Google News 09/18: Chinese bots and their role in the Hong Kong protests

Twitter as a tool for foreign influence

The growing intersection between social media and politics is introducing us to new challenges. For example, trolling — online engagement that seeks only to provoke and inflame — is a common annoyance, but one with an easy-to-follow solution: don’t feed the troll, that is, don’t give them any more attention or material to work with.

But what should we do when the troll isn’t a person — it’s an entire country? Bizarrely enough, that’s exactly the question that contemporary foreign politics presents us with today. As exemplified in the recent scandal surrounding the involvement of Russian bot farms in the 2016 U.S. elections, we’ve recently seen the rise of state-sponsored trolling: governments which seek to use online resources like fake users and bots in order to achieve their political interests.

What should we do when the troll isn’t a person — it’s an entire country?

We find state-sponsored trolling happening in Hong Kong today. Behind the clamoring boots-on-the-ground protests there has been another conflict brewing in the digital space, led by a young and tech-savy generation who experience less censorship than their…