New Delhi: Fake and automated Twitter accounts were deployed on a large scale to boost hashtags both in support of and in opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited Tamil Nadu in February, according to new research put out by the US-based Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).
According to the report, bot accounts were used on February 9-10 to boost two Tamil Nadu-related hashtags with “small groups of accounts pushing out thousands of posts an hour”.
DFRLab, which has worked with Facebook in the past, examined traffic on the hashtags #TNwelcomesModi (Tamil Nadu welcomes Modi) and #GoBackModi.
“While bots were used on both sides… the pro-Modi traffic was far more heavily manipulated than the anti-Modi traffic and, indeed, far more heavily manipulated than any large-scale traffic flow the DFRLab has analyzed as of yet. Conversely, while the scale of the activity was vast, its impact was rather muted given the relatively low number of followers of the accounts,” the research report notes.
“The massive scale of the attempted manipulation nevertheless bodes ill for the quality of online debate in India as the election approaches.”
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According to DFRLab, #TNwelcomesModi was mentioned over 777,000 times in two days.
The 48,727 tweets selected for the organisation’s analysis received a CTM (coefficient of traffic manipulation) score of ‘123.98’, indicating that it was very heavily manipulated by a very small group.
The research notes that the CTM method, first published by the University of Oxford’s computational propaganda project, assigns each traffic flow a score that is based on how much it appears to have been gamed. Generally-speaking, organic and non-manipulated traffic scores a CTM of 12 or lower. Grossly manipulated traffic, often boosted by either automated bots or “coordinated human users” scores up to 60.
DFRLab’s conclusions on #TNwelcomesModi indicates that “almost two-thirds of the posts” that started the hashtag and pushed it to trending levels came from just 50 accounts.
“This was an attempt at manipulation on an industrial scale, using a small number of hyper-tweeting bots to give the hashtag a massive boost,” the report notes.
Anti-Modi hashtags also boosted
The other hashtag analysed by DFRLab, #GoBackModi, was also driven by automated accounts, with bots pushing out messages that supported the Congress party’s narrative.
The 49,538 tweets analysed by the research study returned a CTM score of 46.81, far above the usual range for organic traffic, but still much less in comparison to the pro-Modi efforts.
“Just like #TNwelcomesModi, #GoBackModi was heavily pushed by a small number of high-volume accounts that posted hundreds of times an hour,” DFRlab notes.
“Overall, the nearly 50,000 tweets in the #TNwelcomesModi scan were posted by just 891 accounts, while the nearly 50,000 tweets in the #GoBackModi scan were posted by 7,394 accounts. By any measure, #TNwelcomesModi saw a much more aggressive attempt to make the hashtag trend from a much smaller user base.”