Level 1 Twitter Trolls

Block Bot was a website that maintained a list of “trolls’ accounts on Twitter. They were classified from Level 1 (most severe) to 3. All of the listed accounts were been reported as engaging in some type of harassment. The Level 1 Troll list included accounts “that appear to engage in aggressiveness, threats, harassment, dishonesty in an effort to infiltrate social groups, impersonating someone, posting shock images, encouraging self- harm, spouting dehumanizing rhetoric, promoting hate speech, etc.”. The list was hand curated by a team of blockers who reviewed each reported account. Subscribers to the Block Bot could choose a level and have all accounts listed at that level and above automatically blocked on their own accounts. We collected the list of Level 1 trolls from the Block Bot. For each of these accounts, we collected the friend and follower lists using the Twitter API as well as any accessible tweets. Each user in this dataset was a Level 1 troll on the Block Bot list. The dataset contains the tweets for each user collected in 2016 and an adjacency list of mentions. 15.6 million tweets 12,387 users