In Venezuela everything is political, especially Twitter. Check out this story by
Hannah Dreier on how the Venezuelan government uses Twitter to give a fake impression of its popularity.
Maduro...has become the third most-retweeted public figure in the
world, behind Pope Francis and the King of Saudi Arabia, according to
public relations firm Burston Marsteller
Using a program written at the request of the Associated Press to
test for bots, researchers at the Utah State University Data Science Lab
found classic bot characteristics among hundreds of accounts that
retweet government posts, including messages sent at impossibly fast
typing speeds, repetitive content and tweets posted from different
accounts within seconds of each other.
"We can conclude that there
is a bot alliance," computer science professor Kyumin Lee said. "It's
not that they just happened to repost the exact same content; this is
not normal human behavior."
Von Bergen, who writes for El Nacional, the last major Venezuelan
daily critical of the government, said social media manipulation makes
his job harder.
"They try to hide how things really are. You get
to a point where you're not sure how much support they really have, and
how much they're just gaming things," he said.
Read the whole story online here:
Venezuela ruling party games Twitter for political gain
