Truthy Project Uncovers Political Astroturfing On Twitter

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.'"

Comments

Re:Fake Accounts?

[History's Coming To]

It's a fair point, but I've been fairly surprised by Twitter. Just to be clear, I'm not generally a fan of social networking - I don't have a Facebook or Myspace page, and frankly believe that if people can't be bothered finding my email address or blog then I don't really want to hear from them.

Twitter seems to self-censor quite well though. I follow about 50 people, mostly geek types like Marcus Chown (cosmology author) and a few work related people. I get almost zero spam in my feed, in fact the only real spam is spammer following me to try and get me to reciprocate. I do, by clicking "report spam" and hearing no more...as TFA points out, these accounts were swiftly shut down by the users who presumably did just that.

I've actually found some very interesting people with Twitter, and very little spam, and I'm as surprised by that as anyone.