WIRED

A coordinated, inauthentic social media campaign has been explicitly targeting key US policymakers in an attempt to force them to withdraw plans for anti-vaping legislation. According to Astroscreen, a British startup specialised in detecting inauthentic behaviour online, the campaign, which is still ongoing, operates under the hashtags #WeVapeWeVote and #IVapeIVote,

It began on September 11, the day after the The Food and Drug Administration announced a move to ban all flavoured e-cigarettes in the United States to combat a surge in underage vaping.


Key political figures have been mentioned in tweets containing multiple pro-vaping hashtags and repetitive strings of text or memes. For instance, the Tweet: “We vape. We vote. 20m strong plus friends and family”, was targeted at President Donald Trump's account @realdonaldtrump and his campaign manager Brad Parscale @parscale. Another example included a picture of the Twin Towers bannered with the words “e-liquid flavour ban: the second terrorist attack on 9/11.”

Between September 11 and September 26, 5,873 accounts generated 52,166 hashtag mentions. Out of these 5,873 accounts, more than 925 were created in the month of September – these were responsible for 11,651 mentions of the hashtags.

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Though a broad range of political accounts were targeted, including New York governor Andrew Cumo, the campaign’s primary focus was Trump – out of these 52,166 tweets, 15,000 contained mentions, and more than 10,000 of these tagged @realdonaldtrump. According to Astroscreen, about a quarter of all tweets in the campaign came from inauthentic accounts. To avoid Twitter’s spam detection, some accounts simply added a number into their spammed tweet.

Astroscreen


Attributing the campaign to a specific actor is impossible – open source data does not provide this information. There is also no way of discerning whether the actors behind the campaign believe in the message they are promoting – for instance as e-cigarette enthusiasts – or have started the campaign for an ulterior purpose. Vaping has recently proved to be a controversial politics issue in the US as 17 deaths have been linked to the use of cigarette alternatives.

Astroscreen discovered the campaign using proprietary machine learning technology specialised in identifying social media manipulation. The company's methods range from detecting account creation date anomalies to more sophisticated processes such as linguistic fingerprinting, the concept that a person can be identified by their specific use of language.

In an emailed statement, Twitter did not comment directly on the story but underlined that it takes "robust action when there is a violation of our platform manipulation and spam policy." At the point of writing, the accounts behind the messages are still active on Twitter.

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The targeting of these tweets is significant, says Donara Barojan, head of operations at Astroscreen. “Normally, only about one quarter of all tweets that are part of a social media campaign will include mentions of other accounts, but this particular social media campaign involves a very significant number of mentions.” This targeting, explains Barojan, is a strong indicator of coordination across these networks.


Astroscreen

It is also unusual that these are private accounts – they are impersonating people. “Typically in astroturfing you get a mixture of private and organisational accounts,'' says Yin Yin Lu, an academic at the Oxford Internet Institute. “The key thing with with organisations is that they add authenticity – I found that tweets from an organisation have substantially increased the chances [of] getting liked or shared.”

So far, there is no indication that policymakers have engaged with the campaign. (Astroscreen has not yet ascertained the effect on regular users. There may no be wider impact). Yet it demonstrates the potential for these types of information operations to target legislators and politicians.

It is particularly worrying, says Lu, that these actors were able to game Twitter’s spam detection algorithm just by adding a number to their account names. “It's just yet another piece of evidence that Twitter isn't really doing enough to block logins from automated social accounts,” she says. “They’re currently blocking more than half a million accounts a day, last time I checked, but that clearly just a small fraction of all automated accounts.”

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The features through which these campaigns flourish – hashtags, mentions, retweets – are core, valuable features of Twitter’s ecosystem. Even though they may enable this kind of disinformation to spread, Twitter will be reluctant to make changes to these key features. “Twitter cannot change the definition of a hashtag without really irritating users and taking away the value of it in the first place,'' says Lu.

“The whole idea is that it should be open to anyone to make a hashtag – if users are forced to register to get some sort of permission from Twitter to make a new hashtag that defeats the entire purpose, and it will turn genuine users away.” It is likely that only concrete evidence that politicians were fooled by an astroturfing campaign, and that legislation was impacted, would be enough to spur Twitter to change, Lu says.

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