“Trolls tend to be more impactful, because then they're taking advantage of the kind of natural development of these communities online, rather than trying to build something from scratch, which is a lot more difficult to do.”
. Notably, many of the accounts that Stringhini says have similar behavior to those definitively linked to Russia have previously posted on r/aww, which encourages users to share photographs that may prompt an “aww”-like response—often over cuddly animals.
Instead, Russian trolls build up fake personas online, trying to ingratiate themselves into preexisting Reddit communities, and then move the conversation on to their true aims. Like Bootinbull and JerryRansom, they start with innocuous posts about dogs and animals before pivoting to geopolitics. The goal is to make the person behind the accounts seem more realistic, and more human—thus making it easier to seed the more contentious content.
But Higgins and another researcher, Yevgeniy Golovchenko of the University of Copenhagen, who studies disinformation, are circumspect about the replicability of the academics’ troll hunting approach. Some organic behavior can appear troll-like, Higgins says, pointing to errors in earlier, more basic academic research that wasn’t able to as accurately distinguish between inauthentic and authentic behavior.
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