Projects per year
Abstract / Description of output
In 2017 Twitter released a list of 2,752 accounts believed to be connected to state‐sponsored Russian operative manipulation of the 2016 American Election. We investigate the behaviour of these accounts in the UK–EU referendum using our own unique longitudinal Twitter dataset. We identify Brexit‐related content from 419 of these accounts, totalling 3,485 tweets between 29 August 2015 and 3 October 2017. While these accounts were primarily designed to resemble American citizens, accounts created in 2016 contained German and Italian locations and terms in user profiles, suggesting targeting of wider international electoral processes. Brexit was one of many targets, likely indicating coordinated repurposing of ‘troll’ activity over time. We analyze behavioural shifts in account behaviour in relation to external events, introducing a temporal dimension not typical of political Twitter studies. The ‘troll’ account behaviour altered radically on UK–EU referendum day, shifting from generalized disruptive tweeting to retweeting other troll accounts to amplify their effect.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1148-1164 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies |
Volume | 57 |
Issue number | 5 |
Early online date | 11 Jun 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2019 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- social media analysis
- Brexit
- Russian trolls
- referendum
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'For Whom the Bell Trolls: Shifting Troll Behaviour in the Twitter Brexit Debate'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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The European Union in the Public Imagination: Maximising the Impact of Transdisciplinary Insights
1/06/15 → 31/08/16
Project: Research
Profiles
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Laura Cram
- School of Social and Political Science - Chair of European Politics
Person: Academic: Research Active
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Robin Hill
- Institute of Language, Cognition and Computation
- Edinburgh Neuroscience
- School of Informatics - Senior Laboratory Manager
- Design Informatics
- Language, Interaction and Robotics
Person: Academic: Research Active