Twitter Bots Drown Out Anti-Kremlin Tweets 125
Posted
by
timothy
from the more-of-the-same dept.
from the more-of-the-same dept.
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."
I wonder (Score:2, Interesting)
What happened to Russia? (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought they were getting more progressive in the recent years? Is this not the case? It seems like it's just getting closer and closer to another dictatorship and extreme socialism.
Can someone more informed than me on the subject explain what's going on there? None of the sites seem to say more than "Putin is being an asshole."
Reverse Effect (Score:5, Interesting)
This will ensure the hashtags make it to trending topics. If the hashtags in question are something like #FuckingLiarPutin, doesn't really matter what they add to it. Let's hope the hashtags themselves say enough, like Jeff Jarvis' #fuckyouwashington that went viral quickly.
Re:I wonder (Score:1, Interesting)
and Twitter, the company, will crater
And nothing of value will be lost. Serious journalists will just have to spend a few bucks a month hosting their own web sites. The horror!
Re:So are you saying I shouldn't have friended the (Score:2, Interesting)
It's an open question whether U.S. has free elections or not, but I'm pretty confident that one thing that you don't have in your election is things like ballot boxes pre-stuffed with ballots with the "right" vote marked already.
From what I've heard lot of the US doesn't even have ballot boxes any more. It's all done on electronic voting systems created by friends of one of the two parties, with massive security holes and some well-hidden backdoors suited to vote rigging.