Friday, October 20, 2017
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Twitter influence operation experiment
Twitter was one of the vectors through which the Russian influence operates. My experiment is on how to sanitize it.
I started to more closely follow the 2016 elections in the late summer, and saw lots of interesting discussion about the candidates, and some certain amount of noise, for lack of a better term. There were an increasing number of accounts that made arrogant, inflammatory replies, and either refused to engage at all, or argued for a bit, then disappeared.
As the election neared, if felt like the volume of the noise kept increasing every day, and it was harder and harder to find signal. I had time to sort through it, but I imagine many or most did not, so real information was completely lost in the noise.
This experiment hopes to find a way to quiet the noise, and make twitter useful as a tool again. I will use the mute to remove these noisy accounts. My theory is that there is a limited number of accounts that create noise, and I can use mute to reduce the volume.
I initially tested the theory by adding all the muted accounts to a Twitter List, and occasionally looking at the list, and evaluate if it was pure noise. I found a contingent of accounts that hate being added to a list, and will block you immediately. This has the net effect of removing them from your public list. Didn't hurt the experiment, as either way, I was not seeing their posts. It does make lists less useful to pass the block list to others.
I start by using the Hamilton 68 dashboard http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/ and look at the trending hashtags. When one pops up that looks like an obvious influence operation, I look it up with Twitter search, and mute everyone using that hashtag.
The first one that I tried this with was #TotalNFLBlackout. This one was created as a result of Statements by the president regarding NFL players protesting prior to sporting events. I did not have to mute very many to make this Hashtag go silent. The next to go was #CrisisActors, created in the days after the mass murder in Las Vegas, and a much larger number of accounts got swept up in this one. Last I added #falseflag which also added a huge number.
My mute list now stands at 551 accounts. Twitter has millions, so I am not silencing many voices. So far, it has reduced the volume somewhat. Replies to relatively famous people on Twitter seem more calm, more signal, less noise.
I need a way to quantify this...
I started to more closely follow the 2016 elections in the late summer, and saw lots of interesting discussion about the candidates, and some certain amount of noise, for lack of a better term. There were an increasing number of accounts that made arrogant, inflammatory replies, and either refused to engage at all, or argued for a bit, then disappeared.
As the election neared, if felt like the volume of the noise kept increasing every day, and it was harder and harder to find signal. I had time to sort through it, but I imagine many or most did not, so real information was completely lost in the noise.
This experiment hopes to find a way to quiet the noise, and make twitter useful as a tool again. I will use the mute to remove these noisy accounts. My theory is that there is a limited number of accounts that create noise, and I can use mute to reduce the volume.
I initially tested the theory by adding all the muted accounts to a Twitter List, and occasionally looking at the list, and evaluate if it was pure noise. I found a contingent of accounts that hate being added to a list, and will block you immediately. This has the net effect of removing them from your public list. Didn't hurt the experiment, as either way, I was not seeing their posts. It does make lists less useful to pass the block list to others.
I start by using the Hamilton 68 dashboard http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/ and look at the trending hashtags. When one pops up that looks like an obvious influence operation, I look it up with Twitter search, and mute everyone using that hashtag.
The first one that I tried this with was #TotalNFLBlackout. This one was created as a result of Statements by the president regarding NFL players protesting prior to sporting events. I did not have to mute very many to make this Hashtag go silent. The next to go was #CrisisActors, created in the days after the mass murder in Las Vegas, and a much larger number of accounts got swept up in this one. Last I added #falseflag which also added a huge number.
My mute list now stands at 551 accounts. Twitter has millions, so I am not silencing many voices. So far, it has reduced the volume somewhat. Replies to relatively famous people on Twitter seem more calm, more signal, less noise.
I need a way to quantify this...
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