Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Policy Studies

Committee Chair/Advisor

Darren Linvill

Committee Member

Patrick Warren

Committee Member

Brandon Turner

Committee Member

Condoleezza Rice

Abstract

In the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the notion of state-sponsored trolls engaging in information operations on social media has captured the attention of society. Yet eight years after this policymaking focusing event, sustainable solutions prove elusive and there is still much that is not known about the underlying phenomenon. This dissertation is part explanatory and part exploratory in its attempts to answer the overarching research question: What is the Relationship Between How the Problem of State-Sponsored Trolls on Social Media is Framed & the Way U.S. Federal Policy Attempts to Solve It? Using a convergent parallel design, this study first qualitatively (i.e., term frequency, content analysis) examines over a decade of news reporting about state-sponsored trolls to produce evidence that the dominant framings are monolithic and center around elections, Russia, and promoting an idea via generating user engagement. Second, this study quantitatively (i.e., OLS regressions) examines the entirety of the Twitter Information Operations Archive – only the second study to ever do so – along with portions of the Empirical Studies of Conflict’s (ESOC) Trends in Online Influence Efforts to empirically demonstrate that state-sponsored trolls on social media are far more complex and heterogenous than commonly framed. Lastly, the study concludes by converging the qualitative and quantitative results in an examination of U.S. federal policies aimed at state-sponsored trolls and ultimately concludes that the oversimplified problem-framings do seem to have an impact on the development of policy. Consequently, these findings have implications for the intelligence community as professional problem framers and policy evaluators seeking more effective solutions.

Comments

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this dissertation are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This work is produced under academic liberty provisions.

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