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About trollExposer

The rise of professional “troll armies” and state-sponsored generation and spread of disinformation and discord has turned social media into a battleground for public figures.

Disinformation has scarred democracy, human rights, and impressionable youth.

The Philippines has been called “patient zero” in the global disinformation epidemic. Politicians running for office in the Philippines feel the pressure to hire their own troll armies just to have a chance.

Trolls think they are unstoppable. They have been doing their dirty work with no effort to disguise it and have faced no consequences. Facebook tolerates this behavior, despite their community standards stating otherwise, and so the trolls brazenly spew their propaganda.

But this isn’t just about the Philippines.

It’s a global issue. And it’s getting worse and spreading wider.

Trolls can’t be charged with libel because they’re anonymous.

State-sponsored troll armies are protected by the government. 

Here’s the main problem: Social media platforms are doing little about it.

It’s time for us, the people, to fight back!

Social Media platforms are reluctant to enforce their own rules, since trolls’ divisive and emotionally charged posts and comments increase engagement and profits on the platforms.  Some platforms don’t even have rules against coordinated inauthentic behavior and spreading disinformation (looking at you, YouTube).

Fact-checking isn’t solving the problem. People who spread disinformation are simultaneously claiming that the media and the “elites” are the enemy, and not to be trusted. This lets their followers cheerfully ignore all facts as “lies.”
 
Voters and campaign analysts need to see the actions of the troll armies with their own eyes to understand which messages are genuine and which are “fake” (paid propaganda).

Troll Exposer uses publicly available data to identify trolls.

  • We are a private American company. We offer a social media data analysis service. Please contact us for more details or Direct Message us on Twitter or Facebook.
  • Our projects are funded 100% by citizens of the countries we work in. 
  • Our initial data gathering is done by humans, with a manual process. There is no automated scraping of social media platforms and all data that we use and share is publicly available information.
  • We do not gather or analyze any private data, such as private groups or private shares or comments.
  • We respect privacy! No sensitive data on individuals is ever viewed or gathered, including:
    • email
    • phone number
    • physical address
    • religious or
    • political affiliation
  • We publish trolls that have been confirmed by our analysts along with an analysis of their behavior that lead us to conclude they are trolls.
  • We include the links to the Facebook pages of confirmed troll accounts so that you can see for yourself if their behavior looks real or fake. If a page with a lock on it appears instead of the troll account, that means the account has been removed by Facebook.
  • The data is updated in real time as we identify and verify new fake accounts, so it is constantly growing and keeping up with newly created troll accounts
  • We post who the trolls are working for, i.e. who their work is benefiting. We call these people “Troll Masters” because they are paying for and directing the work trolls to achieve an agenda that benefits the Troll Master. 
  • “Troll Masters” frequently aren’t evil. They are powerful people exploiting a loop hole in social media standards enforcement to achieve their goals. Unfortunately, those goals often interfere with a free and fair society.  And when one party in an election or one side of an issue employs an army of trolls to advance their agenda, the other side has little choice but to do the same.
  • Trolls that limit themselves to positive and supportive social media propaganda, and avoid knowingly disseminating disinformation sometimes call themselves “angels.”  But when the accounts are fake and the behavior is coordinated, they fall under the same category of  prohibited “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” as the rest of the trolls.