Bogus Grass-Roots Politics on Twitter - GOP Based

[benld74]

Why what a suprise! An almost brand new form of social connection product and already the GOP has used it to fit THEIR purpose!
Instead of Grass Roots the Article is calling it Astroturf! And they can back up that IT IS FAKE!!


Researchers have found evidence that political campaigns and special-interest groups are using scores of fake Twitter accounts to create the impression of broad grass-roots political expression. A team at Indiana University used data-mining and network-analysis techniques to detect the activity.

"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?"

In another case, 10 different accounts were used to send out thousands of posts, many of them duplicates slightly altered to avoid detection as spam. All of the tweets linked back to posts on a conservative website called Freedomist.com.





More at:

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26666/?p1=A1

[Billy Burnett]

1. Just like the Neda twitmovement. eom

[EC]

2. I have to laugh at how fast these teabaggers

(that are supposed to be independent with no leader) took the Republican $$$$$ - then were on Lawrence's show bragging about how independent and grass roots they were....yeah, right...