But even still, according to DFR Lab, tactics like this attempted Twitter manipulation may spell trouble for online debate in India. While the level of automation driving both hashtags was high, the impact they had was likely rather low, since the bot accounts had very few followers. This makes the latter hashtag “far more heavily manipulated than any large-scale traffic flow the DFRLab has analysed as of yet,” the report says. Both Indian hashtags studied here, however, scored far beyond that-with #GoBackModi at 47.05 and #TNwelcomesModi at a staggering 123.98.

CTM, the theory of which was first published in an Oxford Internet Institute paper by DFR Lab senior fellow Ben Nimmo, is calculated using a formula that takes into account the percentage of traffic from retweets, percentage from the 50 most active accounts, and the average number of posts per user.Ī CTM value of less than 12 is generally common for non-manipulated traffic. “Overall, however, the scan of #GoBackModi revealed a larger number of lower-activity accounts.” A shattered recordĭFR Lab uses a metric called “coefficient of traffic manipulation” (CTM) to quantify how manipulated a hashtag is.

Like the above account, many of the ones pushing #GoBackModi “were even more prolific than their pro-BJP rivals,” DFR Lab says. The account contains many hallmarks of bots: it uses the photo of a famous person as its profile picture, it has very few followers, and its account was created quite soon before it began promoting a particular hashtag. This account, and the others amplifying the #TNwelcomesModi hashtag, have since been suspended. One such bot account, with the handle for example, was created a few days prior to the TN visit, and tweeted around once every 17 seconds. The analysis revealed that the hashtag was “heavily manipulated by a very small group”-over 60% of its traffic was contributed by the 50 most active accounts. DFR Lab analysed almost 50,000 of these tweets, which covered a span of almost eight hours of traffic. #TNwelcomesModi was mentioned over 777,000 times over both days, during which it trended in India.

The bots, tweeting to herald Modi’s visit to the state, attempted to manipulate traffic on Feb. “TN” in the latter stands for Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, in which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) does not have a particularly strong base. The two hashtags were #GoBackModi and #TNwelcomesModi.

Pro bot vote