/r/Against_Astroturfing
Against Astroturfing and Social Media Manipulation
At what point do we
Start wondering about vote
Manipulation?
- GregariousWolf
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message (e.g. political, commercial, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from grassroots participants. It is intended to give messages or organizations popular credibility by withholding information about source connections. The term is derived from AstroTurf (a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass) as a play on the word "grassroots" first made by U.S. Senator Lloyd Benson in the 1980s.
Media manipulation is a series of related techniques in which partisans create an image that favors their particular interests. Such tactics may include the use of logical fallacies, psychological manipulation, outright deception, rhetorical and propaganda techniques, and often involve the suppression of information or points of view by crowding them out, inducing people to stop listening, or simply diverting attention elsewhere.
State- and non-state actors, local and foreign governments, political parties, private organizations, and even individuals with adequate resources can obtain the operational capabilities and technical tools to construct misinformation campaigns and deploy armies of social bots to affect the directions of online conversations.
This subreddit attempts to explore the issue in a non-partisan way, though that may be impossible. The practice has spread to every social media platform in every country, so partisan finger-pointing takes a back seat to the technology and social psychology. And while fingers may be pointed as individual examples are identified, it must be understood that the problem is deeply complex and in general there is no simple set of rules to assess whether an account is human or a bot.
Reports on Digital Media
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018
An Analysis of Automated Accounts and the Links They Share
A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation
Small Share of U.S. Adults Produce Majority of Tweets
Programming Reference Material
MySQL Connector/Python Developer Guide
Social Media Reference Material
PRAW: The Python Reddit API Wrapper
Getting Started - Twitter Developers
Getting Started - YouTube Developers
Tutorials
Using BigQuery with Reddit Data
Google BigQuery quickstart Using the Web UI
Google Cloud storage quickstart
3rd Party Reddit Analytics
SnoopSnoo (dead)
NotReddit.top (dead)
3rd Party Twitter Analytics
University of Missouri Botrnot
Programming Subreddits
/r/SpamBotDetection (dead)
Political Subreddits
/r/ActiveMeasures (focus on Russia)
/r/TheRecordCorrected (focus on David Brock)
/r/TheoryOfReddit (focus on navels)
/r/sockpuppetry (dead, but good stuff from a couple of years ago)
/r/newaccountsinpolitics (dead)
/r/SubredditAnalysis (dead)
Background Posts
The Astroturfing Information Megathread
Sockpuppet posting activity visualized
Visualization: a scripted reddit account
Visualization of possible sockpuppet ring
Gaming the front page using moderator power illustrated
An experimental tool for tracking subreddits presented
Data Visualization Experiments
An illustration of "position manipulation"
Viz: Animation of position manipulation
A week in the life of a manipulated subreddit
A week in the life of (what I think is) a non-manipulated subreddit
Viz: Distribution of thread scores for subreddit marchagainsttrump
Viz: Animation of distributions of scores for MarchAgainstTrump
Viz: An example of astroturfed twitter follower growth
Viz: An example of organic twitter follower growth
Viz: Composite number of comments for Clinton and Trump
Viz: scores over time with highlight for gilded submissions for MarchAgainstTrump
Viz: Time maps for discrete Reddit events
Viz: Time map of Lemon_Lyman_ last 1000 submissions
Viz: Subreddits near The_Donald
Viz: Two degrees of separation from Lemon_Lyman_
Viz: The current group of suspicious accounts in r-politics
Viz: There may be some funny business going on in r/ourpresident
20% of Reddit users (that leave comments) are responsible for 80% of all Reddit comments.
/r/Against_Astroturfing
2,075 Subscribers
Is this astroturfing?
This looks like astroturfing, is this astroturfing?
11:45 UTC
02:25 UTC
Posting here to show activity so the sub doesn't get redditrequested
It's an election year. I wasn't active here for the last cycle. Everybody had things going on. Astroturf hasn't gone away. Recently I read an article about superpacs paying influencers. I'm not going to point fingers at anyone but I'll say I find it eminently plausible.
Haven't done much programming lately. I did have ChatGPT help me write a trivial OpenGL program. Large language models and diffusion imagery are fun and I'd like to learn more about them. AI has come a long way since thispersondoesnotexist.com.
14:46 UTC
TROLLMAGNIFIER: Detecting State-Sponsored Troll Accounts on Reddit?
03:29 UTC
what an astroturfing account looks like
20:00 UTC
The playbook of media manipulators
Thought this community might be interested in the following work explaining why various manipulation tactics work.
Source: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/disparage-disorient-dispute
19:54 UTC
Discovered what appears to be an inactive group of bots on Twitter. Anyone doing active research or hunting?
I don't want to give it away just yet, but there's a bunch (hundreds) of accounts that seem real, but post benign, almost nonsensical content. They all appear to share similar political leanings, and as of Jul 1, they're leaving comments on particular seemingly unrelated stories all using the same unrelated phrases. It's WEIRD!
I'd love to work with someone who already has analysis tools to pick this thing apart.
11:04 UTC
How is the European Union countering Russian disinformation? (Zoom)
09:16 UTC
r/MurderedByAOC and LRLOurPresident are back with more Pro-Russia, Anti-Ukraine propaganda
16:30 UTC
Do admins plan to take action against subs that are spreading pro russia propaganda (and or mods of those subs?)
13:33 UTC