By Georgia Wells and Robert McMillan
The openness and anonymity of Twitter Inc. that rocketed the
short-messaging service to global fame are now landing it in
trouble.
As Congress and others scrutinize Russia's alleged use of social
media to influence the U.S. presidential election, one focal point
is the prevalence on Twitter of bots, or automated accounts, that
can be used to disseminate manipulative information.
Twitter doesn't require its users to provide identifying
information, such as a name, mobile number or birthday, when
setting up accounts. And Twitter makes it easy for third-party
software to interact with its platform, enabling bots. Researchers
say malicious actors exploit that anonymity to create legions of
bots and flood the platform with an identical hashtag, or retweet
of a post, which can artificially boost the popularity of a
topic.
In presentations on Thursday to congressional investigators
probing alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. election, Twitter said
that bots distributed misleading content about how to vote and
attempted to influence the lists of trending topics to make certain
ideas appear more popular. Russia has denied meddling in the
election.
Nearly all of the 201 accounts Twitter found that were linked to
Russian actors recently identified by Facebook Inc. were bots,
according to a person close to the matter. Facebook said the
accounts ran ads on its platform meant to sow political and social
division during the election.
But the problem of hidden influence on Twitter is much greater
than what the company identified last week, academics say. About
19% of the messages viewed by Twitter users during the last month
of the presidential campaign were generated by bots, according to a
research paper by Emilio Ferrara, an assistant research professor
with the University of Southern California. There were 400,000 bots
sending political messages during the 2016 presidential election,
Mr. Ferrara added.
Twitter says that some bots can be a problem. Since June,
Twitter has detected an average of 130,000 accounts a day
attempting to manipulate trending topics, and the company says it
has taken steps to prevent the impact by identifying and suspending
them. Twitter estimates that spam accounts represent fewer than 5%
of its 328 million monthly users. Sam Woolley, a University of
Oxford research associate who studies the role of political bots on
social media, says that the number could be as high as 20%.
Researchers say Twitter doesn't catch all perpetrators. On
Election Day, for example, suspected Russian bots caused the
hashtag #HillaryDown to trend, and a group of Twitter bots posted
the hashtag #WarAgainstDemocrats more than 1,700 times, says
cybersecurity firm FireEye.
Twitter says researchers "systematically under-represent our
enforcement actions" and don't take into account ways that Twitter
limits "the visibility of low-quality content."
Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and the vice chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized Twitter for only
presenting a small set of accounts with Russian links and said
Twitter hadn't done enough to examine the extent of Russian
activity on its platform. Twitter said Russia and other former
Soviet countries have been the source of automated and spam
accounts for many years.
Twitter isn't the only social network contaminated by bots.
Facebook is home to bots posing as people's friends, and automated
accounts on Reddit vote up posts to make them seem more
popular.
Twitter encourages its users to build software that
automatically broadcast information and send replies on the
platform, such as weather data and RSS feeds. Companies such as
news organizations including The Wall Street Journal sometimes use
bots on Twitter to post headlines, and organizations and
individuals create bots to offer helpful information, such as
earthquake activity in the San Francisco area.
But the abuse wrought on the social network by the malicious
accounts is a problem that the company is only beginning to
understand, according to sources familiar with the company.
"We've been fighting against these issues for years, and as long
as there are people trying to manipulate Twitter, we will be
working hard to stop them," Twitter said in a statement on
Thursday.
In many ways Twitter has built the perfect tool for the kind of
"influence operations," allegedly directed at U.S. voters during
the 2016 election, said Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies
at Johns Hopkins University.
"You have a platform that allows you to create completely
machine-run automated accounts and let them pretend to be actual
human beings," said Mr. Rid. "And at the same time you have all of
the opinion makers and opinion leaders -- the most important target
audience -- on the same platform."
The U.S. isn't the only target in these campaigns. In a study of
Russian accounts tweeting frequently about politics in 2014 and
2015 -- when Russia's clash with Ukraine was the dominant news
story -- a "significant portion" of them were bots, according to
Professor Joshua Tucker and colleagues at the Social Media and
Political Participation lab at New York University.
The bots tweeted both in support of the Kremlin and Russian
opposition. Their findings are the subject of a coming paper in the
academic journal Big Data.
But Twitter says manipulative tweeting by humans is a new
problem. "We've identified new and emerging challenges dealing with
non-automated content -- i.e., human-directed accounts instead of
bots -- that coordinate their activities to spread information,"
Twitter said in its statement Thursday. It added that the human
spammers are harder to identify than bots.
Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com and Robert
McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 02, 2017 19:00 ET (23:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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