In the last episode of Cyberdistillery, Giuditta and Andrea talk with Dr. Marina Ayeb about her research on computational propaganda and troll farms in the Middle East, understood through the lens of labour studies as real workplaces.

First, Marina takes us through the history and origins of troll farms and computational propaganda, touching on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections, Brexit, and WikiLeaks. Then she tells us how she and Tiziano Bonini managed to access Middle Eastern troll farms to conduct research on these “black boxes,” which were revealed to be highly organised, hierarchical places. Troll farm worker profiles differed across her research: trolls in Tunisia, Egypt, and Iraq were motivated by economic reasons and faced high psychological and moral costs in their jobs, while Iranian trolls were driven by ideology and patriotism. She concludes that the most unexpected and interesting finding of her research was how human the work of computational propaganda in the Middle East is: what emerged from their interviews was that behind a cyber troll, there were real humans with ambitions, doubts, and daily ethical struggles for being responsible for influencing the opinion of millions of people.

At the end of the episode, we discuss the gender aspect of Middle Eastern troll farms, and Marina shares insights into her future research.

Marina’s publication: Ayeb, M., & Bonini, T. (2024). “It Was Very Hard for Me to Keep Doing That Job”: Understanding Troll Farm’s Working in the Arab World. Social Media + Society, 10(1).

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Hosts: Andrea Bussini, Giuditta Fiori

Editor: Andrea Bussini