Campaign Calling for Greenwald’s Deportation Created by Internet Bots

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The research group DFRLab has checked some of the Twitter accounts that triggered a campaign calling for the deportation of U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald, from The Intercept website.

The protest campaign used several hashtags, and one of the most popular among them, (#DeportaGreenwald) was examined and showed that several of the most active accounts are suspected of mechanical behavior, through the operation of fake profiles and Internet robots (bots).

‘Vânia’, identified as @Vnia60277936, who posted the hashtag 294 times in four and a half hours, is an example.

On June 9th, The Intercept Brasil, co-founded by Greenwald, published a report disclosing leaked conversations from a messaging app, in which supposed dialogues exchanged between former judge Sérgio Moro and prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol evidenced a conspiracy to incriminate and expedite the arrest of former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva.

The @Vnia60277936 account was the second most active one using the hashtag #DeportaGreenwald, which ended up in the Twitter trend topics section.

In addition to the name with a numerical identifier and a general profile photo, the DFRLab found that the account posted an average of 577 tweets per day; the company considers over 144 tweets a day as highly suspicious. On June 2nd alone there were 1,700 posts.

Other more active accounts also share several features similar to those of @Vnia60277936, and the suspicion of mechanical behavior has been confirmed by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation’s Directorate of Public Policy Analysis, a partner of DFRLab.

The study determined that although the campaign originated from bots, most of the retweets were done by real Twitter users. An interesting fact is that the first and third most popular posts were contrary to the campaign, with one of them claiming that the “digital militias” in favor of “silencing” Greenwald are the same ones criticizing the lack of freedom of expression in Venezuela.

(Source: Terra)