Exposing Paid Opinion Manipulation Trolls

Understand

Recently, Web forums have been invaded by opinion manipulation trolls.

• Some trolls try to influence the other users driven by their own convictions, while in other cases they can be organized and paid, e.g., by a political party or a PR agency that gives them specific instructions what to write.
• Finding paid trolls automatically using machine learning is a hard task, as there is no enough training data to train a classifier; yet some test data is possible to obtain, as these trolls are sometimes caught and widely exposed.
• In this paper, we solve the training data problem by assuming that a user who is called a troll by several different people is likely to be such, and one who has never been called a troll is unlikely to be such.