Disruptive identity politics around Black Lives Matter and Blue/All Lives Matter

In this study, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of online trolling by focusing on Russian and Iranian trolls who discussed the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Blue/All Lives Matter (B/ALM) movements with what we term disruptive identity politics . Leveraging identity politics, they impersonated US nationals to legitimize their disinformation activities. Using novel digital tools to extract the data and employing manual multimodal analyses, we found that the degree of orientation or opposition that the Russian and Iranian trolls had toward either BLM or B/ALM mirrored geopolitical realities. Iranian trolls showed more support for BLM (63% of tweets) than for B/ALM (14.6%). The reverse was the case with the Russian trolls, who were more supportive of B/ALM (78.7%) than of BLM (73.5%). The Iranian trolls also had very little opposition to BLM, with only 1% of BLM and B/ALM samples.