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).”

“…campaigns stems from the challengers’ ability to take advantage of the anonymity of the cyber domain, misleading individuals Page 16 of 27 who consume social media content to believe that messages implemented and disseminated by challengers are authentic (Keller et al., 2020, 258–259).”

“Reflecting a principal– agent problem (Keller et al., 2020), principals delegate campaign implementation to agents: they commission the campaign.”

“…substantially concentrates on such democratic contexts in other events or from a general perspective as well (Bennett & Livingston, 2018; Chomel et al., 2023; Ferrara, 2017; Hajli et al., 2022; Keller et al., 2020; Pierri et al., 2020; Rossetti & Zaman, 2023; Schoch et al., 2022; Starbird, 2019).”

“…to manipulate public opinion [35, 80, 100], provoke specific social responses [56, 87, 92], and orchestrate Information Operations (IOs) to amplify precise agendas [51, 99], thereby raising concerns about their potential role in the spreading of misinformation and propaganda [16, 28, 45, 86, 95].”

“…of artificial amplification that have been identified in the literature include the dissemination of particular content, e.g., via (co‐)retweet (Keller et al., 2020; Muhle, 2020), targeting popular users through mentions and replies (Shao et al., 2018), or misdirecting users to unrelated…”

“Co-tweeting and co-retweeting networks were constructed using NetworkX, and Keller ’ s method 23 was applied to detect groups spreading the same tweet quickly.”

“With improvements in detection techniques [91, 104, 135, 154], recent research has turned toward understanding how IOs are experienced and resisted by different actors.”

“Similarly, Keller et al .”

“Consistent with repressive media’s commodity cooptation mechanism, astroturfing refers to top-down political or corporate Public Relations (PR) campaigns styled as grassroots movements (Keller et al. 2020).”

“Page 6 of 48 Disinformation can also manipulate political participation, affecting election outcomes and other forms of political behavior [26, 51].”

“This suggests that there may be some degree of astroturfing, i.e., inauthentic user behavior, involved in political campaigning via social polls (Keller et al., 2020b).”

“This rhetorical impact to the global audience is more than the hashtag (s) one uses to organize the narrative, but is part of limiting the effectiveness of disinformation campaigns through strategic media literacy (Daer et al., 2014; Huang, 2020; Keller et al., 2019).”

“First, there are those who engage in the aggressive speech and coordinate campaigns – these can be thought of as the principals in a principal-agent framing [51].”

“These campaigns make it appear as if accounts are ordinary citizens speaking on their own volition (Keller et al., 2020).”

“While prior work has studied in great detail the behavior of the IRA bot accounts and techniques that they employed to spread misinformation [8, 9, 19, 22], based on a data set released by Twitter [29], much less work has examined the targets of the IRA bots, namely the overall Twitter user population.”

“LLMs have been exploited for a range of malicious purposes, from phishing attacks [1] and misinformation [2] to politically motivated social botnets and astroturfing campaigns [3, 4].”

“For instance, such transaction costs can include paying for legal counsel, hiring public relations firms, funding lob - bying intermediaries, and investing in elaborate communication or organizational structures to mask their use of astroturf groups (see Keller et al. 2020).”

“Further, F. B. Keller et al. ( 2020 ) warned about the increased overall prevalence of disinformation on social media stating, “general trust in online discussion venues and their potential for political discourses will further erode” (p. 275).”

“The presence of bots and coordinated bot farms, which can artificially inflate visibility and steer emotional engagement toward polarizing or ideologically extreme content (Keller et al., 2020).”

“The intention of disinfor-mation is most often to manipulate (Benkler et al., 2018), to harm (Wardle & Derakh-shan, 2017), or to gain some advantage, such as money (Herasimenka et al., 2023) or political influence (Keller et al., 2020).”

“Astroturfing is part of disinformation efforts not because of the transmitted message, which can illustrate the truth, but due to the fact that it generates “the false impression of independent popular support” (Keller, Schoch, Stier, & Yang, 2019, p.2).”

“- Disinformation spread during elections to weaken political rivals, as seen in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and 2012 South Korean election (Gunther et al., 2019; Keller et al., 2020).”

“( Bastos & Farkas, 2019; Colliver et al ., 2018; Gruzd & Mai, 2020; Johnson et al ., 2017; Keller et al ., 2019; Watanabe, 2018) .”

“While this practice can potentially have a significant impact, it is difficult to assess its effectiveness without accurate information regarding the identity of the perpetrators (Keller et al., 2020).”

“These bots are often used for purposes such as spreading disinformation (Keller et al. 2020; Ruths 2019; Shao et al. 2018), in fl uencing elections (Bessi and Ferrara 2016; Buccoliero et al. 2020; Ferrara 2017; Scha ̈ fer, Evert, and Heinrich 2017), and distorting public opinion (Badawy, Ferrara,…”

“Astroturfing is a political strategy designed to make an issue appear grassroots while it is orchestrated by significant organisational backing (Keller et al., 2020; Kovic et al., 2018; Leiser, 2016).”

“This suggests that there may be some degree of astroturfing, i.e., inauthentic user behavior, involved in political campaigning via social polls (Keller et al., 2020b).”

“…most polluted, in the world” (Petrović 2018, 20), the pervasiveness of this technique of digital manipulation of the public, and the lack of trust it carries certainly contribute to the further polarization of the public (Keller et al. 2019), increasing the public’s reticence to engage in politics.”

“Several previous works have touched upon the topic of astroturfing in various events and forms [43, 53, 85].”

“No obstante, a pesar de que los chatbots se utilizan para verificar información (Morrish 2023), también pueden generar noticias falsas y desinformación mediante información sesgada o incompleta (Keller et al .”

“The ease of social media content generation and consumption leaves a common social media user susceptible to disinformation and astroturfing campaings [23] Given the anecdotes of using social media for astroturfing and disinformation within the country, this dataset can help identify such practices, and also methods t…”

“1Within the political context, online astroturfing implies the distribution of a specific agenda via the Internet, through coordinated campaigns [11], which aim to influence electoral results [10].”

“A few studies test suspicious accounts against control accounts [Pantè et al., 2025, Mungari et al., 2026], or compare the coordination of accounts in an information operation with samples of regular users [Keller et al., 2020].”

“[1, 34–37].”

“…of opinion is itself part of the mechanism— those who read themselves as a minority withdraw (Noelle-Neumann, 1974)—which is what coordinated campaigns manufacture, and why they are detected through account co-activity rather than post content (Keller et al., 2020; Schoch et al., 2022).”

“Detecting coordinated manipulation within this environment increasingly depends on network methods capable of surfacing inauthentic coordination, from astroturfing operations to coordinated link-sharing communities (Giglietto et al., 2020; Keller et al., 2020).”

“Keller et al. [17], Schoch et al. [26] demonstrated that coordinated activity is often used to simulate grassroots support, a tactic known as astroturfing.”

“There is also work that combines these elements Keller et al. [2020].”

“Keller, Schoch, Stier, and Yang (2019) systematically identified how the political astroturfing accounts on Twitter through a coordinated network simulate genuine, mobilized support for political favor.”

“…technical limitations but the fundamental challenge of identifying intentional patterns in high-noise environments, a challenge that empirical research is only beginning to characterize (Keller et al., 2020; Schoch et al., 2022) and that PWAV is positioned to help address rather than fully resolve.”

“Astroturfing, coordinated campaigns posing as ordinary citizens, long predates these models (Keller et al., 2020), but generative AI removes its main bottleneck: the writing.”

“Unlike bot-driven astroturfing (Keller et al., 2020), digital fan groups demonstrate unique, human-driven mobilization patterns based on a collective understanding of platform algorithms, often referred to as coordinated algorithmic action (CAA) (Zhang et al., 2024).”

“Researchers have focused on analysing bot behaviour and profiles (Confessore et al., 2018; Keller et al., 2020) while developing advanced detection tools to combat bots’ harmful influence (Ferrara, 2023; Nightingale and Farid, 2022).”

“One of the major processes is in the creation of perceived source credibility, in which the coordinated accounts attempt to simulate realistic ways of interacting with the public to create the illusion of agreement (Liu et al., 2020).”

“Seminal work by Keller et al. (2020) dissected a state-linked campaign in South Korea, revealing coordination signatures that betray underlying sponsorship, while studies from Mexico (Piña-García and Espinoza 2022) and analyses of corporate front-groups (Mix and Waldo 2015; Wear 2014) underscore…”

“While detection methods have advanced - including network analysis, linguistic patterning, and bot detection - many campaigns blend real and fake elements in ways that circumvent automated systems (Chagas et al., 2022; Keller et al., 2020).”

“This includes coordinated networks of trolls and bots, as well as state-sponsored campaigns aimed at influencing election results (Keller et al., 2020);(Robles et al., 2022).”

“Keller et al. [15] identified bot networks specifically targeting swing states, while Badawy et al. [16] revealed bots’ preference for amplifying extreme political content.”

“In fact, previously proposed astroturfing detection methods rely on the analysis of interaction networks, linguistic content, and user metadata [4, 27], being computationally and data intensive, our results allow early detection methods based on the statistical analysis of the new spreader time…”

“…and it proves that interaction analysis does precisely identify astroturfing behavior Political Astroturfing on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation Campaign (2020), [6]; this article uses network analysis of Twitter data related to political campaigns to detect misinformation clusters.”

“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.”