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
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.
He wants to privatize the VA.. hes a fucking idiot.
Yours truly,
A veteran.
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.
As opposed to people voting based on what TV or newspapers tell them?