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
Metagovernment can't work, Google and most of the other search engines ignore metas these days. /duck
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.
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
"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.
He wants to privatize the VA.. hes a fucking idiot.
Yours truly,
A veteran.
Not only that, but they are openly stating that if they don't get their way, "Second ammendment remedies" may be the only option. Whoah. That is truly scary. Don't get our way? Start a violent revolution! After all, your political opponents are godless communist muslim monsters bent on destroying America, so revolution is justified. Or something.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Clearly we need government by robots.txt!
I personally welcome our new robots.txt overlords.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
If people are voting based on what Twitter tells them then we've got much bigger problems.
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.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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/
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!
Lol, no. There are some things I cannot entrust to a piece of software, and the monopoly on legitimate violence is absolutely on that list.
Beyond that, anyone who claims that democracy is dead, that corruption and fraud have finally become so ingrained in the system that it simply doesn't work as intended, etc. needs to actually learn some basic history of electoral politics. Plain and simple, this shit has been happening since long before day 1. Hell, most of the guys who wrote the fracking Declaration of Independence weren't even elected, and many of the ones who wrote the Constitution were either effectively self-appointed or elected by a process that can only charitably be described as "deeply flawed"... not that it mattered much, since the only people actually allowed to vote were older white men with sufficient means to show up at whatever obscure building was chosen for polling in the middle of fall harvest, and when you've got an almost wholly agrarian, rural society possessing no faster transportation than horseback that's the sort of thing that seriously cramps voter turnout.
The fact of the matter is that, for all the dishonesty and shenanigans that happen every year, American politics are more open, transparent and free from tampering than they've ever been. Democracy is dead like nobody uses the internet.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
You're an idiot, even as far as anonymous cowards go. This country owes its existence to learned men with great foresight coming together after the Revolution to form a republic with a spirit of compromise and optimism. The way you casually describe it, this republic could be the natural result of any armed uprising anywhere. America doesn't owe its existence to people not getting their way any more than it owes its existence to a king not granted his subjects their way. Revolutions do not create countries. That's simplistic, poetic fantasy. Revolutions are destructive, and they lay waste to everything they touch. It's what may fortunately come afterwards that creates countries. These "second amendment remedies" idiots are far from being learned, optimistic individuals with great foresight. They can't get beyond ten word bumper sticker statements of values. They couldn't build a country if they had a box of LEGO bricks and a nicely drawn sheet of instructions.