Twitter Bots Drown Out Anti-Kremlin Tweets

tsu doh nimh writes "It appears that thousands of Twitter accounts created in advance to blast automated messages are being used to drown out Tweets sent by bloggers and activists this week who are protesting the disputed presidential elections in Russia. Trend Micro first observed on Wednesday the bogus tweets flooding popular hashtags being used by Russians protesting the election and the arrests of hundreds of protesters, including prominent anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. Today, blogger Brian Krebs posted evidence that thousands of accounts apparently auto-created in mid-2011 were being used to flood more than a dozen hashtags connected to the protests, and appear to be all following each other and one master account, presumably the botnet controller."

Astroturfing

[onyxruby]

This is just astroturfing. Pretty much any type of popular forum site is going to have large numbers for accounts that have been set up for astroturfing my third parties.

I recall a while back fark all of sudden got crapflooded by pro-chavez bots. Admins simply need to find astroturfing accounts and delete them. Nothing new here.

Correction

[slonik]

... Tweets sent by bloggers and activists this week who are protesting the disputed presidential elections in Russia.

It was Russian parliament elections. Presidential elections are in March 2012.