Trolls of Turkish Reddit

Political trolling has become a hot-topic after the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. The aim of the trolls was to manipulate discussions in Twitter, influence people to get to vote in favour of one candidate or divide the opposition among themselves to disfavour the other candidate. In this project, we will analyse the troll activity during 2018 Turkish Elections in Eksi sozluk, a popular reddit-like website. We would also like to compare their activity with the activity of the Twitter trolls interfering in United States politics. An objective would be to analyze their polarity in the network of upvotes, spikes in their temporal activity, their topical interests (i.e. what are the other topics they are interested in apart from politics?) etc. An end goal would be to predict who are likely to be trolls.

Deliverables: datasets, codebase, accuracy results, a nice presentations with visualizations that you can do interpretations on.

Turkish language is a plus, but not required. It’s possible to do analysis by only network-based methods, free of content. Programming skills in Python is required.