Researchers Uncover Political Astroturfing On Twitter

[Ian David]

Researchers Uncover Political Astroturfing On Twitter

Researchers at Indiana University are looking into how political groups can manipulate Twitter to push their message under the appearance of grassroots activity, the Technology Review reports.

The Truthy project, at Indiana University, analyzed networks, tracked memes and followed-up on tips of suspicious messages and accounts to identify instances of astroturfing on the social networking site. http://truthy.indiana.edu/

"Wherever there are lots of eyes looking at screens, spammers will be there; so why not with politics?" Filippo Menczer, an associate professor at UI and one of the researchers, said.

Menczer says the research group uncovered a number of accounts sending out duplicate messages and also retweeting messages from the same few accounts in a closely connected network. For instance, two since-closed accounts, called @PeaceKaren_25 and @HopeMarie_25, sent out 20,000 similar tweets, most of them linking to, or promoting, the House minority leader John Boehner's website, gopleader.gov.

More:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/researchers-track-astroturfing-on-twitter.php?ref=fpb

Read the rest from the Technology Review here: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=26666

[RandomThoughts]

1. I figure they try to take things from many places.

Without attribution, or showing who else said it. I figure that will only hurt them in the long run, and believe in giving credit where credit is due, or using ideas for the same better reasons that they were originally intended to be used for.


Thats why I post songs, so people can hear the artist sing.

Dire Straits-Why Worry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_03uXQiz6eY


I figure all our bases are out of reach of any threat of losses :)
All have reported in still doing fine :)