Their focus, says Stringhini and colleagues’ research, is on fractious social issues: Troll accounts leveraged the divide over Black Lives Matter, and in US presidential elections-arguably being a factor in propelling Donald Trump to victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. 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. Like Bootinbull and JerryRansom, they start with innocuous posts about dogs and animals before pivoting to geopolitics. 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. “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.” “There's less obvious use of bot networks now, because I think they have been so documented, and people expose them all the time,” says Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, which documents and uncovers the use of such campaigns and open-source intelligence, often focused on Russia. The troll method-which involves real, human beings behind the accounts, rather than preprogrammed bots-has become more popular as the old blunt automated tools lose their power. 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. Like Bootinbull, JerryRansom used the same cute animal photos and 4chan-baiting memes, then gradual slid into political discourse-with added posts in r/sexygirls. And it happens on sites like Reddit, through accounts such as the aforementioned Bootinbull and JerryRansom, both of which were identified by Stringhini and his colleagues, trying to drip-feed a controversial message while using a stream of more regular and mundane posts as cover. The playbook to subvert democracy and sow dissention often starts with social media. And we’ve learned by analyzing the accounts that were released by Twitter and Reddit in the past what they’ll do.” WIRED exclusively obtained an early copy ahead of release.) “They will simulate traditional activity. (The findings are published in an academic paper that has yet to be released onto the arXiv preprint server. The tool is an artificial intelligence model trained on the behavior of known Russian troll accounts, and it purports to be able to identify new, still uncovered troll accounts active on Reddit. “These are accounts that are controlled by actual people,” says Gianluca Stringhini, assistant professor at Boston University, and one of the researchers who identified the troll accounts using a tool they call TrollMagnifier. Reddit continue to track spam bots and trolls, processing 7.9 million reports of “content manipulation” in the second quarter of 2021. The academics identified the accounts as questionable after tracking the behaviors of 335 users identified by Reddit as trolls back in 2017. The account is one of 1,248 identified by researchers from a consortium of British, American, and European universities as Russian-sponsored trolls, operating on the world wide web.
They were a Russian troll account, likely paid by the state to try and upend conventional online discourse and push the country’s talking points to the masses. But Bootinbull wasn’t real-at least not in our traditional understanding. Two weeks later, they were submitting a picture of a dog reclining in a deckchair to r/aww, while also taking part in discussions on the site about the challenge Europe faced with an influx of refugees and Turkey’s geopolitical maneuvering.īootinbull continued adding to Reddit, alternately posting cute pictures of dogs alongside debating China and Russia’s future role in the world. Still, Bootinbull kept going, posting on r/4chan, r/gaming, and r/cats. The post received a grand total of zero comments. While the question may have been burned into Bootinbull’s mind, it wasn’t something that bothered others on Reddit.
#Jailbait sites like reddit series#
At 2.45 am they headed to the r/gaming subreddit and posed a question to the community: Was the Xenosaga series of games influenced by Dan Simmons’ Hyperion cantos?
Reddit user Bootinbull signed up for their account on October 14, 2015.