Mapping troll-like practices on twitter

Tactics such as trolling and the use of bots and “sock-puppet” accounts have been linked to the spread of political disinformation and propaganda online. In the lead up to the 2017 general elections for the Dutch parliament, journalists pointed to the use of sock puppets (i.e. false online identities assumed to deceive and influence opinion) by some political parties to amplify their messages online and to attack their
political opponents on social media.

In this recipe set we provide some methods that can be employed to detect and profile misleading information practices by taking troll- like behaviour around the 2017 Dutch election campaign as a case study. We focus on political troll-like practices, a term which we use in the narrower sense of attacks addressed at political representatives.

We focus on three aspects of political trolling: the sources of troll-like activity, the characteristics of these practices and their targets.