Tracking the Troll Factory

The League of Women Voters (LWV) of the Clemson Area invites the community to “Tracking the Troll Factory” on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018, at 7pm in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which is located at 100 Thomas Green Boulevard in Clemson. The LWV of the Clemson Area welcomes those interested to hear a first-hand account about how the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed contractor operated fake accounts from St. Petersburg, Russia. In November of 2017, Buzzfeed News crowned @Jenna Abrams the “Troll Princess” of Twitter. She had over 70,000 followers and had been quoted in dozens of mainstream news outlets. She was one of the most successful of the 2,752 accounts being operated by the Internet Research Agency. By June of 2018, that list had been expanded to include over 3,500 accounts. Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, two Clemson University professors have completed their first analysis of the more than 3 million tweets. Their results suggest a complex “industrialized” strategy of propaganda production. Come learn more about their timely research.