Pro-Gov't Twitter Bots Try to Hush Mexican Activists Klint Finley - Wired
go to original August 25, 2015

LoQueSigue blogger Alberto Escorcia has been watching the rise of Twitter bots in Mexico since the 2012 elections, when he noticed fake accounts promoting the candidacy of Enrique Peña Nieto, now the president. But the bots have become more active since the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students.

Using social network visualization tools such as Flocker and Gephi, Escorcia has discovered a reliable way of detecting bot accounts by examining the number of connections a Twitter account has with other users. Bots have few connections, while real users tend to have far more. Using the software, he’s been able to identify many cases of bots used to sabotage protests.

Andres Monroy, a social-computing researcher at Microsoft Research, has observed similar behaviors in Mexico and other countries such as Venezuela. He says that in many cases, the bots are run by traditional spammers targetting popular hashtags — the kinds you might see hawking Viagra through the #FiveWordstoRuinADate hashtag — for commercial, as opposed to political, purposes. He also says that spam bots’ impact on trending topics is hard to quantify and that activists often mistake the natural ebb and flow of trends for malicious interference. “Just because a hashtag is popular doesn’t mean it’s trending,” he says. “Both sides [spammers and activists] put too much effort into trending topics.”

That said, Monroy confirms that politically motivated spam bots exist and pose real problems for activists, particularly when they flood hashtags with useless content. These efforts can have material effects on organizers.

Read the whole story at Wired

Image: Google

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