> Sepúlveda managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to shape discussion around topics such as Peña Nieto’s plan to end drug violence, priming the social media pump with views that real users would mimic. For less nuanced work, he had a larger army of 30,000 Twitter bots, automatic posters that could create trends. One conversation he started stoked fear that the more López Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew the currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the candidate’s own internal staff memos.
I've been wondering when more sophisticated Twitter sockpuppetry would start having an impact. The media seems generally unprepared for a coordinated campaign of fake tweets from accounts that don't have eggs as their avatar or #freeiphones in their profiles...I don't mean just the trend of "Hey 3 people said something on Twitter so it's a story", but that there's also not enough skepticism paired with efficient ways for sniffing out fakery on social media. I hadn't thought about the problem of a mass army of bots suddenly creating a trending tag.
It reminds me of "The Agency", a story published last year investigating how Russian operatives allegedly used human-controlled Twitter spamming to try to publicize a fake story of a Louisiana chemical plant explosion:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_...
But as sophisticated as that sockpuppet campaign was...it was obviously destined to fail by the fact that an exploding chemical plant is fairly easy to confirm as true or false in real life. Trending opinions about politics don't offer such binary ways of filtering.