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...
