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Politico: How Twitter Bots and Trump Fans Made #ReleaseTheMemo Go Viral
Saw this thanks to two tweets from John Schindler, who wrote "READ THIS NOW" in the first one:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/04/trump-twitter-russians-release-the-memo-216935
Use any basic analytical software to scroll through the early promoters of #releasethememo, and you’ll see most of the accounts meet basic criteria for bot/troll/cyborg suspicion — what the Atlantic Council’s open-source intelligence research group DFRLab describes as “activity, amplification, and anonymity.” There is also a consistent theme in the list of identities — the repetition of certain words (deplorable, Texas, mom, veteran) and certain first names; use of an American flag emoji at the end of the name; specific numbers or patterns of numerical sequences associated with bots; names changed to hashtags, or frequently shifted between trending right-media topics (Benghazi, NFL boycott, the memo, the emails); photos that aren’t faces, or not unobscured faces, or certainly not of them if they are.
There is little chance an organic or incidental community, even of friends or acquaintances, would look this way online so holistically, tweeting together in such tight intervals. Several of the accounts involved in the initial promotion of this hashtag have subsequently been restricted or suspended by Twitter. Online data analysts said many accounts used to promote the hashtag were recently created, with more being created and disappearing after the hashtag appeared. Thousands still had the default profile photos. CNN’s analysis found that hundreds of accounts created after the hashtag first appeared were fueling the viral trend.
Cross reference this analysis and inputs from things like the Hamilton68 dashboard, and you can see #releasethememo is carried forward by automated accounts overnight after it begins to trend. It continued to do so from its appearance until the memo was released. The volume and noise matter — and so does the targeting.
A key function of the accounts discussed above is that they tweet at key influencers with these messaging campaigns — media personalities, far-right brand names, and elected officials who might pick up the info or hashtag and legitimize it by repeating it. The accounts tweeting #releasethememo immediately began to target the president (not an unusual occurrence), but also the Trumpiest of congressmen — Steve King, Matt Gaetz, Lee Zeldin, Trey Gowdy, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, etc .— as well as alt- and far-right influencers and media personalities. A few active verified accounts, including @KamVTV — an account that often appears as the first verified amplifier of bot and far-right content — and @scottpresler, picked up the hashtag, and others retweeted tweets sent to them from sketchy accounts (@saracarterDC of Fox News, for example, RTed an account that is a month old and has already tweeted 1,200 times, including posting content from (other) bots and fake profiles).
-snip-
Verified alt- or far-right personalities — @gatewaypundit, @jacobawohl, @scottpresler, among others — began using the hashtag, in particular tagging Matt Gaetz. At 9:53 p.m. WikiLeaks tweeted #releasethememo. Before midnight, Steve King, Mark Meadows and Matt Gaetz had all tweeted #releasethememo; so had Laura Ingraham, a massively influential conservative media personality with 2 million followers. Each time an influential verified account used the hashtag, it was rapidly promoted by a vast network of accounts. From its appearance until midnight, #releasethememo was used more than 670,000 times.
By midnight, the hashtag was being used 250,000 times per hour. At 2:53 a m. on Jan 19, the pro-Trump conservative personality Bill Mitchell was posting an article from Breitbart about how #releasethememo was trending online. The hashtag had become the organizing framework for multiple stories and lanes of activity, focusing them into one column, which got a big boost from right-stream media and twitter personalities.
Some, like Breitbart, would argue this volume is representative of the outpouring of grassroots support for the topic. But compare this time period to other recent significant events. During a similar duration of time covering the Women’s March on January 20 — when more than a million marchers were estimated to be involved in demonstrations across the country — there was a total volume of about 606,000 tweets using the #womensmarch2018 hashtag during its peak (being used at a pace of 87,000 times per hour). During the NFL playoff game the next day (#jaxvsNE), there was a volume of 253,000 tweets, with a top speed of about 75,000 tweets/hour.
The pace and scale of the appearance and amplification of #releasethememo is barely even comparable. This is because the hashtag benefited from computational promotion already built into the system. It was used to target lawmakers who would play a role in releasing the memo — lawmakers who argued that there was public pressure to release the memo. Up until the time of the vote, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee were collectively targeted with #releasethememo messages over 217,000 times. Raul Labrador, Lee Zeldin, Steve King, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz — all of whom promoted #releasethememo to the public and their colleagues — were targeted more than 550,000 times in 11 days. By the time Speaker of the House Paul Ryan spoke in favor of releasing the memo, he had been targeted with more than 225,000 messages about it.
-snip-
A recent analysis from DFRLab mapped out how modern Russian propaganda is highly effective because so many diverse messaging elements are so highly integrated. Far-right elements in the United States have learned to emulate this strategy, and have used it effectively with their own computational propaganda tactics — as demonstrated by the “Twitter rooms” and documented alt-right bot-nets pushing a pro-Trump narrative.
This gets at a deeper issue: the problem with the term “fake news” is that it is completely wrong, denoting a passive intention. What is happening on social media is very real; it is not passive; and it is information warfare. There is very little argument amongst analytical academics about the overall impact of “political bots” that seek to influence how we think, evaluate and make decisions about the direction of our countries and who can best lead us — even if there is still difficulty in distinguishing whose disinformation is whose. Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher with Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Research Project who has helped to document the impact of ‘polbot’ activity, told me: “Often, it’s hard to tell where a particular story comes from. Alt-right groups and Russian disinformation campaigns are often indistinguishable since their goals often overlap. But what really matters is the tools that these groups use to achieve their goals: Computational Propaganda serves to distort the political process and amplify fringe views in ways that no previous communication technology could.”
-snip-
There is little chance an organic or incidental community, even of friends or acquaintances, would look this way online so holistically, tweeting together in such tight intervals. Several of the accounts involved in the initial promotion of this hashtag have subsequently been restricted or suspended by Twitter. Online data analysts said many accounts used to promote the hashtag were recently created, with more being created and disappearing after the hashtag appeared. Thousands still had the default profile photos. CNN’s analysis found that hundreds of accounts created after the hashtag first appeared were fueling the viral trend.
Cross reference this analysis and inputs from things like the Hamilton68 dashboard, and you can see #releasethememo is carried forward by automated accounts overnight after it begins to trend. It continued to do so from its appearance until the memo was released. The volume and noise matter — and so does the targeting.
A key function of the accounts discussed above is that they tweet at key influencers with these messaging campaigns — media personalities, far-right brand names, and elected officials who might pick up the info or hashtag and legitimize it by repeating it. The accounts tweeting #releasethememo immediately began to target the president (not an unusual occurrence), but also the Trumpiest of congressmen — Steve King, Matt Gaetz, Lee Zeldin, Trey Gowdy, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, etc .— as well as alt- and far-right influencers and media personalities. A few active verified accounts, including @KamVTV — an account that often appears as the first verified amplifier of bot and far-right content — and @scottpresler, picked up the hashtag, and others retweeted tweets sent to them from sketchy accounts (@saracarterDC of Fox News, for example, RTed an account that is a month old and has already tweeted 1,200 times, including posting content from (other) bots and fake profiles).
-snip-
Verified alt- or far-right personalities — @gatewaypundit, @jacobawohl, @scottpresler, among others — began using the hashtag, in particular tagging Matt Gaetz. At 9:53 p.m. WikiLeaks tweeted #releasethememo. Before midnight, Steve King, Mark Meadows and Matt Gaetz had all tweeted #releasethememo; so had Laura Ingraham, a massively influential conservative media personality with 2 million followers. Each time an influential verified account used the hashtag, it was rapidly promoted by a vast network of accounts. From its appearance until midnight, #releasethememo was used more than 670,000 times.
By midnight, the hashtag was being used 250,000 times per hour. At 2:53 a m. on Jan 19, the pro-Trump conservative personality Bill Mitchell was posting an article from Breitbart about how #releasethememo was trending online. The hashtag had become the organizing framework for multiple stories and lanes of activity, focusing them into one column, which got a big boost from right-stream media and twitter personalities.
Some, like Breitbart, would argue this volume is representative of the outpouring of grassroots support for the topic. But compare this time period to other recent significant events. During a similar duration of time covering the Women’s March on January 20 — when more than a million marchers were estimated to be involved in demonstrations across the country — there was a total volume of about 606,000 tweets using the #womensmarch2018 hashtag during its peak (being used at a pace of 87,000 times per hour). During the NFL playoff game the next day (#jaxvsNE), there was a volume of 253,000 tweets, with a top speed of about 75,000 tweets/hour.
The pace and scale of the appearance and amplification of #releasethememo is barely even comparable. This is because the hashtag benefited from computational promotion already built into the system. It was used to target lawmakers who would play a role in releasing the memo — lawmakers who argued that there was public pressure to release the memo. Up until the time of the vote, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee were collectively targeted with #releasethememo messages over 217,000 times. Raul Labrador, Lee Zeldin, Steve King, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz — all of whom promoted #releasethememo to the public and their colleagues — were targeted more than 550,000 times in 11 days. By the time Speaker of the House Paul Ryan spoke in favor of releasing the memo, he had been targeted with more than 225,000 messages about it.
-snip-
A recent analysis from DFRLab mapped out how modern Russian propaganda is highly effective because so many diverse messaging elements are so highly integrated. Far-right elements in the United States have learned to emulate this strategy, and have used it effectively with their own computational propaganda tactics — as demonstrated by the “Twitter rooms” and documented alt-right bot-nets pushing a pro-Trump narrative.
This gets at a deeper issue: the problem with the term “fake news” is that it is completely wrong, denoting a passive intention. What is happening on social media is very real; it is not passive; and it is information warfare. There is very little argument amongst analytical academics about the overall impact of “political bots” that seek to influence how we think, evaluate and make decisions about the direction of our countries and who can best lead us — even if there is still difficulty in distinguishing whose disinformation is whose. Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher with Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Research Project who has helped to document the impact of ‘polbot’ activity, told me: “Often, it’s hard to tell where a particular story comes from. Alt-right groups and Russian disinformation campaigns are often indistinguishable since their goals often overlap. But what really matters is the tools that these groups use to achieve their goals: Computational Propaganda serves to distort the political process and amplify fringe views in ways that no previous communication technology could.”
-snip-
Emphasis added.
Molly McKew's long Twitter thread on her very long Politico article starts here:
Link to tweet
You'll have to click on that to see the full thread of more than 20 tweets.
2 replies
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