#DiaDeLaIndignacion: The Protest Mexico's Pro-Government Twitter Bots Couldn't Silence Daniel Pena - Mother Board
go to original October 1, 2015

#DiaDeLaIndignacion Timelapse (LoQueSigue TV)

September 26 marked the one year anniversary of the Ayotzinapa kidnappings in which 43 students were taken by municipal police in Iguala, Mexico, never to be seen again.

To no one’s surprise, the date was marked with a fresh onslaught of pro-government propaganda on Twitter.

The current administration under President Enrique Peña-Nieto allegedly uses more than 75,000 automated Twitter accounts, called “Peñabots,” to silence or stymie critics of the Mexican government by diluting or creating trending topics, conducting smear campaigns, and even sending death threats to individuals.

A Peñabot attack is actually very simple: according to researchers, the automated accounts, many of which send out 20 or more tweets per second, spam a trending hashtag by “poisoning” it, which means tweeting the hashtag with nonsensical or empty content.

This tricks Twitter’s algorithm into pulling the hashtag from its trending list, making it harder for protesters to communicate with each other and decreasing the likelihood of real tweets - made by real human connections - to be disseminated out into the world.

Because Twitter’s novelty index takes the tweet rate of a specific hashtag into consideration, this form of attack has been particularly successful in shutting down modes of communication between protesters as they tweet in real-time.

Read the rest at Mother Board

Photo: Rebecca Blackwell/AP

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