Are shills on FB using hacked/cloned accts to sway tide of comments?

[Nwgirl503]

Conspiracy theory warning. (Or maybe this is already well known and I'm just super late to the party? This is long....sorry.)

I posted something on my personal FB page when pussy-gate happened. I got nasty replies from complete strangers who I had no mutual friends with and who never responded to my replies to their comments. When I looked at their profiles there was no recent activity and they weren't from my area or the profile info was sparse. Whatevs. I didn't give it much thought.

Since then I've honestly been very surprised at the number of anti-HRC or anti-liberal responses I've seen on my friends' anti-Trump FB posts. When I try to figure out who the commenters are, same as my post...no mutual friends, inactive/sparse profiles. Just complete strangers coming in and dropping some nasty comment. I've also started to notice when reading anti-Trump news link posts on FB, when I click on a profile of someone who says essentially "killary" or "libtard" or another few word reply...majority of the time it's an inactive profile.

I thought maybe it was just me seeing a pattern where one doesn't exist to help justify my feelings after the election.

But today I was on a Huffpost FB post, reading the comments and decided to test my theory. Granted, this is not a scientific analysis by any means. But I was interested with what I found from a tiny sample.

The post had 1138 comments and the first reply was in essence "Trump's a narcissistic sociopath who's going to ruin our country". I checked the first 100 replies to that comment and broke the replies into 4 groups: For, Against, Unknown and N/A. Each For and Against response I clicked on the profile and noted if the profile had been active in the last year (active as in more than 2 posts since 2015). Here's what I found:

"For" had 81 responses with 2 inactive profiles
"Against" had 12 responses with 9 inactive profiles
Unknown had 6 responses
N/A had 1 response

Huff is obviously predominantly anti-Trump, so the number of For or Against posts didn't surprise me. It's the percentage of Against posters who have inactive profiles that surprised me.

Are hacked/cloned profiles being used as shill accounts to sway the tide of comments? Is this a thing? There was one obviously brand new fake account (Against), but all the rest had friends, photos, etc. Just no recent activity. There could be lots of non-nefarious explanations, as well as the simple explanation that I AM seeing a pattern that doesn't exist.

Since I have nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, I'm going to troll a Fox news page and do the same test on an anti-HRC post.

[JHan]

1. Yeah there are a lot of trolls, even Samantha Bee covered this:

Many are probably Americans but also Russian:

[link:

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[Nwgirl503]

2. Interesting

Thanks for the link. I've heard more than I want to know about fake news. Didn't realize fake FB accounts were a thing too.

I'd be interested if someone smarter than me could come up with some stats on how many of these accounts are really out there.