Political Astroturfing on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation Campaign

“…level have become more influential, political actors such as governments (King, Pan, & Roberts, 2017; Lukito et al., 2018), hyperpartisan media (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Faris et al., 2017), far-right groups (Marwick & Lewis, 2017) or actors with economic motives (Silverman & Alexander, 2016)…”

“…a “social movement grows when people with grievances meet, agree on a common agenda, and organize for political action” (Howard, 2006, p. 86; see also Bennett & Segerberg, 2013), an astroturfing campaign tries to appear like such an organic expression of public opinion, but is actually centrally…”

“, they tweet on the same days – and groups them together (Hartigan, 1972).”

“Tweets posted by known and suspect NIS accounts should reflect these goals and strategies, and therefore differ significantly from those posted by regular users, political users, and opinion leaders (Broniatowski et al., 2018).”

“In order to prevent this type of shirking, the principal may opt for constant and direct supervision by physically locating all agents in the same office – as done by the “Russian troll factories”(3) – or at least hire them to work during office hours instead of paying by post, as the eponymous “50 cent party” alleged…”

“Social media also have the potential to set the news agenda (Chadwick, 2013; Neuman, Guggenheim, Jang, & Bae, 2014) as journalists pay close attention to social media buzz (Lukito et al.”

“To better understand how the patterns of the two types of campaigns should differ, we turn to principal-agent theory (Miller, 2005; Ross, 1973).”

“…governments (King, Pan, & Roberts, 2017; Lukito et al., 2018), hyperpartisan media (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Faris et al., 2017), far-right groups (Marwick & Lewis, 2017) or actors with economic motives (Silverman & Alexander, 2016) try to influence the public with false, misleading or…”

“Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become major venues for ordinary citizens to discuss politics, disseminate news, and organize collective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Lilleker & Koc-Michalska, 2017; Stier et al., 2018; Thorson & Wells, 2016; Vaccari, 2017).”

“Retweeting is often used to amplify the impact of a campaign (Yang & Kim, 2017), and retweet patterns usually reflect political divisions among Twitter users (Conover et al., 2011).”

“We argue that past research’s predominant focus on automated accounts, famously known as “social bots”, (see Howard & Kollanyi, 2016; Varol, Ferrara, Davis, Menczer, & Flammini, 2017) misses its target since reports on recent astroturfing campaigns suggest that they are often at least partially run…”

“Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become major venues for ordinary citizens to discuss politics, disseminate news, and organize collective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Lilleker & Koc-Michalska, 2017; Stier et al., 2018; Thorson & Wells, 2016; Vaccari, 2017).”

“The increasing roles of opinion leaders and ordinary citizens in the public opinion formation process can enable new actors to frame public discourses in their favor (Bode et al., 2015).”

“Grimme et al. (2018), for instance, find that most of the accounts involved in a troll attack during a German elections TV debate were less than one month old.”

“Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become major venues for ordinary citizens to discuss politics, disseminate news, and organize collective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Lilleker & Koc-Michalska, 2017; Stier et al., 2018; Thorson & Wells, 2016; Vaccari, 2017).”

“Its participants also send out similar messages, but they are intrinsically motivated, and usually organized in a more decentralized fashion than agents of an astroturfing campaign (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Walker, 2014).”

“The third baseline is created using all 27,606 tweets posted by 58 opinion leaders as identified by Bae, Son, and Song (2013).10 10The list of opinion leaders includes major politicians, Twitter celebrities, popular podcasters, journalists, We use these datasets for three types of content…”

“Retweeting is often used to amplify the impact of a campaign (Yang & Kim, 2017), and retweet patterns usually reflect political divisions among Twitter users (Conover et al., 2011).”

“86; see also Bennett & Segerberg, 2013), an astroturfing campaign tries to appear like such an organic expression of public opinion, but is actually centrally coordinated and organized – hence the analogy to the eponymous carpet “AstroTurf” which tries to mimic real grass (Howard, 2006; Walker, 2014).”

“These messages drew attention away from negative news, denigrated the opposition, and raised divisive issues ( 164 ).”

“Overall it is also important to broaden the perspective and focus more on political digital astroturfing [46] for which bots are just one potential dimension [47].”

“shifting the focus from content to dynamics of information spreading within online networks (Hui et al., 2019; Keller et al., 2019).”

“They may simply generate a large volume of posts to amplify certain narratives [21, 26] or to manipulate the price of stocks [24, 25] and cryptocurrencies [23].”

“, 2017), for example, by fueling outgroup hostility, a critical element of both organic misinformation and targeted disinformation campaigns, particularly during contentious political events such as the 2020 US Presidential elections (Groshek & Koc-Michalska, 2017; Hindman & Barash, 2018; Iyengar & Massey, 2018; Kelle…”

“…to focus on activities on a single social media platform such as Twitter (e.g. Arif et al., 2018; Broniatowski et al., 2018; Wilson et al., 2018, Keller et al., 2019; Zannettou et al., 2019), or YouTube (e.g. Hussain et al., 2018), or in the surrounding news media ecosystem (e.g. Starbird,…”

“…is astroturfing: Coordinated campaigns 4 Disinformation as a context-bound phenomenon that employ real people to present certain beliefs, identities or interpretations imitating grassroot movements that signal widespread social support for these beliefs (Keller et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2013).”

“So far, however, this research has focused almost exclusively on how to identify fake accounts or automated social bots (Keller et al., 2019; King et al., 2017).”

“109 Two points are important to note.”

“Supporting criteria relying on interactions alone, as observed in the literature (Ratkiewicz et al. 2011; Keller et al. 2019), include retweeting the same tweet ( co-retweet ), using the same hashtags ( co-hashtag ) or URLs ( co-URL ), or mentioning the same accounts ( co-mention ).”

“While methods of labeling social media accounts as bots abound (Varol et al., 2017), findings have been mixed (Keller et al., 2020).”

“Also Assenmacher et al. propose a 2-step framework for detecting IOs (Assenmacher et al. 2020b; 2020a).”

“A small body of work has shown that it is possible to find coordinated influence efforts on social media using unsupervised ( 4 , 20 ) or supervised machine learning ( 21 , 22 ).”

“Other recent developments in the automatic extraction of Twitter communities likely to be engaged in astroturfing campaigns have mainly focused on tweet coordination networks [11, 12, 17], text-based analysis [11], and specific temporal patterns [17].”

“Traditional social bots often follow pre-defined instructions to perform simplistic tasks, such as spamming (Yang et al., 2019), following others, and amplifying certain narratives (Keller et al., 2020).”

“An emerging line of scholarship has only begun to compare the keywords (Keller et al., 2020) and sentiments (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016) posted by human-like and bot-like accounts.”

“Other text requires situational context for harm risk to manifest: for example, authoring many fake comments evincing a certain view and posting of them online as genuine, in an astroturfing effort [15].”

“What astroturfers do is sow distrust and instigate arguments on such online social platforms, creating uncertainty, and disrupting genuine communication (Keller et al. 2019).”

“grassroot participation while being secretly orchestrated and funded [12].”

“While there has been a growing use of the term “fake news,” academics have raised concerns about this umbrella term because of its conceptual ambiguity and misuse by political actors (Keller et al., 2020).”

“One possible application of NFTDisk can be the identification and analysis of political astroturfing on Twitter [22, 47], where a group of Twitter accounts are manipulated by their employer to distribute disinformation in a coordinated manner.”

“Previous studies could show that social bots can amplify specific content, leading to “megaphone effects” (Woolley and Guilbeault, 2019: 193), as well as initiating political astroturfing campaigns (Keller et al., 2020).”

“From that moment on, it became clear that the antagonist online participatory practices of sharing, collaborating and organizing collective actions [29, 44], which used to be considered the prerogative of democratizing forces fighting established and sometimes oppressive powers, could be just as…”

“The first is by using bots, trolls, computational propaganda, and other inauthentic and often deceptive means to fabricate the appearance of support and interest (Bjola, 2017; Keller et al., 2020; King et al., 2017; Marwick & Lewis, 2017; Sanovich, 2017; Woolley & Howard, 2017).”

“…the same year, Bolsonaro’s spreading of disinforma-tion messages via WhatsApp during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, and more recently, Milei’s social media campaign in the 2023 Argentinian elections )Keller et al., 2020; Howard & Kollanyi, 2016; Santini et al., 2021; Swire et al., 2017(.”

“…instance, the financing of the EU’s radical right and left parties (thus investing in the proxied antagonization of an adversary’s political and discursive fields) or subverting the very domestic debate via social media ‘astroturfing’ campaigns (Tyushka 2019: 12; Keller et al. 2020; Kayali 2020).”

“Astroturfing is a subcategory of disinformation, defined as having a purposeful, and often malicious, intent to deliberately mislead audiences in support of strategic objectives (Keller, Schoch, Stier, & Yang, 2019).”

“The literature behind disinformation campaigns on Twitter is long [4,13–15] and keeps growing when new election campaigns occur around the globe or when crypto-currency and stock investors want to influence the market through social media [16–19].”

“Here, we use the largest publicly accessible LLM to date, GPT-4, to ask two related questions:”

“Predictably, political astroturfing has the potential to heavily influence electoral outcomes, as well as any other forms of political behavior [130].”

“Methods based on fixed similarity thresholds discard all edges in the network whose weight 𝑤 𝑤 th , and all the resulting disconnected nodes [12–14, 16, 17, 19–21, 23, 28, 29, 38–41, 46, 49, 54, 56–59, 67, 68, 78, 87–89, 91– 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 112, 116, 135, 138, 142, 145, 149].”

“In this way, campaign team staff, often on party pay-rolls, are able to assume the guise of everyday or ‘grassroots’ users to shape public discourse on WhatsApp, in a manner that resembles ‘astroturfing’ (see Johns and Cheong, 2019; Keller et al., 2020).”

“counterfeit::astroturfing Astroturfing as a tactic aims to create an illusion of a genuine grass-roots support or opposition to a group or a policy, through centrally-coordinated witting agents that appear to be independent and ordinary citizens (n = 3) [54].”

“Other detection techniques analyze network structures with the goal of identifying groups of users that are involved in an IO [3], [10], [19], [20], and to estimate their influence on the rest of the network [33].”

“The Coordination Network Toolkit 1 includes functionality for co-tweeting and co-retweeting [8, 9], where accounts post exactly the same text (co-tweets) or repost the same post within a short time window (co-retweets).”

“…element of account automation as well as the likelihood that an account is employed as part of an astroturf campaign, that is, is part of a group of coordinated accounts with the intent to give the impression of an organically emerging grassroots social media movement (F. B. Keller et al., 2020).”

“Both could be used in online astroturfing, referring to the attempts that create an impression of widespread grassroots support for a policy, a cause, or a stance, where little such support exists (Keller et al., 2020).”

“We will examine coordination campaigns and coordination networks [34,12,27,14,19] to quantify the impact of coordinated activity in the social network structure and to further investigate its influence on social media users.”

“…disseminate fake news 3 and inflammatory information 4,5 , exploit the private information of users 6 , sway public attention on controversial topics 7–9 , and create false public support for political and commercial gain 1,10,11 , especially during major political events such as elections 12–14 .”

“…domestic operators use trolls, bots, and sock puppets as super-spreaders of disin-formation on social media platforms (Ahmad et al. 2019; Bradshaw and Howard 2019; Jamieson 2020; Keller et al. 2019; Linvill and Warren 2020; Weissmann et al. 2021; Woolley and Guilbeault 2017; Zannettou et al. 2019).”

“While the use of targeted misinformation campaigns by state actors is well documented (Keller et al. 2020, Zannettou et al. 2019, Bradshaw & Howard 2018), ordinary citizens often both consume and spread (mis)information through their well-meaning online activity, which can inadvertently help to…”

“These campaigns work to intentionally spread harmful or inaccurate disin-formation, which can be particularly troubling for organizations on the receiving end of an attack (Cho et al., 2011; Keller et al., 2020).”

“They did not focus messaging on key dates (Keller, et al., 2020; King et al., 2017); instead, they posted quite regularly, almost mechanically.”

“Keller et al. (2020) established that the South Korean government created and controlled a network of Twitter accounts to gen-”

“Our work is based on the concept that the behavior of sponsored-trolls on social media is mainly driven by extrinsic motivations [23], this is completely different from the behavior of genuine users whose online political participation is driven by intrinsic motivations relating to self-efficacy and…”

“One of the first documented IOs was uncovered in a South Korean social media platform in 2012 (Keller et al. 2020).”

“Inauthentic behaviors (Keller et al., 2020) such as creating fake accounts, using bots to artificially boost engagement metrics (Chan, 2024; Tucker et al., 2018), or manipulating online discussions through coordinated efforts obscure the origins of falsehoods and worsen misinformation by…”

“e IRA campaign during the 2016 election has drawn great interest in the research community. Earlier research has characterized the strategies of IRA activity on social media from various perspectives [8, 9, 19, 22]. To the best of our knowledge, most of this work does not examine how IRA accounts interact with general…”

“At the same time, we know that disinformation messages can also be amplified by bot accounts on Twitter [20, 36].”

“Guided by these observations, we next present our research hypotheses and methodology.”

“Such coordinated and sustained disinformation campaigns in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens acting independently, can influence electoral outcomes and other forms of political behaviour (Keller et al. 2020).”

“There is a growing body of literature devoted to the phenomenon, but few studies are suggesting methods to detect astroturf movements (Keller et al., 2019).”

“These automated accounts are specifically designed to participate in political discussions 2 , leading us to analyze users interacting with astroturfs separately from those who interacted with non-astroturfs.”

“In the connected era social networks arguably play an instrumental role in reflecting and even shaping up to an extent the public sentiment regarding various social, political, cultural or even historical events [1].”

“Over the past decade, electoral campaigns have been characterized both by the consolidation of new digital platforms and by disinformation (Keller et al., 2020; López et al., 2023).”

“…dates, in addition to the high probability of bots, suggests an astroturfing phenomenon or orchestrated support campaign, or both, in some groups using co-tweeting and co-retweeting techniques (Keller et al. 2019) to evade detection by users, platforms and academic studies (Elmas et al. 2021).”

“…o no en este trabajo, es la siguiente: H1: Se está aplicando alrededor del debate político español en Twitter la estrategia Astroturfing para la diseminación de contenido desinformativo, en los términos expuestos por autores como Sorensen et al. (2017), Keller et al. (2019) y Elmas et al. (2021).”

“Examples of such manipulation include extreme propaganda [1], promotion of political conspiracies [16, 21], and interference in elections [10, 15].”

“Previous research on disinformation mainly focused on social media platforms such as X, formerly known as Twitter (e.g., Dasilva et al., 2021; Keller et al., 2019; Linvill & Warren, 2020), and Facebook (e.g., Iosifidis & Nicoli, 2020; Jang et al., 2019).”

“Concerns regarding the impact of disinforma-tion have stimulated a fast-growing body of academic research on this phenomenon (Guo & Vargo, 2020; Keller et al., 2020; Y. M. Kim et al., 2018; Linvill & Warren, 2020; Rojecki & Meraz, 2016).”

“According to Keller et al. (2019), Astroturfing is a ‘common strategy of disinforma-tion, where the disinformation pertains less to the content of the campaign, which can be completely truthful, but to the false impression of independent popular support’.”

“There is proof that coordinated campaigns through astroturfing are used to improve a brand’s perception or as public relations tool (Kirsch and Chowdhury 2023).”

“Although studies on centrally coordinated disinformation campaigns often focus on how one specific entity (attempts to) shape the public opinion (Keller et al., 2020; Im et al., 2020), complex events involve multiple entities promoting different messages.”