State-sponsored trolling, another novel online political manipulation
strategy, is speciﬁcally concerned with governmentally driven computational
propaganda campaigns aimed at attacking political opposition over social
media (Monaco and Nyss 2018; Zannettou et al. 2019). Analysis from
Monaco and Nyss on this phenomenon notes that the now global trend of
“disinformation is often only one element of a broader politically motivated
attack on the credibility and courage of dissenting voices:
journalists,
opposition politicians and activists” (Monaco and Nyss 2018, p. 4).
According to their study, informed by more than two years of research and
interviews and ﬁeldwork spanning more than eight countries, the use of
computational propaganda and astroturf political communication is not only
propagated by organizations tangentially associated with governments, such as
the IRA in Russia. Politically motivated trolling teams, in some cases outﬁtted
Social_Media_and_Democracy