Truthy Project Uncovers Political Astroturfing On Twitter 99
An anonymous reader writes with a follow-up to the launch of the Truthy Project we discussed last month.
"Tens of thousands of tweets this election season have turned out to be automated messages generated by employees of political campaigns, Indiana University researchers have found. Quoting: 'In one case, a network of nine Twitter accounts, all created within 13 minutes of one another, sent out 929 messages in about two hours as replies to real account holders in the hopes that these users would retweet the messages. The fake accounts were probably controlled by a script that randomly picked a Twitter user to reply to, and a message and a Web link to include. Although Twitter shut the accounts down soon after, the messages still reached 61,732 users.'"
Automated messaging is good, no, bad! (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25964/?p1=A4
"The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it. It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds."
Evil, no wait!
Re:Who needs tweets with twits like (Score:3, Informative)
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever." - one of Rand's paid employees took that quote to heart.