Troll Farms and Voter Disinformation

Philipp Denter and Boris Ginzburg

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Political agents often attempt to influence elections through "troll farms" that flood social media platforms with messages from fake accounts that emulate genuine information. We study the ability of troll farms to manipulate elections. We show that such disinformation tactics is more effective when voters are otherwise well-informed. Thus, for example, societies with high-quality media are more vulnerable to electoral manipulation.

Keywords: Fake News; Disinformation; Troll Farms; Elections; Social Media; Information Aggregation; Fact-Checking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-isf, nep-mic, nep-pay, nep-pol and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:109634

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