The Coalition’s Twitter fraud and deception
What lengths and extremes do you go to when you’ve got no real friends and supporters on social media? Torin Peel reports on the recent plague of Coalition Twitter bots.
COALITION has ramped up their campaign on Twitter, going as far as
buying hundreds of thousands of followers and spamming the social
network with the same messages.
My investigation discovered how it appeared the Coalition had so much
support on social media, and how they were getting their message out.
What I found was shocking, and shows how low they are willing to go to
look popular online.
Everybody knows the Coalition is not popular with young people and
the majority of their support base don’t use social media. This clearly
leaves Labor and the Greens to dominate the networks and makes it easier
for them to target supporters. That’s the reason why the Coalition has
had to go extreme measures to begin playing catch-up.
It all started on Facebook and Twitter a few weeks ago, when people
began to notice that the number of likes and followers on Tony Abbott’s
and the Coalition’s accounts began to jump up. Some even believe the
Liberal Party and their accounts gained more than 100,000 Facebook likes
in a single week.
Twitter users then reported being spammed through the social
networking, with users promoting the Coalition and the announcements
that Tony Abbott was making. It all seemed a bit strange, with multiple
accounts repeating the same message. Upon further analysis, I was able
to find that the accounts sending these messages weren’t even from
Australia.
The accounts being used on Twitter to make the Coalition look good
were based in the United States and Britain, where is rather unlikely
people have much interest in what Tony Abbott wants to do to Australia.
'Paid parental leave is a winner for Tony Abbott.'
~ San Jose Sharks PR (@hhMatthewwp) August 18, 2013
'Paid parental leave is a winner for Tony Abbott.'
~ Sarah Jorgensen (@SLJorgensen122_) August 18, 2013
Not surprisingly, the accounts in question were suspended by Twitter as a clear violation of their terms of use.
making these findings over a period of a week or two, I decided it
would be a good idea to audit the Twitter followers on the Coalition’s
Twitter accounts. This would give me an idea about how many of their
followers were real, inactive and actual people who use Twitter
regularly.
I wasn’t too surprised with the results. It’s sort of what I expected from the Liberals. The official Twitter account of the Liberal Party
had 33,000 followers at the time of my audit. I used multiple websites
to do checks and then worked out the average numbers from those
findings.
I am able to report that this account only has a 55% genuine following.
This means that more than 45% of their followers are inactive, or are
not real at all. They’re most likely robots, or fake Twitter accounts
created by computer. I then moved on to auditing the Opposition Leader
Tony Abbott’s account.
A scan of Abbott’s 203,000 followers revealed that 95% of his
followers were fake, 4% active and just 1% genuine. This is clearly much
worse than the following of the Liberal Party’s account. These results
are clearly much worse than anyone could have expected.
Next time you get a message from a Coalition supporter, it might pay
off to go a step further and click on their profile to see whether it’s
genuine. If the location is outside of Australia, this usually indicates
it is a robot or account that was paid to send messages. Robots usually
have no profile picture, page design or header photo.
If you’ve been invaded by robots, email me. I’d be thrilled to hear some your stories. You can also follow me on Twitter, where my handle is @torin.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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