A new website called Truthy (after Stephen Colbert’s word) was set up by researchers at the University of Indiana to track internet memes, most specifically on Twitter. To understand how it works, read this link. The Truthy website is able to detect genuine grassroots memes and differentiate them from astroturfed memes. Can you guess who is one of the beneficiaries of the astroturfing?
Following a tip from a user who flagged a handful of suspicious tweets smearing Chris Coons, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Delaware, the researchers uncovered a network of about 10 bot accounts. These bots have names like @krossnews, @BethlehemTweets, and @kingdomcast. They inject thousands of memes, all of which link to posts from the Freedomist.com website.
“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.”
Generating traffic is important, explains Gonçalves: “While usually referred to as ‘viral,’ the way in which information or rumors diffuse in a social network is different from infectious diseases. Rumors gradually acquire more credibility and appeal as we become more exposed to them. After some time, a threshold is crossed and the rumor becomes so widespread that it is considered as ‘common-knowledge’ within a community and hence, ‘True.'”
Indeed, each of the bot accounts has hundreds, and in some cases thousands of followers, who retweet and spread the truthy memes, he added.
I don’t know how many of you use Twitter but accounts connected to Christine O’Donnell have been a real annoyance to users from Delaware. Delaware has a fairly strong Twitter presence and have a hashtag for news & events in Delaware, #NetDE. (If you really want to weep, check out the #DESen hashtag.) O’Donnell fans, most from out-of-state, have been spamming the tag for months. In fact if you follow the tag you’ll see that it’s generally endless re-tweets of the same tweets, probably from these fake accounts. So they’re trying to build an appearance of strong grass roots support while getting information they think is helpful to Christine O’Donnell to voters in Delaware. Mostly, they’re just a nuisance.