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Monday, August 24, 2015

'PeñaBots': Automated Twitter accounts (BOTS) impede protests, hinder critics, send threats

Lucio R. Borderland Beat republished from Wired Magazine, Revolution News, video from Vice

Iguala September 26, 2014, night from hell

Pro-Government Twitter Bots Try to Hush Mexican Activists

More than 75,000 automated Twitter accounts (BOTS)  are being used to combat protests and attack critics of the government, according to research presented by writer Erin Gallagher at the Chaos Communication Camp in Zehdenick.

The automated accounts, known as Peñabots, first appeared during the election of President Enrique Peña Nieto.

ON SEPTEMBER 26, 2014, a group of students departed the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College for a protest in Iguala, Mexico, about 80 miles away.(Note: actually they were going to DF to protest, not Iguala) They never arrived. What happened on the road to Iguala remains a mystery, but we know that at least three students were killed and another 43 are missing. The government’s official story is that the 43 students were killed after being handed over to the Guerreros Unidos cartel on the orders of the mayor of Iguala. But investigations conducted by  the U.S. publication The Intercept paints a darker picture of complacency at higher levels of government.


The incident was emblematic of broader fears and frustrations with violence and corruption in Mexico and sparked a wave of ongoing protests across the country. Like so many modern protest movements, activists turned to social media to organize and promote their cause. One Twitter hashtag in particular—#YaMeCanse or “I am tired”—became a central hub for organizing protests and disseminating information.


That’s when artist and journalist Erin Gallagher, who covers the protests for Revolution News, noticed something strange. The search results for #YaMeCanse were flooded with tweets that included the hashtag but no other content, save for a few random characters such as commas, semicolans, and angle brackets. A typical tweet might be: “,,> #YaMeCanse.” The accounts tweeting the empty content bore the telltale signals of spambots, such as a lack of followers and a tendency to tweet variations of the same thing over and over again. It became difficult, if not impossible, for activists to actually share information with each other through the #YaMeCanse hashtag, and as a result it quickly dropped out of Twitter’s trending topics. Bots, it seemed, had effectively jammed the protesters’ communications channel.


Gallagher and LoQueSigue blogger Alberto Escorcia say the bots have followed protesters from hashtag to hashtag over the past few months, drowning out real conversations with noise. They’ve also seen similar bots create fake hashtags in apparent attempts to push real hashtags out of Twitter’s trending list, spread anti-protest messages, and even send death threats to specific activists.

It might seem petty to worry about Twitter bots in a country besieged with violence and corruption, but social media has become a central part of activism throughout the world. When it is undermined it has real effects. Yes, the term “Twitter revolution” is a massive simplification of the uprisings in Iran in 2009 or the “Arab Spring” protests that spread throughout the Middle East in 2010. After all, massive protests, riots and revolutions are as old as civilization itself. 

But it’s fair to say that Twitter and other social networking sites have become the predominant platform for free expression throughout the world. And bots are now being used to stifle that freedom, not just in Mexico but around the globe. Similar tactics used against protesters in other countries, such as Turkey, Egypt and Syria. Just as the freedom of press was only truly guaranteed to those who could afford to buy one, freedom of social media may soon be limited to only those who can afford to build bot armies.

A Swarm of Lonely Bots

Escorcia has been watching the rise of Twitter bots in Mexico since the 2012 elections, when he noticed fake accounts promoting the candidacy of Enrique Peña Nieto, now the president. But the bots have become more active since the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students.

Using social network visualization tools such as Flocker and Gephi, Escorcia has discovered a reliable way of detecting bot accounts by examining the number of connections a Twitter account has with other users. Bots have few connections, while real users tend to have far more. Using the software, he’s been able to identify many cases of bots used to sabotage protests.

Andres Monroy, a social-computing researcher at Microsoft Research, has observed similar behaviors in Mexico and other countries such as Venezuela. He says that in many cases, the bots are run by traditional spammers targetting popular hashtags — the kinds you might see hawking Viagra through the #FiveWordstoRuinADate hashtag — for commercial, as opposed to political, purposes. He also says that spam bots’ impact on trending topics is hard to quantify and that activists often mistake the natural ebb and flow of trends for malicious interference. “Just because a hashtag is popular doesn’t mean it’s trending,” he says. “Both sides [spammers and activists] put too much effort into trending topics.”

That said, Monroy confirms that politically motivated spam bots exist and pose real problems for activists, particularly when they flood hashtags with useless content. These efforts can have material effects on organizers. For example, Gallagher reports that as police dispersed a protest in Mexico City on December 1 of last year, protestors used the hashtag #RompeElMiedo (“break the fear”) to share information about police locations so that protesters, journalists and bystanders could exit protest without being arrested or beaten.

One protester posted a map highlighting an area to avoid in particular, but Gallagher says that Twitter accounts behaving in exactly the same way the #YaMeCanse spammer did made it extremely difficult for protesters to find that map. The result was that they were more likely to end-up being beaten or jailed.  

The bots also make it more difficult for information to reach the public. For example, in February, activists used the hashtag #Acapulco to share photos from a protest in Acapulco, Mexico but the hashtag was pushed off the Twitter trending list by another hashtag, #SoyAmanteDe (“I am a lover of”), that Escorcia believes was created and promoted by bots, based on his analysis of the connections—or lack there of—between the bot accounts and other Twitter accounts. Tellingly, many of the #SoyAmanteDe Tweets used the same words, but in different arrangements, Gallagher reports.

Most chillingly, Gallagher says that activist Rossana Reguillo received death threats, including photos of charred bodies, over the span of two months, via Twitter bots.

So the question remains: who is running these anti-activist bots? Gallagher says that because of their appearance during President Peña Nieto’s campaign the bots are commonly referred to as “Peñabots,” and the ongoing assumption among activits on Twitter is that the federal government is behind the current crop of bots. Escorcia hasn’t been able to find any hard evidence linking the bots to the federal government in general, or to Peña Nieto in particular, but Gallagher points out that the bots seem to specifically target anti-government, as opposed to anti-cartel, sentiment on Twitter.

 Below from Revolution News


  

This software can be modified to do more than just detect bots. Alberto Escorcia, lead developer from LoQueSigue, tells us that Gelphi has scientific origins and is used to analyze molecules, geophysical data and anything that creates networks and can be visualized. In the case of social networks it can be used to analyze the manner in which online conversation is carried out. For example during a natural disaster, conversation takes on a certain shape. Conversation about Christmas takes on a different geometric form. When bots attack they have a very particular shape. Before any event a certain pattern is created. If we have the ability to analyze all tweets in Gelphi, it would be possible to detect trending topics before they happen

Below from Vice

29 comments:

  1. The government from Mexico doesn't want people to find out what the cartels they protect really do to society, instead they flood the radios with stupid fake corridos that familiarize the drug dealer life style. In reality people from Mexico idolize "chapo" and all the others except the zetas eventhogh they are exacly the same. Now they have a lot of narco telenovelas like el senor de los cielos to make the people admire the same people who are killing and selling drugs to their own

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    1. That's true. good comnent. As long as people look up to these mensos the situation will be the same. I watched "el senor de los cielos" to see what the big fuzz was about and it was relly exaggerated. They made Amado Carrillo tall ,handsome and strong. in all the pictures that I seen from him he is the total opposite. lol also "el cochiloco" who is really fat and ugly butnot on t.v. lol The only actor that looked almost exacly the same was Pablo Escobar novela.

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  2. fascinating stuff

    thanks for the article

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  3. Hey Lucio, great post, it is the most important post on BB for the past week or more, yet I am willing to guess few of the keyboard narcos will comprehend the meaning.

    EPN manipulating social media to confuse people and control citizens and social activism. This is huge. EPN will not comment on the story.

    TOO MANY IDIOTS ON BB.

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    1. His bots will problably give the mexican people an answer about this

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    2. True that, but also sadly the mexican people are extremely gullible and thus causing it very difficult to make changes, the old people either fear change or dont want change which has the same effect. So the mexican government only has to apply the old "bread and circus" tactic to keep the people content. Good news is it we're in a new era and hopefully in the near future we'll be able to make changes here in mexico for the better

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    3. The many idiots on BB have not lost contact with the BB blog, site, whatever, and any smart blogger will get around peñabots somehow, FOR FREE...
      --I AM NOT TECHIE, but I know peñabots can not drive out from their hearts, the hate most mexicans have for peña nieto, el PRI, el PAN y todos eso hijos de sus putas madres, tweets or no tweets...
      --Dr Mireles already beat peña nieto on the times covers, without spending one single peso agains the millions peña nieto paid for the propaganda or the bots...

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    4. But then people hate chapo for doing what he does and these Mexican politicos do worser than him.

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    5. Is there an app to fight these pesky bots!

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    6. Chapo and the politicos are the same people they sleep together.just write to him and tell him you fell head over heels for him already stop making excuses!

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    7. Drop twitter, that will teach them to mind the store, users make twitter more money than peñabots, I am not registered, no problem, use instagrams or other sexoservidores...

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    8. Keep friends in circles and do not take in unkown links, offers ads etc, they are usually porn or communist propaganda...
      Break your free USAID phones, too, they are compromised and Obama is lissenin' recording and videotaping it all, even if you turn them off...
      --drop twitter, tell them YOU ARE FIRED!!! and unsuscribe,
      --have faith, now the cubans can travel and help with Cuban Technology, youtube...

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  4. EPN dragging his tail to cover his tracks. No shame where money and power are involved.

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  5. Too many idiots on BB + 1 too many at 3:35...
    -Peñabots are just like a little stone in our shoes, #que chinguen a su madre peña y peñabots...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Asi es. Muy bien dicho 11:32 PM! Pa' la fregada con EPN.

      Delete
  6. could make a change but thousands will die to bring Mexico to good country

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 5:16 AM: 1,000's are already dying

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  7. Pena nieto does not worry about cartels its a revolution

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  8. Yes those Penebots are driving people insane

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  9. Peñabots can be jammed too, just put the spam on full auto, all the government agencies will have to slow down or quit...

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    Replies
    1. Full auto hahahaha i like how you explained that

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    2. 3:59, yer welcome, I am not computer savy, but I really think it can be done, how you think chinese plants exploded and why, they hanging tight with the russians, the chinese got paid back...

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  10. Who would have thought!, all, or at least most "users" supporting Peña at youtube, twitter and so on have been bots all along, they are effective because they are always alert and ready to deploy their fake armies, bit easy to spot by behavior alone.

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    1. If it supports el PRI, el PAN, PVEM, PRI-ANAL (!), any coalition with PRD, peña nieto, or any former mexican president, or future candidate of them, or talks about the wonderful president peña nieto and his Madrota la gaviota...it is propaganda, paid and full of shit...
      --See "Como recibieron a peña nieto en aguascallientes" youtube, and you see how the public thinks of his motherfacking ass for real, live...and there are many more like that, you need to be specific , if you look for anything that reads about the many successful victories of epn, you will never see the end of it, it is computers, shit in, shit out, marching protesters can not be faked, positive testimony is paid for usually...

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    2. The donal' is famous for, he paid actors to come and clap at his announcement that he was running for presidnt...now he is at 27%...ahead of the rest...

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    3. How do you think peña nieto got elected? All fake like his marriage to la pinche gaviota to appear to be muy macho, like Chiapas governor manuel velasco, who also spent 130 million pesos (10 million dollars) in publicity propaganda for "his state", of course that is now 180 000 000.00 pesos, all stolen by the PVEM governador, thanks to electoral fraud, from one of the poorest states in mexico...do not blame the mexicans for the "computerized electoral democracy"...
      --HACKERS NEEDED TO FACK UP THE IFE, if retrograd priistas can do it...

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  11. PF link PRI officials to attacks on Aristegui and SinEmbargo websites since last Fall:

    https://www.change.org/p/atacaron-a-aristegui-noticias-sin-embargo-y-otros-medios-consignen-a-los-responsables-ya-pgr-mx

    ReplyDelete
  12. The US has many criminals involved in government...don't speak evil of the US americans...
    Mexico has many criminals involved in government...don't badmouth mexico!!!
    --Veracruz has MANY, TOO MANY criminals working as "government"...
    ...don't badmouth veracruz, no lo voy a permitirrrr, jams de los jamases!!! Nunca! Eso no lo voy a tolerar! "Portense bien, por favor, despues no acusen..."
    --Just 3 examples of lo que no te quepa o lo repartas, do not split your sins around, fools!!!

    ReplyDelete

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