troll farm

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troll farm (plural troll farms)

1. (Internet) A group of Internet trolls organized in order to interfere in political opinions and decision-making.

   Synonyms: troll army, troll factory

   • 2021 March, Facebook March 2021 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report‎^[1]:

     These are some of the hallmarks of a so-called troll farm — a physical location where a collective of operators share computers and phones to jointly manage a pool of fake accounts as part of an influence operation.

   • 2021 September 16, Karen Hao, “Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows”, in MIT Technology Review‎^[2], retrieved 17 September 2021:

     Troll farms — professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks— were still building massive audiences by running networks of Facebook pages.

   • 2021 June 11, Julia Wong, “Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats”, in The Guardian‎^[3], retrieved 26 September 2021:

     Rally Forge ... established a domestic 'troll farm' in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election.

   • 2025 October 2, William Davies, “A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0”, in The Guardian‎^[4]:

     The scourge of “fake news”, pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media.

• bot farm