A bit of corporate backing, perhaps? Matt Cardy/Getty

It’s like a doping test for memes. An algorithm can detect when a Twitter hashtag or meme has received more attention than expected. This can show it got an artificial boost from corporate advertising dollars, says Emilio Ferrara of the University of Southern California, who led the team.

Twitter normally labels tweets that have been paid for or sponsored. But hashtags can be promoted by other means, such as via websites or TV, Ferrara says. “If we can learn the characteristics of promoted campaigns, then maybe we can detect and even predict them,” he says.

The team trained their algorithm by having it learn how a promoted meme labelled as such by Twitter looks and circulates. Once trained, it also found unlabelled promotional campaigns, like #GameofThrones or #AmericanIdol, which had been advertised elsewhere. Overall, the algorithm tested 95 per cent accurate, missing just one in every 20 of the memes that Twitter explicitly promotes. Ferrara and his colleagues presented their results at the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.


Jacob Ratkiewicz, a software engineer at Google, says he was impressed by the algorithm’s performance. Catching Twitter bots boosting a product or political candidate is one thing, but it’s tougher to work out when human users have been coaxed into retweeting an advertisement.

“What this study is doing is looking at real human activity and trying to tease apart the organic human stuff from the promoted stuff,” he says. “That’s impressive to me.”

But there are some kinds of advertising that can slide under this algorithm’s radar, says Christo Wilson of Northeastern University.

“Let’s say that Shell paid Kim Kardashian to tweet something,” he says. “That looks organic. She could have tweeted about her dog or Shell oil. The way it looks and the way it spreads look the same.”

Still, algorithms like this have some uses, Wilson says. “We can try and catch a lot of the low-hanging fruit,” he says.

Read more: Web of lies: Is the internet making a world without truth?