‘Unmasking’ trolls’ operation

There’s another interesting piece on social media trolls titled “Unmasking the Trolls: Spin Masters Behind Fake Accounts, News Sites” posted last January 20 at the ABS-CBN website news. abs-cbn.com and written by Chi-Almario Gonzalez of the ABS-CBN Investigative and Research Group. Like the one written by Rappler’s Maria Ressa and posted on rappler.com weeks ago, “Unmasking” dwells largely on how trolls played a big part in last year’s presidential elections.

The first part of the article has one main source, former journalist Arman Dean Nocum, who left newspaper reporting in the mid-1990s to found Dean and Kings, a public relations and communications firm that dealt with candidates starting in the 2010 elections. The information Nocum provided to ABSCBN is interesting for me because I know that some p.r. firms in Cebu were active in last year’s polls.

Trolls on their own and acting independently can’t be an effective force in social media, thus they need to be organized and unleashed on certain targets or focused on certain goals in order to become a felt presence. This is where p.r. practitioners play a role. Because they have the clientele, they have the resources to organize and fund a machinery of trolls that could be let loose in an election.

--Machinery. Nocum said that the social media team he formed for the 2010 presidential elections was a “small group of less than 10 people. He didn’t talk about the 2013 figure but in last year’s polls, he already hired 50 people. That goes without saying that money to run the daily operation was bigger considering the number of equipment used and the number of people to be paid. That could run up to millions of pesos especially for a national campaign.

--The process. The army of trolls create social media sites dealing with certain issues and lure members that could then be the objects of their manipulation or they infiltrate other sites and discussion groups using fake accounts. Nocum said he now maintains “50 or so” social media sites on Facebook (and probably on Twitter and Instagram also) with each site having 5,000 to 70,000 members or “likers.” These sites host controversial socio-political issues. In addition, each of Nocum’s people has five to ten fake troll accounts.

--Content. The main task is to “manipulate content.” Nocum said that when he started his social media campaign in 2010, it was all “goody-goody” p.r. stuff done by promoting the candidate’s political agenda and boosting his image. But last year, he said, all gloves were off. That was when information was twisted and malicious content planted. Candidates attacked each other viciously and social media became a forum for massive black propaganda.

Nocum’s social media people, using real and fake trolls (not a real person and includes “bots” that are computer-generated), plant malicious content or positive/negative comments and find ways that these would have many “likes” and reactions to land, say, on Facebook’s top 20 feeds. There, the planted content are shared. Meanwhile, the fake troll accounts are used to infiltrate discussion groups and manipulate it. (to be continued)