And Twitter users believed….
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Twitter Election Bots Hide Tons of Reply Spam Behind Boring Themed Accounts
Motherboard: A much-discussed research paper out of Oxford this month concluded that millions of tweets about the presidential election are generated by highly automated Twitter accounts. According to the authors’ analysis, about a third of pro-Trump traffic, and one fifth of pro-Clinton tweets, is “driven by bots and highly automated accounts.”
The Oxford study pegged Twitter accounts as highly automated if they posted at least 50 times a day using any one of a group of election hashtags—such as #MAGA, #TrumpTrain, #ImWithHer, and #StrongerTogether—over a three-day period.
The paper conceded that “extremely active” humans might post 50 or more times per day on one of the 52 hashtags they selected, “especially if they are simply retweeting the content they find in their social media feed.”
At the Electome, a project of the Media Lab at MIT, we use complex machine learning algorithms to analyze the election conversation on Twitter. The Oxford paper made us curious about the possibility of spotting bots in the dashboard we recently built for journalists covering the election.
Read more: How Mexican Twitter Bots Shut Down Dissent
Bot detection can be challenging, partly because they come in different varieties. Some are purely automated accounts, while others layer some manual curation on top of automated tweets.
Last week, we noticed a spike while searching our Twitter data on the keyword “rigged.”
In early September, the “rigged” discussion on Twitter, which previously had revolved around a variety of issues including economic inequality and the electoral process, shifted suddenly toward immigration—that is, tweets containing the word “rigged” also used terms connected to immigration.
Digging into the data, we found one verbatim tweet showing up across a dozen or so handles, each of which posted the same message over and over each day: “Immigration Policy is RIGGED against American Workers #Trump2016 #FeelTheBern.”
Beyond using identical phrasing—including idiosyncratic capitalization—the tweets coming from these accounts all linked to the same video, which compares statements by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders about immigration policy. Each video, in turn, linked to the same anti-Clinton Twitter account.
Although the accounts don’t have the telltale bot profile image—the egg—based on their characteristics and activity, including breakneck output of strikingly similar content, these are clearly spam handles, and apparently at least somewhat automated.
Wading in further, we found that each account puts out a stream of photos and GIFs on a given theme, on top of a common rotation of anti-Clinton videos and memes.
The bots follow the same playbook: Publicly they tweet the same innocuous content fitting their theme, while simultaneously flooding the replies of public figures and media outlets—essentially piggybacking on famous tweets to influence users who see those tweets’ replies—with campaign-driven videos and memes.
One apparent bot account has pumped out more than 27,000 tweets since its creation in March, with content that tends to mix videos of Clinton advisor John Podesta with memes from the 1970s film A Clockwork Orange:
TheTweetest @TheTweetest
#debatenight you found out…
Hillary killed Osama bin Laden
..WITH HER EYES
@TheTweetest #Podesta Lobbying Firm campaign manager to #Hillary and defender of #ACORN sex scandal pic.twitter.com/eBcPMRK9L9
— Viddy Well (@Hi_Hi_Hi_There) October 24, 2016
A zombie-themed account boasts 30,000 tweets since April: Podesta mingled with the undead:
Then there’s the seeming food porn handle that has put out 21,000 tweets since March: Podesta plus photogenic snacks:
In the last few days, these three accounts have tweeted thousands of times, sometimes hundreds of posts in a single hour. Most went entirely dark on October 30, for some reason, then geared up early on October 31 to put out hundreds more by noon.
Other apparently automated accounts pay homage to burgers, the Doge meme, geese, Hydrox cookies, knights, pigs, pulp science fiction, Putin, trains, and Transformers. They vary in frequency of activity, but each circulates the same videos with identical accompanying text.
Spambots like these have been spotted at other points in this election. In April, a conservative activist noticed a few hundred accounts frantically tweeting an identical call to file federal complaints against Ted Cruz for robocalls.
In June, a reporter for New York magazine mined the feeds of three pro-Trump, alt-right accounts, noting that they consistently replied to Trump’s tweets within mere seconds and with memes attached. Like the accounts we’ve identified here, many of their replies lacked any connection to the subject of Trump’s original tweet.
Last week, one of those three accounts circulated a hoax image of immigration officers arresting Hispanic voters, according to ProPublica’s Electionland.
Difficult as it is to track down accounts like these or gauge their prevalence, it’s even harder to discern how they might affect the overall Twitter discussion about the election. Whether or not the Oxford analysis proves accurate, its authors performed a service merely by raising public awareness of election bots. More here including additional tweets.
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Then there was that weird FBI release on Twitter:
FBI to Conduct Internal Probe of Election-Season Tweets
GovernmentExec: Suddenly renewed activity on an FBI Twitter account publicizing Freedom of Information Act releases has prompted an internal bureau review of the propriety of such activity so close to the Nov. 8 election, according to a source involved in the matter.
In emails obtained by Government Executive sent to an ex-investigative reporter who filed complaints, the deputy at the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility on Tuesday revealed that the complaint about possible political favoritism in tweeting has been referred to the FBI’s Inspection Division.
“Upon the completion of its investigation, the matter will be referred to my office for adjudication,” wrote Candice Will, assistant director of the Office of Professional Responsibility to Jonathan Hutson, a former investigative reporter and now a media consultant. He received a similar email from Nancy McNamara, assistant director of the FBI’s Inspection Division, with two more FBI employees copied.
An FBI official told Government Executive that on Oct. 30, electronic patches were sent through the FBI’s content management system to fix the automatic feed of information that goes through the FOIA Twitter account.
First reported on Thursday by the liberal-leaning news service Think Progress, the new probe comes days after questions were raised about the FBI FOIA office’s release on Monday of 129 pages of documents pertaining to the 2001-2005 investigation of President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose wife was a longtime Clinton donor.
That probe, led for a time by current FBI Director James Comey as a U.S. attorney, ended with no prosecutions, which is why the Hillary Clinton campaign immediately complained that its timing seemed questionable. “Absent a (Freedom of Information Act) deadline, this is odd,” Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted. “Will FBI be posting docs on Trumps’ housing discrimination in ‘70s?”
It also comes less than a week after Comey shook up the presidential race with his letter to lawmakers and FBI staff suggesting that newly uncovered emails in an unrelated probe might be “pertinent” to the bureau’s suspended investigation Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of State Department emails.
The FBI responded to this week’s complaints with a statement outlining its FOIA policies:
“The FBI’s Records Management Division receives thousands of FOIA requests annually which are processed on a first in, first out basis,” it said. “By law, FOIA materials that have been requested three or more times are posted electronically to the FBI’s public reading room shortly after they are processed. Per the standard procedure for FOIA, these materials became available for release and were posted automatically and electronically to the FBI’s public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures.”
But critics have now zeroed in on the bureau’s Twitter account at the FBI Records Vault. As noted by ex-investigative reporter Hutson, who first filed a complaint with the Justice Department inspector general, the FBI’s FOIA Twitter account had been silent for the past year. “For the first few years after its 2011 launch, most of its tweets produced only 10 re-tweets, the most being 122,” Hutson said. “But suddenly, at 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 30, it roared to life, not for business and not usual.”
The Tweet on Bill Clinton’s Marc Rich pardon, which was part of a probe on the Clinton Foundation, “was highly negative for Hillary Clinton” because it didn’t mention that no charges were brought, while another recent FBI tweet, announcing new documents pertaining to Republican candidate Donald Trump’s father’s past housing industry activities, favored Trump by “calling him a philanthropist,” which in Hutson’s view is “editorial shading.”
Also, Hutson said, “it is significant and telling” that the FBI FOIA people also recently tweeted the FBI’s ethics manual. “That shows they know full well that is it illegal for bureau employees to influence or effect the outcome of an election.” Hutson believes there may be violations of the Hatch Act, Justice Department guidelines and the FBI ethics manual. The FBI vault item on the Clinton Foundation, he pointed out, now has 9,000 re-tweets.
FOIA specialists consulted by Government Executive had mixed evaluations of this turn of events, both for the release of the FOIA documents and the related tweeting. “It’s nothing abnormal,” said Ronald Kessler, an author and longtime investigative journalist who has written on the FBI. “People don’t understand that it would be improper for the FBI to withhold a release of material to try to manipulate media coverage simply because agents happen to finish their work on it late Friday afternoon or just before an election. Like all of us humans, agents try to work extra hard to finish a project that is close to completion before a long weekend.”
Anne Weismann, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, said after all her years of sending FOIA requests to the FBI, she found it “astonishing” that the FBI is tweeting, saying it “adds to the unprecedented nature” of this fall’s FBI’s intervention in the presidential race. She also found it odd that the FBI released what appears to be a “first round, partial” file of documents in the Marc Rich case, “with no context.” “Unless you knew they were talking about a major, very serious investigation of a former president, you wouldn’t know that the FBI never prosecuted Clinton,” she said. “I’ve pushed the FBI in litigation for release of documents on a rolling basis, and they always say no.”
Alex Howard, a senior analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, said the FBI has some flexibility in releasing documents. “Agencies are mandated to acknowledge a FOIA request in 20 days, although many in practice do not. Unless an agency is under instruction by a judge to release records responsive to a FOIA lawsuit on a specified timeline or by a given deadline, however, agencies can have some discretion in when they disclose records to a requester, unless their FOIA regulations specify otherwise. The “first in, first out” standard is one such rule: some agencies have pending FOIA requests going back over a decade.”
Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress, said, “There’s not enough information to make a judgment, which is why we would welcome an independent investigation, but on its face it is unusual.”
