The Vagaries of Robotic Trolls
Published in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computational Social Science IC2S2 (Authors: Brett Bourbon, Renita Murimi), 2021
Robotic trolling instigated by instruments of the Russian Federation is widely believed to have influenced the 2016 Presidential election in the United States. It is, however, extremely difficult to measure or investigate actual political, let alone psychological and sociological, effects caused by trolling and other similar online behavior. Consequently, we have concentrated on quantifiable patterns of robotic troll behavior, both as a means of identification, but also as a way of investigating the political logic behind that behavior.