Shareblue Astroturf Analysis @likingonline

Suspiciously terrible yet seemingly popular takes If you have ever had the misfortune of arguing with @SallyAlbright under the assumption of good faith, you have probably been shocked at how inane some of her statements can be. Perhaps more shocking is the fact that there seems to be many people online that actually agree with her horrible tweets. Being inundated with notifications of strangers agreeing with bad tweets, rather than your good tweets, can be disorienting. Who would agree with and then retweet these horrible responses!? Why are all of these people camping out deep in the comments just to retweet bad replies? Well, turns out it’s just Sally. Her sockpuppet influence campaign has continued brazenly since it was exposed in late January. With over fifty fake accounts, she gaslights and supresses oposition while amplifying messages such as: free college is racist, Bernie Sanders is a Russian agent, Hillary Clinton is a superior private citizen (leave her alone), Russian bots gave us Trump, an old cop is defending democracy, and that political dynasties are good.

Report Outline In the following sections, I will attempt to lay out the following: Evidence of sockpuppet use And the connection with Shareblue Which voices are being amplified Verified and unverified accounts What messages are being pushed The extent of the astroturfing operation

Sockpuppet tech support The best evidence of Sally Albright using sockpuppets is the fact that she literally tweeted it out. In March of 2017, Sally was concerned over some changes to Twitter automation software called Buffer. In the process of troubleshooting the issue with Buffer support over Twitter, she tweeted a screenshot of the the Buffer browser extension. The screenshot clearly shows dozens of Twitter account avatars signed in to the service and ready to lay down astroturf. Buffer allows for creating groups of different accounts in order to schedule tweets (or retweets) for different purposes or communities. At the time of the screenshot, Sally had 24 accounts in a group called “Weird Twitter”, 25 in “Hillary”, 6 in “Group 1”, and 14 in “Tier 2”.

Connection to Shareblue In the above screenshot, avatars of three dozen accounts are clearly visible. Six of the avatars were easily recognizable and matched photos from accounts that commonly retweeted Sally. Importantly, all of these accounts were tweeting links to Shareblue.com multiple times per day in late January, 2018. The screenshot of account avatars, the Shareblue articles shared via Buffer, and the fact that the official @Shareblue account also uses Buffer, offer circumstantial evidence that Sally’s sockpuppet army is either working with or adjacent to Shareblue. Shareblue has a reputation for not disclosing its employees, so there is little chance that they would admit to their involvement in this astroturf campaign. The tweets in the above image can be found in this collection. In general, tweets sent with Buffer can be searched for on Twitter by including ‘source:buffer’ along with the desired query. To find the Shareblue tweets sent from Buffer, search: shareblue source:buffer. In the event that tweets are deleted, they have been archived here: SallyAlbright tweeting to Buffer support

Buffer responding to SallyAlbright

Shareblue tweets from sockpuppet accounts

Method Tweets from 64 suspected sockpuppet accounts were collected using the rtweet package for R. Up to 3200 tweets (includeing retweets and replies) were gathered from each target account. The total number of tweets collected was 194377. Data regarding the clients used and individual sockpuppet accounts can be found at the end of the report.

Which accounts are being amplified? Unsurprisingly, Sally Albright was the most retweeted account overall. She retweeted herself 30939 times from 63 unique sockpuppet accounts. This amounted to 15.6% of the 190k total tweets collected. In the first six weeks of 2018, she managed to retweet herself an average of 559 times per day. Verified Accounts Eric Garland was the second most retweeted account overall, with 2678 retweets originating from 59 unique sockpuppet accounts. Eric Boehlert was the most retweeted Shareblue employee, with 1883 retweets originating from 60 unique accounts. The wordcloud below shows the 100 most frequently retweeted verified accounts. Font size of each screen name corresponds to the number of retweets received relative to other verified accounts. In addition to actively amplifying conspiracy theorist Eric Garland, “the Breitbart of the left” also engages in artificially inflating it’s percieved reach and authority by retweeting it’s own writers. Unverified Accounts In the following analysis, @SallyAlbright’s massive number of self-retweets were omitted for ease of visual interpretation.

Clients Used About 95% of the tweets collected were made using Buffer automation software. The next most common clients were RoundTeam (7k tweets), Web Client (800 tweets) and Hootsuite (400 tweets). RoundTeam and Hootsuite are other types of Twitter automation software. About 95% of the tweets collected were made using Buffer automation software. The next most common clients were RoundTeam (7k tweets), Web Client (800 tweets) and Hootsuite (400 tweets). RoundTeam and Hootsuite are other types of Twitter automation software.