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

Who needs tweets with twits like

[Anonymous Coward]

Rand Paul:

"The Democrats tripled the U.S. debt!"

From the man who will

1. Privatize Social Security
2. Privatize the Veterans Administration
3. Replace the U.S. Federal Income Tax with a national sales tax.
4. Change the Moon to green cheese.

Go Rand ! all the way to the insane asylum.

Yours In Moscow,
Kilgore T.

Re:Fake Accounts?

[harlequinn]

Just to clear things up, all of the accounts on Twitter are real. The person that registered the accounts (or wrote the script that registered the accounts) is also real. Even the content is real.

The only thing that might be fake is if the account represents a fictitious person (but as above, it is still a real account - it just represents a fake person).

as the saying goes:

[ChipMonk]

Soap, ballot, jury, cartridge. In that order.

Re:as the saying goes:

[Anonymous Coward]

"rural Pakistanis"? Hardly. Every one of those strikes has targetted foreign militants in pakistan, or Pakistanis who were followed back from Afghanistan. So much for your thruthiness.