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.'"
I am glad I don't use twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm.. no. Not surprised at all.
Professional astroturfing is hardly new (Score:5, Insightful)
These types of services have been available for a very long time. Why would it surprise anyone that professional shill's would pick up newer comm methods like twitter?
Without doubt professional shills have accounts ready to go on just about any type of news site you can think of. Without question certain subjects bring up certain shills time after time on sites like Slashdot. Anymore this is just one more form of a perception management service to be offered by PR firms.
The best thing to do would be to have a law that would require disclosure of such shilling (similar to advertising shill regulation for places like amazon.com). It wont stop many of the shills, but the cost of discovery could be punitive enough to give pause to those that hire them.
Re:All the way to the insane asylum. (Score:4, Insightful)
He wants to privatize the VA.. hes a fucking idiot.
Yours truly,
A veteran.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only that, but they are openly stating that if they don't get their way, "Second ammendment remedies" may be the only option. Whoah. That is truly scary. Don't get our way? Start a violent revolution! After all, your political opponents are godless communist muslim monsters bent on destroying America, so revolution is justified. Or something.
Re:No proof the accounts are spamming (Score:3, Insightful)
What good did it do? Again, the people actually following and receiving those messages WANTED to see them. I don't generally like or use twitter much myself but that is a huge benefit twitter has as a communications channel, in that it's immune from sent spam
I frequently see re-tweets of tweets that I'm not interested in seeing via people that I follow. So it's not exactly pub-sub -- messages can and do leak across explicit "follows".
Wrong focus (Score:3, Insightful)
If people are voting based on what Twitter tells them then we've got much bigger problems.
Truth is the antidote to lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No proof the accounts are spamming (Score:2, Insightful)
The fake accounts can give weight to a shill statement which is available in the search for aggregators and analysts.
Re:I am glad I don't use twitter (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just Twitter.
All social media outlets are heavily infested with marketers trying to spin their products or trash their competitors. As soon as a service becomes popular, they're all over it like flies on rotting garbage.
There was a brief few years when you could read Slashdot with the expectation that people expressing an opinion about a product actually held that opinion. Now it's more likely to come from a script or checklist.
Re:Truth is the antidote to lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Even your own mind is susceptible.
Re:Wrong focus (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to people voting based on what TV or newspapers tell them?
Re:Truth is the antidote to lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All the way to the insane asylum. (Score:3, Insightful)
Some amount of inflation is necessary for an economy to grow. And grow, it has to, when you're trying to take care of everyone, and not just the plantation owner. Gold only works if you have a static economy.
Besides, Gold standard introduced to the US (I assume that with the mention of 1776, you're talking about the US): 1873 [wikipedia.org]. At various points in time, currency was backed by gold, silver, others and nothing, the "nothing" periods primarily being wars (war of 1812, Civil War, etc).
With gold, you also have the exact opposite problem - deflation, when the gold supply grows at a rate slower than the economy.
But don't let basic economics distract you from talking points and sound-bites, inconvenient as they are!
Re:OMG, politicians aren't saints? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lol, no. There are some things I cannot entrust to a piece of software, and the monopoly on legitimate violence is absolutely on that list.
Beyond that, anyone who claims that democracy is dead, that corruption and fraud have finally become so ingrained in the system that it simply doesn't work as intended, etc. needs to actually learn some basic history of electoral politics. Plain and simple, this shit has been happening since long before day 1. Hell, most of the guys who wrote the fracking Declaration of Independence weren't even elected, and many of the ones who wrote the Constitution were either effectively self-appointed or elected by a process that can only charitably be described as "deeply flawed"... not that it mattered much, since the only people actually allowed to vote were older white men with sufficient means to show up at whatever obscure building was chosen for polling in the middle of fall harvest, and when you've got an almost wholly agrarian, rural society possessing no faster transportation than horseback that's the sort of thing that seriously cramps voter turnout.
The fact of the matter is that, for all the dishonesty and shenanigans that happen every year, American politics are more open, transparent and free from tampering than they've ever been. Democracy is dead like nobody uses the internet.
Re:Wrong focus (Score:4, Insightful)
With web/tv/radio/print, it's possible to communicate complex ideas
It's possible, but it's the sharp, stingy and false single-liner slogans which are the most cost-effective way of affecting the voters regardless of the medium used to transmit them, so that's what is used. It has nothing to do with the laziness or inability of journalists to communicate more complex idea - it's just not needed (in fact, it is undesirable!).