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Twitter Bots Drown Out Anti-Kremlin Tweets
tsu doh nimh writes "It appears that thousands of Twitter accounts created in advance to blast automated messages are being used to drown out Tweets sent by bloggers and activists this week who are protesting the disputed presidential elections in Russia. Trend Micro first observed on Wednesday the bogus tweets flooding popular hashtags being used by Russians protesting the election and the arrests of hundreds of protesters, including prominent anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. Today, blogger Brian Krebs posted evidence that thousands of accounts apparently auto-created in mid-2011 were being used to flood more than a dozen hashtags connected to the protests, and appear to be all following each other and one master account, presumably the botnet controller."
But seriously, hashtags are ephemeral things. Change it up while someone works on knocking out the C&C and getting the bogus accounts blacklisted.
Is Twitter going to be like Switzerland and stay neutral? Also, how well can this tactic work against a critical mass? And what is that critical mass? I can't read Russian, but I imagine it would be pretty easy to pull out fake comments from real comments.
There is something fundamentally wrong with any social media that does not autofilter, grade and weight posts based on a metric other than sum (#topic).
Twitter tells you what to think.
Why have those accounts all follow each other? It would make exterminating them trivial assuming twitter can be bothered to do so. Just implement any communications on the back end, or using less-obvious forms of communications.
Of course, with all the twitter spam out there it wouldn't surprise me if people just have these networks ready to go all the time and sell them to the highest bidder when the price gets high enough.
Twitter is obsolete in any case.
Somewhere in here there is an angry birds joke.
So you're saying in Soviet Russia bot follows you?
Coming soon!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is just astroturfing. Pretty much any type of popular forum site is going to have large numbers for accounts that have been set up for astroturfing my third parties.
I recall a while back fark all of sudden got crapflooded by pro-chavez bots. Admins simply need to find astroturfing accounts and delete them. Nothing new here.
... of fame as a political force (in Iran).
Check your premises.
After reading about HBGary Federal's own work in Astroturfing software when they were hacked by Anonymous earlier this year I figured that everyone would be getting in on that action. Now that mainstream media doesn't have their death grip on the spread of information (or disinformation), the G-men in black suits standing off camera need to come up with other ways to cloud things.
Trying to cut off the internet completely would just result in the population going apeshit, so now they're utilizing shadier methods that are harder to detect. In reading some of the comments on news stories here in the states over the last year or so, I'm sure there are people doing this here as well. You can only see so many "NOBAMA 2012!!!" posts by people with names like Chuck17359 before you start to wonder if there is actually a human being on the other side.
I thought they were getting more progressive in the recent years? Is this not the case? It seems like it's just getting closer and closer to another dictatorship and extreme socialism.
Can someone more informed than me on the subject explain what's going on there? None of the sites seem to say more than "Putin is being an asshole."
Come on, everyone wants lots of Russian friends on both Twitter and Facebook!
But us calling them a dictatorship?
Please, have you looked in the mirror lately?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This will ensure the hashtags make it to trending topics. If the hashtags in question are something like #FuckingLiarPutin, doesn't really matter what they add to it. Let's hope the hashtags themselves say enough, like Jeff Jarvis' #fuckyouwashington that went viral quickly.
I8-D
Who can explain what this 632305222316434 thing is about? It tells: "Everyone who disagrees with criminal behaviour of Russian president, government and all those rascals, must do that." but what does it mean?
Aren't situations like this when Twitter should, at the very least, temporarily suspend the obvious, automated "spam" accounts? All they need to do is quote some vague line in their "terms of service," which I haven't seen (I don't have a twitter account) but I would be surprised if it doesn't exist.
This is a very strong bad sign for where Russia is heading, this is bad , too bad to be true, also means they were already expecting this, and they prepared, they prepared to hold the country to the Czars and not the people. Future does not look bright in Soviet Russia.
*Sigh* here we go again with the false equivalence squad.
If you can't see why your "hurr durr so is amerikuh" statement is a bunch of crap, let's make the following deal: I'll go stand in an anti-government protest here in the States, and you go stand in Red Square with those protesting Putin's latest power grab.
If we're lucky, you'll be able to write letters from prison telling us how it went.
Looks like /. already covered that. Oh, wait, that was 4 years ago...
... 100% of voters voted for the presidential party. This can only be achieved by injection of fake ballots and/or stealing the votes.
This is a good (albeit somewhat rudimentary) explanation of a clear indication of the elections being rigged. The first graph shows the histogram of the % of the votes for different parties vs. the number of the voting locations that registered that figure. Under standard circumstances the curves should be close to normal (Gaussian) distribution. Different curves correspond to different parties; the presidential party is brown. All of the curves exhibit a clear bell-shaped behavior, except for the brown one, which has the obnoxious right tail and artificial peaks at nice-looking values (50 to 100% with a step of 5). This means that according to lots of voting locations, exactly 55, 60, 65,
But us calling them a dictatorship? Please, have you looked in the mirror lately?
Have you looked at the videos documenting widespread electoral fraud?
It's an open question whether U.S. has free elections or not, but I'm pretty confident that one thing that you don't have in your election is things like ballot boxes pre-stuffed with ballots with the "right" vote marked already. Or, even more bluntly, counting the ballots, and then changing the numbers in the protocol before it is submitted (and kicking out any observers that protest or try to photo it).
It's an open question whether U.S. has free elections or not, but I'm pretty confident that one thing that you don't have in your election is things like ballot boxes pre-stuffed with ballots with the "right" vote marked already.
From what I've heard lot of the US doesn't even have ballot boxes any more. It's all done on electronic voting systems created by friends of one of the two parties, with massive security holes and some well-hidden backdoors suited to vote rigging.
Why has not twitter killed the master account?
It was Russian parliament elections. Presidential elections are in March 2012.
I don't even have a twitter account lol @ a nation-state-sponsored-twitter-terrorism.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Aren't situations like this when Twitter should, at the very least, temporarily suspend the obvious, automated "spam" accounts? All they need to do is quote some vague line in their "terms of service," which I haven't seen (I don't have a twitter account) but I would be surprised if it doesn't exist.
Someone already thought of a spam blocker for twitter:
I'll go stand in an anti-government protest here in the States, and you go stand in Red Square with those protesting Putin's latest power grab.
the moment your protest becomes something noticeable you will be beat down by **PD just like how it happened with ows. and as long as your protest is a dozen guys with placards daily picketing some place, they wont give a damn about you.
in russia, they will instantly take you seriously and beat you down.
the only difference in between these cases, is the speed the beatdown happens. and the level you are taken seriously.
Read radical news here
Yes, the US isn't the shining beacon of hope, freedom and liberty it thinks it is. But it is still a very, very far cry from the autocratic and kleptocratic country that is Russia.
is that why police departments all over usa had beaten down occupy protesters in a move coordinated by FBI ?
http://www.examiner.com/top-news-in-minneapolis/were-occupy-crackdowns-aided-by-federal-law-enforcement-agencies
talk about democracy.
Read radical news here
Regardless of whether it's twitter or some other medium, the point might be that not only is someone planning ahead for disrupting social networks when they're used to organize, but also for actively using it against the people.
Predictably now other regimes might use similar tactics when social networking is used to organize for other situations ranging from occupy to outright rebellion and rioting.
Maybe the only surprise is that we haven't seen this until now.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
your pie has been spent.
Would you like to see how long a pile of the top .01%'s cash would last if it was split up fairly?
Hmm, it could be used to pay down some of the national debt.