Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
companies, famous people, and now political people. Twitter is spam central unless you only follow your close friends.
The world is how you make it
Umm.. no. Not surprised at all.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
... I hope they don't let twitter users vote.
Virtually all communication on the Internet is faked by somebody out to make a buck. BUY CHEEP V1AGR4!!!
Really? Politicians and political action groups - people who are willing to do just about anything to get elected or extend their power - are willing to 'astroturf'? Seems like a small sin compared to the shenanigans they normally stoop to.
If politicians are willing to sell out the citizens in exchange for campaign contributions as low as a few hundred or measly few thousand dollars, is there any possibly doubt they might just maybe engage in less than ideal campaign practices.
In reply to all the people who say that democracy is dead and we just have to live with this corrupt system, may I introduce you to the one (admittedly very difficult and long-term) alternative that actually has a chance of freeing us from politicians entirely?
Read: http://metagovernment.org/ and before you criticize it... remember that the only other alternative is this disaster we have now. That or authoritarianism.
On Twitter? Unpossible!
Actually, the only thing I'm surprised to learn is that there may, in fact, be some legitimate accounts on Twitter. 99.999% of it seems to be spam judging by my few visits to the site, although maybe calling it spam is unfair; after all, you have to sign up to the individual streams of advertising.
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.
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.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25964/?p1=A4
"The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it. It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds."
Evil, no wait!
I would argue the findings don't matter a bit, because they didn't reach people not interested in seeing the messages sent.
So what if one holder generated twenty accounts in a second? The accounts exist in a void, and are only "truthy" if they trick people into following them. THEN I would say there was skullduggery at work, but they showed no proof of that.
On top of that, Twitter is a terrible outlet for spam because the first time you see someone you don't care about from someone you just unfollow them or never follow them to start. 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 (now people who follow you just to spam you with presence, that's another matter but not under discussion).
On a side note I like how the only people they named explicitly were republicans and unnamed were some of the bigger supposed problem accounts. This was pretty obviously a kind of astroturfing, in and of itself... make up a problem where none exists and claim Republicans are at the heart of it, all on election day. Smooth.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
See Karl?!?!? I TOLD YOU we shouldn't have created those accounts so closely together...
I for one welcome our new bot overlords
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
No wondering other non-western countries hold a very cautious and suspicious view of it. I bet during chaotic periods and time leading to it when tweet volume exploded, twitter wasn't so keen, quick or even willing to detect and shut down suspicious accounts and activities (read, CIA, NED, etc)
a.k.a. The Senate
Thankfully the Dems had a cakewalk because those tea party crazies nominated a fool. NOT!
Rand by 10+.
AND Rand was to the LEFT of the dem on the drug war and the war war.
Rand will be a fine principled senator. Just like his dad in the house. The question will be what can he accomplish. But the nonsense of the parent is little more than team red team blue nonsense.
Go Rand.
Was it as obvious as the "hot chick" named Tanya486 who follows you, is following 56000 other people, and has 2 followers?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Personally I'm outraged by this news!
Most politicians (and by that I mean Congress) waste enough time on my nickel (speaking as someone who would be a taxpayer if I made enough money for the federal government not to refund pretty much all of it ;) that quite honestly I would prefer that they would be required to Tweet every 15 minutes so we can account for every moment of their time in office!
I'd also like a requirement that Pictures and Geotagging have to be included, not just to ensure against fraudulent Tweets, but also to be used in evidence in the next (and there will always be a next time) sexual misconduct charge! In fact, given the fact that anyone in public service should not have any expectation of privacy, let's include a requirement for an entry whenever a member of congress enters the restroom! This way we can clearly establish not just who took the last square of toilet paper and/or soap without reporting it to maintenance, but whether or not a congressman really is reaching for a paper left on the floor and not, in fact, asking for sexual favors from the man in stall next to him in a restroom!
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
They're on the internets!!!1
If people are voting based on what Twitter tells them then we've got much bigger problems.
It's about time we start using the information age to separate false from true. Centuries-old practices of paid rumor-spreaders and disinformation should have some more chance of being tracked down and exposed. We are all tricked every day, it's time we all start to figure out what is going on, and not just be fed our opinions via factoids filtered for angle and timing.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
...while I dust off my 'surprised' face...
0 0
<O>
there we go.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Soap, ballot, jury, cartridge. In that order.
Note the voting pattern of Hispanics, Asian-Americans, etc. These non-Black minorities serve as a measurement of African-American racism against Whites (and other non-Black folks). Neither Barack Hussein Obama nor John McCain is Hispanic or Asian. So, Hispanics and Asian-Americans used only non-racial criteria in selecting a candidate and, hence, serve as the reference by which we detect a racist voting pattern. Only about 65% of Hispanics and Asian-Americans supported Obama. In other words, a maximum of 65% support by any ethnic or racial group for either McCain or Obama is not racist and, hence, is acceptable. (A maximum of 65% for McCain is okay. So, European-American support at 55% for McCain is well below this threshold and, hence, is not racist.)
If African-Americans were not racist, then at most 65% of them would have supported Obama. At that level of support, McCain would have won the presidential race.
At this point, African-American supremacists (and apologists) claim that African-Americans voted for Obama because he (1) is a member of the Democratic party and (2) supports its ideals. That claim is an outright lie. Look at the exit-polling data for the Democratic primaries. Consider the case of North Carolina. Again, about 95% of African-Americans voted for him and against Hillary Clinton. Both Clinton and Obama are Democrats, and their official political positions on the campaign trail were nearly identical. Yet, 95% of African-Americans voted for Obama and against Hillary Clinton. Why? African-Americans supported Obama due solely to the color of his skin.
Here is the bottom line. Barack Hussein Obama does not represent mainstream America. He won the election due to the racist voting pattern exhibited by African-Americans.
African-Americans have established that expressing "racial pride" by voting on the basis of skin color is 100% acceptable. Neither the "Wall Street Journal" nor the "New York Times" complained about this racist behavior. Therefore, in future elections, please feel free to express your racial pride by voting on the basis of skin color. Feel free to vote for the non-Black candidates and against the Black candidates if you are not African-American. You need not defend your actions in any way. Voting on the basis of skin color is quite acceptable by today's moral standard.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED! To find that astroturfing has been happening on Twitter!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If the spam is relevant and constructive, then it does not matter if it was generated by an astroturfing script.
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
political horseshit placed by a shill or script, mod down
Instead of calling it AstroTurfing, lets call it:
TurfHogging ...
or
TurfHacking
or
Lies
or
BrainWashing
or
BullShit by any other name would smell as sweet
Vote Early, Vote Often!
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
A democratic researcher looking for abuse of online social systems found only one instance of abuse (our politicians only cheated ONCE ? How likely is that ?). Obviously the only abuse he found was conservative.
If you're going to research this and you can't find at least one scumbag from either party, I'm not going to believe for a second you're impartial, or that you've got anything interesting to say about "abuse in general". You're just propagandizing.
Let's not pretend it's hard to find a lying scumbag in either party. This is politicians we're talking about. They're about as honest as a lawyer who likes to eat young virgins on friday night talking to the police.
Yeah, lets create more software that lets nutcases create polling sites that lead them to believe their twisted worldview is a majority opinion. Sorry to break it to you, but half the people in this country have a two digit IQ. Direct democracy would quickly result in a racially segregated country, with an official state religion of Conservative Protestant (Lutherans, Methodists and other Devil Worshipers need not apply), where the teaching of evolution is punishable by death, with a tax rate of 0%, but everyone would still be guaranteed Medicare and Social Security.
We saw yesterday what happens when the stupid leave their TVs to vote. Imagine if they could vote on every issue right from their TV. With Fox News telling them how to vote on each issue. That would be great. At least with representative democracy it takes the electorate longer to fuck up the country because not everyone they elect is a congenital idiot. You're expecting people who believe their income taxes are too high even though they aren't paying any income taxes to manage the economy?
When people enter the military, we expect them to give up some rights. They no longer have unlimited free speech. They no longer have privacy. They are, in theory, held to a higher standard of behavior than others. I don't see why we can't do the same for political candidates. If you want to run for congress or for a federal office, you give up your right to lie with impunity. A $10,000 fine for each lie should do it, and lets say the 11th lie is a felony that gets you a little jail time, costs you your right to vote, and gets you dropped from the ticket.