Still out there: Modeling and Identifying Russian Troll Accounts on Twitter

Understand

There is evidence that Russia's Internet Research Agency attempted to interfere with the 2016 U.S.

• election by running fake accounts on Twitter - often referred to as "Russian trolls".
• In this work, we: 1) develop machine learning models that predict whether a Twitter account is a Russian troll within a set of 170K control accounts; and, 2) demonstrate that it is possible to use this model to find active accounts on Twitter still likely acting on behalf of the Russian state.
• Using both behavioral and linguistic features, we show that it is possible to distinguish between a troll and a non-troll with a precision of 78.5% and an AUC of 98.9%, under cross-validation.