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A troll farm or troll factory is an institutionalised group of internet trolls that seeks to interfere in political opinions and decision-making.

Freedom House's report showed that 30 governments worldwide (out of 65 covered by the study) paid keyboard armies to spread propaganda and attack critics. According to the report, these governments use paid commentors, trolls, and bots to harass journalists and erode trust in the media. Attempts were made to influence elections in 18 of the countries covered by the study.

Governments

Brazil

It has been widely suspected that Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro and his family created troll farms to promote support for his government policies and to attack and harass rivals through the internet. These fake accounts and bots are possibly controlled by an office inside one of Bolsonaro's government buildings led by Jair's son Carlos known as 'office of hate', which is suspected to have created more than a thousand fake accounts to support Bolsonaro's government.

Troll accounts have also been linked to misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, as Bolsonaro's government is known for having adopted a denialist and weak posture regarding the pandemic.

China

The "50 Cent Party" consists of paid Chinese bureaucrats who cheerlead for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or try to change the subject during online discussions.

India

India's ruling party BJP has a large number of online supporters who support its agenda and attack political rivals. Their methods were recorded by investigative journalist Swati Chaturvedi, who described them as a "digital army" in her book on the subject, I Am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP's Digital Army.

Malaysia

In 2022, Meta Platforms announced that it has removed hundreds of Facebook and Instagram accounts that were directly linked with the Royal Malaysia Police (RMP), as they were used as part of a troll farm to disseminate propaganda and manipulate public discourse about the Malaysian police and the government. Meta added that such actions were against its policy of "coordinated inauthentic behaviour".

Nicaragua

In November 2021, Facebook reported that it closed accounts, groups and pages in Facebook and Instagram linked to a troll farm operated by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the ruling party in Nicaragua.

Philippines

The Philippines has been called "patient zero in the global disinformation epidemic." Studies into the country's troll farms found that political campaigns pay trolls $1,000 to $2,000 per month to create multiple fake social media accounts to post political propaganda and attack critics. The political campaign of President Rodrigo Duterte has spent $200,000 to hire online trolls, according to one study. Duterte admitted to hiring trolls for his 2016 political campaign.

Since then, trolling behaviour supportive of Duterte has been traced back to taxpayer-funded government institutions.

Russia

The Russian web brigades, including Internet Research Agency, became known in the late 2010s for the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. The Internet Research Agency has employed troll armies to spread propaganda, command Twitter trends, and sow fear and erode trust in American political and media institutions.

Turkey

The ruling Justice and Development Party of Turkey has a troll farm commonly known as AK Trolls.

Vietnam

Ukraine

Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians actively use [ru] "troll factories" for their business and political purposes. Journalists from Radio Liberty note that the services of trolls, among others, were used by such oligarchs as Rinat Akhmetov and Ihor Kolomoyskyi. In the fall of 2019, two large-scale journalistic investigations about “troll factories” in Ukraine were published.

Non government entities

Facebook

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook found that troll farms from North Macedonia and the Philippines pushed coronavirus disinformation. The publisher, which used content from these farms, was banned.

In the run-up to the 2020 United States elections, Eastern European troll farms operated popular Facebook pages showing content related to Christians and Blacks in America. They included more than 15,000 pages combined and were viewed by 140 million US users per month. This was in part due to how Facebook's algorithm and policies allow unoriginal viral content to be copied and spread in ways that still drive up user engagement. As of September 2021, some of the most popular pages were still active on Facebook despite the company's efforts to take down such content.

Harassment of Jessikka Aro

Finnish investigative journalist Jessikka Aro interviewed workers at a “troll factory” in Saint Petersburg. Aro was harassed online after she published her story. A court in Helsinki convicted three persons who had harassed Aro on charges of defamation and negligence. Aro has stated that online trolls can negatively affect freedom of speech and democracy.

People's Mujahedin of Iran

In February 2020, the New York Times interviewed 10 ex-People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) members who said that the MEK's Albania camp had a troll farm that promoted the opinions of MEK supporters, including Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton, and attacked the Iranian government. The MEK claimed that the former members were Iranian government spies. In the March 2021 CIB (Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior) report, Facebook announced that it removed hundreds of accounts, pages and groups in both Facebook and Instagram which were in a troll farm in Albania, operated by MEK.

Pro-Trump misinformation

In the North Macedonian city of Veles, locals launched at least 140 United States political websites supporting Donald Trump.

Turning Point

During the 2020 United States presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic, Turning Point USA and its affiliate Turning Point Action were described as troll farms for paying young conservatives in Phoenix, Arizona, some of them minors with parental support, to post misinformation about the integrity of the electoral process and the threat of COVID-19. The payout included bonuses for posts that generated greater engagement. They used their own social media accounts or fake accounts without disclosing their relationship with Turning Point and were instructed by Turning Point to slightly alter and repost the modified messages a limited number of times to avoid automatic detection.

See also

• Alarmism – Excessive or exaggerated alarm about a real or imagined threat
• Alternative facts – Expression associated with political misinformation established in 2017
• Big lie – Propaganda technique
• Chequebook journalism – Practice of news reporters paying sources for information
• Citizen journalism – Journalism genre
• Clickbait – Web content intended to entice users to click on a link
• Confirmation bias – Bias confirming existing attitudes
• Demoralization (warfare) – Warfare tactic used to erode morale
• Disinformation – Deliberately deceptive false information
• Doomscrolling – Compulsive consumption of negative online news
• Echo chamber (media) – Situation that reinforces beliefs by repetition inside a closed system
• Euromyth – Exaggerated or invented story about the European Union
• Fact – Datum or structured component of reality
• Fact-checking – Process of verifying information in non-fictional text
• Factoid – Invented claim or trivial fact
• Fake news – False or misleading information presented as real
• Fake news website – Website that deliberately publishes hoaxes and disinformation
• Fallacy of composition – Fallacy of inferring on the whole from a part
• False equivalence – Logical fallacy of inconsistency
• Fearmongering – Deliberate use of fear-based tactics
• Filter bubble – Intellectual isolation through internet algorithms
• Firehose of falsehood – Propaganda technique
• Freedom of the press – Freedom of communication and expression through various media
• Information quality – term to describe the quality of the content of information systemsPages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallback
• Information silo – Insular information management system
• Internet meme – Cultural item spread via the Internet
• Journalism ethics and standards – Principles of ethics and of good practice in journalism
• Mainstream media – Mass news media that influence many people
• List of fake news websites
• Muckraker – Progressive-Era reform-minded investigative journalist in the US
• Political bias – Bias towards a political side in supposedly-objective information
• Post-truth politics – Political culture where facts are considered irrelevant
• Pseudohistory – Pseudoscholarship that attempts to distort historical record
• Selective exposure theory – Theory within the practice of psychology
• Social Networks – journalPages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallbackPages displaying short descriptions with no spaces
• Spiral of silence – Political science and mass communication theory
• Tabloid journalism – Style of largely sensationalist journalism
• Tribe (Internet) – Slang for an unofficial community of people who share a common interestPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Truthiness – Quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than actual truth
• Turing test – Test of a machine's ability to imitate human intelligence
• Yellow journalism – Sensationalistic news

References

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35. Wong, Julia (11 June 2021). "Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats". The Guardian. San Francisco. Archived from the original on 27 September 2021. Retrieved 26 September 2021. Rally Forge ... established a domestic 'troll farm' in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election

• Internet trolling