Trolls need their holidays as well

The war in Ukraine is still going on and in the US the midterm elections are near. That means that government-sponsored troll farms in Russia have been busy. Every two years, Russian trolls ramp up their activities on social media to influence the voting behaviour of Americans or the public opinion about Russia in general. But Russian trolls are real people, not bots. And that means they need a holiday from time to time.

Douglas Almond and his colleagues used the Russian troll accounts identified by Twitter in 2018 to see how their activity changed over time before these accounts were forced off Twitter. It turns out that when there is a holiday in Russia, troll activity on Twitter dropped by some 34%. Both newly generated original tweets and retweeted content declined on the holiday and jumped back to normal levels the day after.

Russian troll activity on Twitter around public holidays

Source: Almond et al. (2022)

That’s good news because one week from today is the next Russian holiday, National Unity Day on 4 November. So, if you want to have a relatively calm day on Twitter, I suggest you go online next Friday.

By the way, another time when Russian trolls are less active is when there is cold weather in St Petersburg. Turns out that when it is exceptionally cold, they can’t be bothered to show up to work and stop trolling other users on social media.

Oh, and before we get into a political infight about ‘that Russia story’ let me point out that there is no evidence that Russian trolls have had any significant impact on the voting behaviour of Americans. These Russian trolls are effectively wasting their time, which is still better than doing other things where they could do real harm like, well, joining the army and invading neighbouring countries.