Last week an account going by the name @PeaceKaren_25 was suspended by Twitter.com. We wouldn’t normally care about some spambot getting picked off, but PeaceKaren is important because she wasn’t peddling porn or popups–she was a political puppet.
Karen and her sister account @HopeMarie_25 are examples of political “astroturf,” fake Twitter accounts that create the illusion of a “grassroots” political movement. In the diagram above, the two accounts are connected by a very thick band, which indicates that Marie constantly re-tweeted everything Karen said. Together they sent out over 20,000 tweets in the last four months promoting the Twitter account and website of Republican congressional leader John Boehner.
Such messages were cataloged and analyzed by Indiana University’s Truthy project, which takes its name from Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness.” The goal of the project is to seek out propaganda and smear campaigns conducted via false Twitter accounts.
“To avoid detection by Twitter, duplicate tweets are cleverly disguised by adding different hashtags or subtly tweaking the web addresses,” said IU research associate Bruno Gonçalves, who is mining the stream of tweets. “This gives the appearance of a lot of different people sharing the same views, while in reality the bots are flooding the Twittersphere with one coherent political message.” [Press release].
To find political spammers, the researchers analyzed the Twitter network, asked users to report suspicious accounts, and tracked the origins of hot memes that saw sudden spikes in usage.
“We think this technique must be common,” says Filippo Menczer, an associate professor at Indiana University and one of the principal investigators on the project. “Wherever there are lots of eyes looking at screens, spammers will be there; so why not with politics?” [Technology Review].
Other memes implicated in possible astroturf campaigns include the hashtag #ampat, a 10-account user group that spread links to the website Freedomist.com and smears Democrat Chris Coons, and an account under the name of @GoRogueRunSarah which links to a website displaying pro-Palin and anti-Muslim propaganda.
Though these examples may suggest that the Truthy group has a political bias, they deny that their program is picking and choosing the memes it tracks. The researchers say their results simply reflect the volume of tweeting and popular hashtags produced by the conservative right during this election cycle.
“We looked really hard for any ‘truthy’ memes from the left, but unfortunately we could not find any. I am sure this is not because they don’t exist, but rather because there is just very little traffic on Twitter from the left this political season,” he said. “The conservative side is creating huge amounts of traffic. Almost all of the most popular hashtags, the most active accounts, and the most tweeted URLs, are from the right. So a large majority of what we are able to track is from the right–both authentic and ‘truthy.’” [Press release].
What remains to be seen is if these Twitter campaigns have any real influence. Social computing researcher Bernardo Huberman thinks not:
In a study that successfully predicted the popularity of movies based on Twitter activity, [Huberman] found that legitimate movie studio Twitter campaigns were largely ineffective compared to honest mass opinion. [Technology Review].
For more political tweet-based visualizations, look through Truthy’s examples, or check out these neat visualizations from the New York Times.
Also, follow us on Twitter! We swear, DISCOVER’s account is 100 percent authentic science news.
Related content:
80beats: Hackers Infect Twitterverse With Worm Using Old, Known Bug
80beats: Researcher Updates His Twitter Feed Using Only Brainwaves
80beats: Twitter Security Breach Reveals Confidential Company Documents
Discoblog: The Best Way to Predict Box Office Hits: Twitter Chatter
Discoblog: How To Make Your Twitter Followers Uneasy: Use ShadyURLs
DISCOVER: Twitter’s Greatest Hits—and Greatest Misses
Image: Truthy.indiana.edu
November 2nd, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Not that liberal tweets are talking points memos (cough cough)…
November 2nd, 2010 at 6:07 pm
It’s always the Republicans who have to resort to underhandedness to get their point across. In their Bible the phrase is “The truthiness will set you free”
November 2nd, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Here in Canada , there is word that newly elected Toronto mayor , Rob Ford , whose father is with the Conservative Party , and his campaign team operated a fake Twitter account , QueensQuayKaren , for four months before deleting it after his win .
November 9th, 2010 at 9:27 am
Political operatives use deception? I am *shocked*, SHOCKED I tell you!
November 20th, 2010 at 8:33 am
This is a part of Twitter in all areas. I work as a Twitter consultant and have found that bots produce the majority of tweets. It also shows that the work of astroturfing will probably get more sophisticated in the next election. Most Twitter spammers behave like email spammers, but everyone’s email isn’t available for analysis the way tweets are. Asotroturf won’t go away, it will just evolve to be less detectable.
November 28th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
I can’t get over the fact that Palin has her own reality television show. Can anyone have a reality show nowadays? And it is glaringly clear that she is using it to get more attention so she can have a shot at being president of the United States. The most chilling part is that with the way everybody idolizes reality stars, it’s just crazy enough to actually work. I’m not exactly an extreme liberal or anything, but I think anybody with half a brain on either side of the aisle should be able to tell why we wouldn’t want somebody like Palin being in charge of the greatest nation in the world (the USA!).