Citation

Unmasking Trolls: Political Discussion on Twitter During the Parliamentary Election in Catalonia

Author:
Puig Abril, Eulàlia
Publication:
Trípodos
Year:
2017

In recent years, Twitter has become a popular online platform where citizens can discuss politics. However, these con­versations may take an uncivil turn, and the consequences could be damaging to democracy. One such uncivil beha­vior on Twitter is trolling, a disruptive online activity geared toward luring others into pointless and time-consu­ming discussion. Disruptive messages can have severe consequences for the de­liberative system in democratic societies and could frustrate the development of a public sphere. This study explores Twitter trolls during the contentious 2012 Parliamentary election in Cata­lonia, an autonomous region in Spain. Using Gnip’s firehose, all tweets contai­ning the word “independence” or the hashtag “#25N” from the four weeks preceding the election were captured for analysis, which generated a corpus of 325,888 tweets. Results based on au­tomated and manual content analysis show that the prevalence of successful trolls was at 0.01%, thus indicating that they were scant despite the controversy surrounding the issue of indepen­dence. The study also contributes to the identification of successful Twitter trolls and discusses the democratic implica­tions of trolling on Twitter.