A Quick Taste of How an Online Troll Army, Like Hillary’s “Correct the Record,” Functions

By Shane Ryan  |  May 17, 2016 | 10:33am
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Politics Features
A Quick Taste of How an Online Troll Army, Like Hillary’s “Correct the Record,” Functions

We told you last month that Hillary Clinton’s super-PAC “Correct the Record,” under the guidance of political hatchet man David Brock, was spending $1 million on an army of Twitter trolls, we got a taste of the digital storm troopers in action when at least a couple of them colluded to get Bernie Sanders Facebook pages shut down. But that may or may not have been an independent action, and it never represented the true tactics of the group called “Barrier Breakers 2016,” which would undoubtedly be far subtler and more insidious.

Now, thanks to a keen-eyed Reddit user on the Sanders for President sub-reddit, we can pinpoint one of the nasty, shrewd tactics that are far more likely to fly under the radar. The Redditor in question noticed a very specific phrase that had been repeated twice, by different users, which you can see in this image:

RedditBern1.png

The two elements we see here here can only exist in tandem:

1. The claim that the “anti-Hillary hyperbole on S4P is often unreal.”

2. The insistence that the poster is a Sanders supporter, lending legitimacy to the complaint.

It’s the word-for-word language, of course, that indicates concern trolling on an organized level, rather than just the individual hand-wringing each user is trying to convey. As a follow-up, the Reddit user ran a Google search for those specific words, and the results are either funny or horrifying, depending on your perspective.

The trolling will likely become less sloppy, and less identifiable, as time goes on, but it’s this kind of strategy that muddies the digital waters and makes it hard to trust any source. Which, when you’re the candidate with far less representation on the Internet, might be exactly what you want.

 
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