TextOre is very proud to recognize the culmination of research by our very own Alana Vogel during in her final semester of graduate study at Columbia University last year, which has subsequently been published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) titled, “Russian Holidays Predict Troll Activity 2015-2017.”
Alana and her colleagues hypothesized that Russian trolls must “take vacations” based on a FireEye publication on APT29 that noted malicious network activity decreased on Russian holidays. The research team found that trolling fell 35% on Russian holidays between 2015-2017. While this is an interesting finding, they were even more excited at the prospect of using the Russian holiday calendar as an “instrument” to measure the true (causal) impact of troll activity on any domestic US outcome during that time period. Click here to download the entire research paper. Well done Alana!