PerspectiveIs There a Targeted Troll Campaign Against Lisa Page? A Bot Sentinel Investigation

“Homewrecker.” “Traitor.” “Tramp.” These are just some of the insults flung at Lisa Page—the former FBI lawyer whom President Trump has targeted for her text messages critical of him during the 2016 election—in the almost 4,000 responses to a tweet she posted on 18 January.

Christopher Bouzy, the founder and CEO of Bot Sentinel, writes in Lawfare that phrased like this, such insults might seem unsurprising, if gross. Public figures often receive online abuse, after all. “But the replies to Page’s tweet stand out. They likely represent a targeted trollbot attack—one that nobody has reported on until now,” he writes, adding:

I operate Bot Sentinel, a platform that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to classify Twitter accounts that exhibit toxic troll-like repetitive behavior—that is, misleading or coordinated posting. Because of my experience, I see a lot of bile from trolls and inauthentic accounts on Twitter. But when my team examined the responses to Page’s tweet, even I was shocked by what we discovered.

….

But [the sheer number of responses] is not what surprised us the most. Our team was most struck by the sheer vitriol of the trollbot attacks against Page. It is our job to identify and examine inorganic activity on social media platforms; we sift through vulgar and toxic content all the time. Yet the replies to Page’s tweet stood out for their unusually vile quality.

….the suspicious activity associated with her tweet has all the characteristics of such a campaign: a swarm of inauthentic accounts using the same toxic language and repetitive activity. It looks a lot like the coordinated campaigns we witnessed during the 2016 election, when a swarm of accounts would suddenly begin tweeting the same toxic messaging.

Bouzy concludes: “All this raises a question: Who is behind the apparent trollbot activity against Page?”