by Roberto Rocha
Paid internet trolls linked to the Russian government tried to influence the U.S. election with divisive social media posts. But they also targeted Canadians, at a smaller scale. Here's how I used Python to find tweets aimed at dividing Canadians among a trove of 3 million troll tweets.
It's known that the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St. Petersburg, tried to sow division among Americans by flooding social media with inflammatory content on both sides of a debate. A trove of 3 million tweets associated with these troll accounts was made public. Using pandas and some regex, I found about 8,000 that were seemingly aimed at polarizing Canadians. This talk will briefly go over this research that was made into a news story for the CBC.