The Role of Clones in #Merdeka55

We have run multiple censuses on politician’s followers since December 2011, and over time developed some basic categories to distinguish followers:

Active – shown signs of Twitter use in the last 1-2 months, has followers and/or tweeted
Observer – user with 0 tweets and 0 followers
Inactive – no change in statistics in the last 1-2 months (besides followers)
Suspended – account currently suspended by Twitter

We are going to add a new category called Clones, which will draw users from Active and Inactive categories. This will be for users found to be run by the same person or group of persons.

What are Clones?

When you create/manage multiple accounts on Twitter with intent to tweet the same type of content some/all of the time, we will call those clones. Not all clones are bad. There are good reasons to have multiple accounts:

For marketing purposes, you can post tweets targeted at different markets
For work, multiple accounts representing different departments/franchises/organisations
You can have one account for personal use, and one for professional use
You can use each account to tweet about different topics, and socialise with the different groups for each topic

As long as the number of accounts is kept small and tweeting frequency kept low, Twitter doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. It doesn’t change the fact that only one person is managing these accounts.

When multiple accounts are used to send the same tweet, they are in danger of being suspended or deleted. This is because such behaviour is a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service (TOS):

You may not do any of the following while accessing or using the Services: (v) interfere with, or disrupt, (or attempt to do so), the access of any user, host or network, including, without limitation, sending a virus, overloading, flooding, spamming, mail-bombing the Services, or by scripting the creation of Content in such a manner as to interfere with or create an undue burden on the Services.

Clones pose a problem when doing Twitter analytics because:

They inflate the @mention levels for an account
They artificially increase the follower count for other users
They affect sentiment analysis, because one person tweeting an opinion to 10 accounts gives the illusion of 10 users sharing the same opinion

Regular Twitter users call these ‘fake followers’. So there is a need to filter these accounts out to get a truer sense of how many people follow politicians.

Bad Clones (Bots)

Some people register multiple Twitter accounts with some/all of the following characteristics:

Pretending to be another person, or fake organisation
Scheduled or automated mass-tweeting
Following the same user
Similar follower/following relationships

These clones are bots. They are not real people. They do not socialise, except with other bots or their creator(s). They have automated behaviour. They were created to serve an agenda. Their creators maintain a real persona online and make use of the bots when needed.

Their effect is to increase follower counts and raise @mention levels. Bots may be terminated by Twitter if they start spamming, so many lie dormant. We will treat bots as a subset of clones. Our bot-detection methods will not be shared publicly, to avoid having the bots change tactics.

Catching the #Merdeka55 Clones

During the #Merdeka55 event, we noticed large blocks of identical tweets being sent at the same time. Further investigation into who sent the tweets revealed that many of these users had a lot in common:

Tweeted using Tweetdeck
Sending scheduled/automated tweets containing #Merdeka55 and @NajibRazak in sync with other bots
Fake-looking profile (based on personal details)
Similar follower/following relationships

The pattern seemed to be one real person having as many as several dozen more Twitter accounts. The person may have ‘tweet to all’ or scheduled the tweets. Such tweets were sent from 31^st August – 1^st September, primarily during 8.15 PM – 9.15 PM on 31^st August. One possibility is also real users giving their login details to a 3^rd party for use during #Merdeka55.

Some samples of bot account profile images are below. The bot account names are listed at the end of this post. Suspected non-bot user(s) that we have identified have been removed from the mosaic, though it is possible we missed some. It doesn’t change the fact that they are all clones, and each tweet was only tweeted by clones. See what they have in common.

Example 1

Tweet: #Merdeka55 Rukun Negara 5 Kesopanan dan Kesusilaan @NajibRazak @relamalaysia

Sent: 8:17:16 PM

Total users: 78

Bots: 77

Example 2

Tweet: #Merdeka55 Rakyat Malaysia, berikrar kepada @NajibRazak untuk menumpukan seluruh tenaga dan usaha kami untuk mempertahankan Rukun Negara

Sent: 8:32:07 PM

Total users: 75

Bots: 73

Example 3

Tweet: Terapkan semangat kemerdekaan yg ke 55 DS@NAJIB RAZAK #MERDEKA55 #JANJI DITERPATI

Sent: 8:44:52 PM by 20 users, 8:44:53 by 20 users (2 batches)

Total users: 40

Bots: 38

Example 4

Tweet: Variations of ‘mee curry’:

Eating mee curry in Queensbay at the foodcourt and “Keranamu Malaysia” song being played. So #Merdeka55 mood! :) @NajibRazak
. Eating mee curry in Queensbay at the foodcourt and “Keranamu Malaysia” song being played. So #Merdeka55 mood! :) @NajibRazak
eating mee curry at qeensbay mall foodcourt with ‘keranamu malaysia’ so in mood #merdeka55 @najibrazak @HishammuddinH2O

Sent: Multiple batches at 8.19 PM, 8.28 PM, 8.29 PM, 8.36 PM, 8.46 PM, 8.52 PM

Total users: 111

Bots: 96

At the time of this writing, over 2500 clones have been identified. These wrote 33,112 #Merdeka55 tweets, at an average of 11 users per tweet at the same second. This covers 30.29% of the 109,320 #Merdeka55 tweets we obtained.

There are many more clones waiting to be discovered. Over time we will develop better algorithms to detect and filter them. The examples we gave are but a small sample – once all the #Merdeka55 Tweetdeck users are laid out in a mosaic sorted by creation date, the patterns become very clear.

The image above is just a portion of the 720 X 9043 pixel mosaic. Click on the image to see the full-sized version on Flickr. There are 2,729 users in the full-sized image.

Some of the users are real people with ordinary Twitter accounts, and some are clones. From February 2012 onwards, you will find repeated profile images along a theme – Caucasian babies, Ultraman, cats, flowers, cars, football players and more, all created in sequence. These are the likely clones.

During the #Merdeka55 event, Twitter Search was very good at filtering out these clones. People searching for ‘#Merdeka55’ on Twitter’s website did not see 80.63% of the 33,112 tweets coming from the clones. Some of the users that we found have already been suspended for their behaviour, which violated Twitter’s TOS.

It is not known who created these accounts and why, but their existence has further implications for Malaysian politics online. This will be discussed in another blog post.

More facts about #Merdeka55

During the weekend we went through the data and found this tweet by @KhairyKJ:

[tweet https://twitter.com/Khairykj/status/241519309883588609]

During the Olympics, the highest tweets-per-minute was 80K, when Usain Bolt won the gold in the 200m sprint. The 100K tweets-per-minute mentioned by @KhairyKJ would be a new record that has yet to be announced by Twitter.

Politweet has been tracking global, Malaysian and Kuala Lumpur trends since April. As of this date, #Merdeka55 did not trend worldwide. That is unexpected, considering that Twitter trends favour new words/hashtags/phrases that are tweeted in a high volume in a short amount of time. One exception is when a trend had already trended worldwide recently, in which case it has to beat the previous record to trend again.

But #Merdeka55 never trended. It’s possible that the presence of bot spamming reduced the odds of trending. This makes sense because Twitter would have built-in safeguards to prevent manipulation of their trends. No Merdeka-related phrase trended worldwide either.

#Merdeka55 Trend Rank Changes in Malaysia, 8.00 PM – 9.30 PM

8.00 PM: 5^th place

8.20 PM: 3^rd place

8.50 PM: 5^th place (lost 3^rd place to #RY13)

9.00 PM: 8^th place (lost 7^th place to Taylor Swift. #RY13 still holding 3^rd place)

9.10 PM: regained 3^rd place and held it until 10.30 PM when it dropped to 10^th place

In Malaysia, #Merdeka55 reached a peak rank of 3rd place at 8.20 PM. The cumulative total trend time for #Merdeka55 was 740 minutes (12 hours 20 mins), tied with ‘2012 MTV Video Music Awards’. Definitely in terms of tweet volume some record was achieved.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that bots contributed to the announced 3.6 million tweet total, and we won’t know how many tweets were sent by real people or what the real tweets-per-minute record is. Had bots not interfered, #Merdeka55 might have trended worldwide.

While there are no organiser rules stating that clone/bot usage are not allowed, using clones to flood Twitter with #Merdeka55 tweets is a violation of Twitter’s TOS. Violating Twitter’s rules to achieve a record on Twitter was an unethical act by the person(s) managing these accounts.

Hopefully Twitter or some 3^rd party can come forward and verify the record claim.

Appendix

The following is a list of usernames from the examples. Visit some of them and see the evidence in their timelines before any cover-up takes place.

List of users from Example 1

Tweet: #Merdeka55 Rukun Negara 5 Kesopanan dan Kesusilaan @NajibRazak @relamalaysia

List of users from Example 2

Tweet: #Merdeka55 Rakyat Malaysia, berikrar kepada @NajibRazak untuk menumpukan seluruh tenaga dan usaha kami untuk mempertahankan Rukun Negara

List of users from Example 3

Tweet: Terapkan semangat kemerdekaan yg ke 55 DS@NAJIB RAZAK #MERDEKA55 #JANJI DITERPATI

List of users from Example 4

Tweet: Variations of ‘mee curry’

Published On: September 10th, 2012 / Categories: Analyses, Social Media / Tags: Barisan Nasional, Bots, Clones, Malaysia, Merdeka, Merdeka55, Tweetdeck, Twitter /

The Role of Clones in #Merdeka55

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