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
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.
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)
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever." - one of Rand's paid employees took that quote to heart.
Says the AC
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"?
He wants to privatize the VA.. hes a fucking idiot.
Yours truly,
A veteran.
Yeah, I can't wait for the money supply to be controlled by international gold traders and/or mining cartels.
We won't have any economic crises after that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Grand total inflation when gold and silver were the currency (between 1776 and 1913) was 14%.
Since then, it is tough to estimate, but at least a thousand percent.
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
And the government's SWAT teams and un-manned drones will wipe all four of your boxes off the face of the planet like so many rural Pakistanis.
Blar.
Soap, ballot, jury, cartridge. In that order.
Ah, the Tyler Durden Option...
You know what they say about having "enough soap", right?
Some amount of inflation is necessary for an economy to grow. And grow, it has to, when you're trying to take care of everyone, and not just the plantation owner. Gold only works if you have a static economy.
Besides, Gold standard introduced to the US (I assume that with the mention of 1776, you're talking about the US): 1873. At various points in time, currency was backed by gold, silver, others and nothing, the "nothing" periods primarily being wars (war of 1812, Civil War, etc).
With gold, you also have the exact opposite problem - deflation, when the gold supply grows at a rate slower than the economy.
But don't let basic economics distract you from talking points and sound-bites, inconvenient as they are!
Soap, ballot, jury, cartridge. In that order.
Your predictable battleplan is your weakness. Mix it up a little the keep The Man on his toes.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
As opposed to the banks? Or the privately run "Federal" Reserve. At least with gold they can't just make infinite free (to them) money by dropping the reserve requirements to zero. We have to find some form of currency that is tied to the actual value of the goods in the market.
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.
We have to find some form of currency that is tied to the actual value of the goods in the market.
If you did some research, you'd find at least a couple of alternatives (not saying you don't have any in mind). Unfortunately, they kinda break the current corporate/global system...
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
Wow, it's a real person. I assumed it was some kind of fictional cross between Ayn Rand and Ron Paul. And is that really what passes for news in the USA? It sounds like she's asking a list of questions that he submitted before hand to make him look good.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Didn't you know? Only whites can be considered racist, prejudice or discriminating. Every other race is just "Expressing pride in their color."
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
No, inflation is not necessary for the economy to grow. Inflation economies punish savings, and inflation-proof economies punish savings and push people toward investing (read gambling) in the market (read casino) to maintain their worth.
If you care to look at how the currency worked, it was unnecessary to "back" a gold or silver coin with anything. Gold and silver coins being currency in those days, they were their own backing.
Basic economics is what got us into this mess, starting on Jekyll Island in 1913. Experimental, wet-dream banker economics.
I call bullshit. In 1776 inflation rate was about 20%. In 1777 it was 25%. In 1778 it was 30%. During the war of 1812 it hit 20%. In between were periods of deflation in there that hit 20% They may have added up to 14% (it's hard to tell from the document I'm looking at), but there was a hell of a lot of inflation and deflation in those periods and a whole lot of pain because of it. Deflation cripples the economy. Technically telling the true what propagating a false story (the gold standard prevents inflation) is still lying.
The economy was largely stagnant during much of that time and there were repeated depressions that got successively worse until the great depression. Gold isn't money, it's a commodity and its value will fluctuate like any commodity even if you hold large quantities in reserve. That destabilizes the money supply and during those years you got periods of inflation and deflation. If you look at the actual annual inflation/deflation rate (page 6 of this) you will see that prices have been far more stable since we've gone off the gold standard and into an actively managed economy. You'll also see that GDP growth has taken off much more than the total inflation has.
The only way you get a stable value for gold is if you only compare it to gold. Compared to other things its value isn't even close to stable.
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And just how much gold/silver can you have to back all the currency in circulation? How do you increase the gold supply to meet the demands of a larger population? Remember, most of the easily accessible gold has already been mined - what we have is a diminishing supply, which by your plan would necessarily be shared among a growing population.
Also, there are situations where you can have over-supply of the commodity being used to back your currency. Suppose you're backed by gold, and an alchemist the philosopher's stone. Just any way by which the supply can increase like crazy. Suddenly, your entire currency is rendered worthless. All those gold dollars under your mattress that you spent your life accumulating are now equal to something that a guy in a dark room dressed in a weird robe can conjure up in a few seconds. Where's your self-backed currency now?
The problem is that an unbacked currency, combined with the now accepted idea of monetizing debt, has already caused hyperinflation.
Bankers realized that making worthless money from cotton is so much more profitable than anything else they ever tried. Coin money, backed by itself, is more or less inflation proof. Supply and demand take care of the rest. So population increases faster than the gold supply, that just means that goods will cost less as there is less money chasing them. The actual amount of gold per human is moot. The people who save in such an economy don't need to gamble in the market just to maintain their wealth. All they need is a jar and a backyard.
The real magic trick was convincing people that worthless paper has some sort of value. Paper money, backed by debt, is only good for bankers and stealing resources from brown people.