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Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world

Online political astroturfing—hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online—has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet’s promise to more...

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Autores principales: Schoch, David, Keller, Franziska B., Stier, Sebastian, Yang, JungHwan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8930979/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35301344
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-08404-9
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author Schoch, David
Keller, Franziska B.
Stier, Sebastian
Yang, JungHwan
author_facet Schoch, David
Keller, Franziska B.
Stier, Sebastian
Yang, JungHwan
author_sort Schoch, David
collection PubMed
description Online political astroturfing—hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online—has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet’s promise to more equitable participation in public debates. We argue that the logic of social behavior within the campaign bureaucracy and principal–agent problems lead to detectable activity patterns among the campaign’s social media accounts. Our analysis uses a network-based methodology to identify such coordination patterns in all campaigns contained in the largest publicly available database on astroturfing published by Twitter. On average, 74% of the involved accounts in each campaign engaged in a simple form of coordination that we call co-tweeting and co-retweeting. Comparing the astroturfing accounts to various systematically constructed comparison samples, we show that the same behavior is negligible among the accounts of regular users that the campaigns try to mimic. As its main substantive contribution, the paper demonstrates that online political astroturfing consistently leaves similar traces of coordination, even across diverse political and country contexts and different time periods. The presented methodology is a reliable first step for detecting astroturfing campaigns.
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spelling pubmed-89309792022-03-21 Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world Schoch, David Keller, Franziska B. Stier, Sebastian Yang, JungHwan Sci Rep Article Online political astroturfing—hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online—has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet’s promise to more equitable participation in public debates. We argue that the logic of social behavior within the campaign bureaucracy and principal–agent problems lead to detectable activity patterns among the campaign’s social media accounts. Our analysis uses a network-based methodology to identify such coordination patterns in all campaigns contained in the largest publicly available database on astroturfing published by Twitter. On average, 74% of the involved accounts in each campaign engaged in a simple form of coordination that we call co-tweeting and co-retweeting. Comparing the astroturfing accounts to various systematically constructed comparison samples, we show that the same behavior is negligible among the accounts of regular users that the campaigns try to mimic. As its main substantive contribution, the paper demonstrates that online political astroturfing consistently leaves similar traces of coordination, even across diverse political and country contexts and different time periods. The presented methodology is a reliable first step for detecting astroturfing campaigns. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-03-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8930979/ /pubmed/35301344 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-08404-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Schoch, David
Keller, Franziska B.
Stier, Sebastian
Yang, JungHwan
Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world
title Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world
title_full Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world
title_fullStr Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world
title_full_unstemmed Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world
title_short Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world
title_sort coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8930979/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35301344
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-08404-9
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