“It Was Very Hard for Me to Keep Doing That Job”: Understanding Troll Farm’s Working in the Arab World

IF 5.5 1区 文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION Social Media + Society Pub Date : 2024-01-27 DOI:10.1177/20563051231224713
Marina Ayeb, Tiziano Bonini
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Abstract

This article investigates the production culture and routines of “troll farms” in three Arab countries—Tunisia, Egypt, and Iraq—from a production studies approach. A production studies approach enables us to focus on the working conditions of paid trolls. We employed qualitative methods to look inside the “black box” of Arab troll farms. From February to April 2020, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eight disinformation workers at both managerial and staff levels. We propose to understand disinformation work as a specific type of digital labor, characterized by very intense shifts and emotionally burdensome daily tasks, absence of legal job contracts, and highly surveilled work environments. The article contributes to understand disinformation practices outside and beyond the West; it situates disinformation activities within the broader context of digital media industries; it provides a detailed analysis of the features that distinguish troll farms in the Arab world from those that emerged in other regions of the Global South; and it reconnects the research on disinformation to digital labor studies.
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"我很难继续做这份工作":了解巨魔农场在阿拉伯世界的工作情况
本文从生产研究的角度出发,调查了三个阿拉伯国家--突尼斯、埃及和伊拉克--的 "巨魔农场 "的生产文化和常规。生产研究方法使我们能够关注有偿巨魔的工作条件。我们采用了定性方法来了解阿拉伯巨魔农场的 "黑箱 "内部。2020 年 2 月至 4 月,我们对 8 名虚假信息工作者进行了半结构化访谈,访谈对象包括管理人员和员工。我们建议将虚假信息工作理解为一种特殊的数字劳动,其特点是日常工作强度大、情绪负担重、没有合法的工作合同、工作环境受到高度监控。文章有助于理解西方以外的虚假信息实践;将虚假信息活动置于数字媒体产业的大背景下;详细分析了阿拉伯世界的巨魔农场与全球南部其他地区出现的巨魔农场的不同之处;并将虚假信息研究与数字劳动研究重新联系起来。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Social Media + Society
Social Media + Society COMMUNICATION-
CiteScore
9.20
自引率
3.80%
发文量
111
审稿时长
12 weeks
期刊介绍: Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.
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