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...