The Stream

How to Spot Hillary’s Fake, Paid Twitter Trolls

Use this handy guide to spotting the trolls and out them yourself.

By Rachel Alexander Published on October 30, 2016 •

Rachel Alexander

Earlier this month, I wrote about an army of paid online trolls which the SuperPAC associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign is using to attack anyone who criticizes her. Correct the Record’s anonymous social media accounts are easy to spot, and are frequently called out by savvy conservatives (and during the primary, Bernie Sanders supporters) for lying about who they are. It’s one thing to create an anonymous online account to support your candidate, but it’s simply lying to falsely say you are a “middle-aged Asian woman” who is “supporting Donald Trump.”

Since my last article, savvy Reddit and Twitter users have started aggressively outing the fake accounts. Although the election is almost over, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has used the trolls going back to at least 2007, so this is not the end of them.

How to Identify a Troll Account

You can identify Twitter trollbot accounts by looking at most or all of these features:

  1. Only a handful of followers (easiest way to spot them), so they have hardly any RTs and interactions
  2. Joined Twitter very recently, within the last couple of months or so
  3. No profile photo, or if there is one, it is an image from the Clinton campaign or something vague
  4. Every single tweet is related to helping the Clinton campaign
  5. Repeats the same tweet multiple times in a row
  6. Retweets other pro-Clinton tweets a lot
  7. Name is is either very generic, like Joy Johnson and Samuel Smith, below, or a random phrase
  8. Directly tweets criticism at Trump supporters

The accounts that have been on Twitter for a few years still have tell tale signs: their follower count is so low it is clear it was an old Twitter account that the troll or someone set up in the past and never used until now. Their are comparable fake accounts on Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.

Calling Out Trolls on Twitter

Twitter Accounts That Have Been Called Out as Hillary Trolls and Mostly Fit the Criteria

Hillary trollbot1
Hillary trollbot2

Hillary trollbot3

Hillary trollbot4

Hillary trollbot5

Hillary trollbot6

Hillary trollbot8
Hillary trollbot9

The Daily Caller reported that Reddit users have declared war on Clinton’s paid trolls. On the subreddit /r/WikiLeaks, one Reedited offered this advice concerning Clinton’s Correct the Record, “It looks like CTR is out in force and getting smarter. Don’t waste your time arguing, just dig! Don’t let them eat up your time. Get to work digging or spreading. They’re wasting cash on man hours, don’t let them eat up yours.”

It’s much easier to detect a Hillary Twitter troll than to prove its status conclusively. There is almost no way to discover the truth short of subpoenaing records from Twitter if a crime is committed. But since it only takes a few minutes to acquire more than a handful of followers, and the trolls generally discuss nothing but the presidential election, the smell of a troll is often unmistakable.

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