As part of my research for The Voting Wars, I have been reading a great deal of computer science and related research on Twitter and politics. Some of the most interesting work is coming out of Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing.

The research on astrotweeting, though too tangential to my book, is worth flagging for readers. In this paper, the authors describe how political operatives set up fake accounts to spread rumors or false statements about candidates. This is done in a way to make it appear as though the information is coming from numerous sources, to convey the impression that the information is reliable. Here is a description of one such effort the researchers uncovered:

How Chris Coons budget works- uses tax $ 2 attend dinners and fashion shows

This is one of a set of truthy memes smearing Chris Coons, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Delaware. Looking at the injection points of these memes, we uncovered a network of about ten bot accounts. They inject thousands of tweets with links to posts from the freedomist.com Web site. To avoid detection by Twitter and increase visibility to different users, duplicate tweets are disguised by adding different hashtags and appending junk query parameters to the URLs. This works because many URL-shortening services ignore querystrings when processing redirect requests. To generate retweeting cascades, the bots also coordinate mentioning a few popular users. These targets get the appearance of receiving the same news from several different people, and are more likely to think it is true, and spread it to their followers. Most of the bot accounts in this network can be traced back to a single person who runs the freedomist.com Web site. The diffusion network corresponding to this case is illustrated in Figure 7(D).

Here is the abstract for the paper: