TechPresident and the Boston Globe may have stumbled across the latest tactic in online smear campaigns—the Twitter bomb. A Wellesley College study, “From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real Time Search,” analyzed more than 185,000 tweets during the last week of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s failed campaign. The findings? The researchers found large batched of anti-Coakley tweets coming from an Iowa-based GOP group. TechPresident writes, “And because of the nature of real-time search -- for example, Google's newish practice of promoting tweets to the top page of search results -- those negative tweets got a wider audience than they otherwise would have.” The group apparently set up nine anonymous Twitter accounts that sent 929 tweets over the course of about two hours and reaching about 60,000 people.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
A Twitter Bomb
TechPresident and the Boston Globe may have stumbled across the latest tactic in online smear campaigns—the Twitter bomb. A Wellesley College study, “From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real Time Search,” analyzed more than 185,000 tweets during the last week of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s failed campaign. The findings? The researchers found large batched of anti-Coakley tweets coming from an Iowa-based GOP group. TechPresident writes, “And because of the nature of real-time search -- for example, Google's newish practice of promoting tweets to the top page of search results -- those negative tweets got a wider audience than they otherwise would have.” The group apparently set up nine anonymous Twitter accounts that sent 929 tweets over the course of about two hours and reaching about 60,000 people.
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