Trolls without borders: a comparative analysis of six foreign countries’ online propaganda campaigns

Abstract

Despite the existence of multiple propaganda campaigns from around the globe, most scholarly attention has been primarily given to those operated by Russia. This focus on a single country has limited the scope of propaganda research. We offer a systematic comparison of six campaigns, examining the issues they engaged with, and their deployment strategies. Using a computational analysis of more than 9.5 million tweets released by the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium, we show differences across campaigns. Some operations were massive in scale while others were modest. Some focused on US domestic affairs, while others emphasized global issues. While some campaigns showed high levels of sophistication in terms of persona crafting and account deployment, others did not participate in pre-propaganda. We conclude by discussing the practical and theoretical implications of these findings.