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Some Twitter bots appear to be promoting the Ives campaign

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Illinois

This article was originally going to be about sentiment analysis on tweets about candidates in the Illinois governor election. However, when I was pulling data from Twitter, I noticed that Governor Bruce Rauner’s primary opponent, Jeanne Ives, had almost five thousand tweets and retweets mentioning her name, placing her with four times the amount of mentions of the leading Democratic candidate.

When I looked into this further, half of Jeanne Ives’ mentions come from retweets of posts by the Twitter handle NinaMorton. Additional mentions come from accounts like redhead4645 and PatriotPete101. These accounts are filled with right wing propaganda tweeted out multiple times a day. […]

Within less than a month’s time, [NinaMorton] posts went from having around twenty retweets to nearly one thousand retweets. The news articles she posts on her Twitter feed are from fake news websites such as worldtoday365.info or extremely biased right wing news websites.

Nina Morton’s account growth is staggering. Over the course of twenty eight days, she went from having a few retweets to a thousand. She began to gain hundreds of followers a day. All of this growth has continued over the past few months as her account began to shift to more propaganda and image-based content from text-based content. She went from tweeting once every other day to tweeting every other hour. The evidence above led me to believe that NinaMorton’s account is most likely a bot account, or at the very least an account used to spew fake propaganda that benefits far right-wing candidates. […]

Retweets from accounts such as the NinaMorton and redhead4645 propaganda accounts composed of the majority of Jeanne Ives mentions on Twitter. In fact, Jeanne Ives has more mentions on Twitter than she does followers and more Twitter mentions than the other Democratic candidates combined. These anomalies despite her poor polling performance is because of massive tweeting and retweeting by bot and propaganda accounts on Twitter.

Jain is a Statistics and Computer Science and Political Science student at UIUC. I tried replicating his results, but I couldn’t get his program to work (I was probably too busy and definitely too ignorant).

Jain did, however, run those accounts through BotCheck.me and discovered that “both NinaMorton and redhead4645 were either bot accounts or political propaganda accounts.”

* The Outline then published a rather breathless story without going into much detail about how these alleged bots were targeting Illinois…

Bots are flooding Twitter with political propaganda and conspiracy theories in an apparent attempt to sway a number of upcoming local and state elections in the U.S., including Pennsylvania’s special election, Illinois’ gubernatorial election, and California’s congressional election. The Outline has identified at least 14 Twitter accounts — some of which have well over 200,000 followers, and have been retweeted by the President himself — which appear to be part of a coordinated effort to amplify fake news, inflame partisan tensions, and spread popular Russian-based conspiracy theories through the use of bots. All of the accounts were found to either solely or primarily share political propaganda with an ultra-right-wing bent, most of which centered around topics like Pennsylvania’s March 13 special election, Illinois’ March 20 gubernatorial election, gun control, immigration, and the QAnon conspiracy.

* Chicago Reader…

Kathleen Murphy, Ives’s spokesperson, denied knowledge of the bots in an e-mailed statement:

“This is the first we have heard of Twitter bots,” Murphy wrote. “We block [accounts that] are abusive on social media, but beyond that our campaign staff is small. And all are juggling huge workloads at this point. No one on our staff has time for this sort of activity.” […]

A day after the Outline piece was published, all three accounts called out in Jain’s report have had their Twitter handles changed. @NinaMorton has been changed to @MAGANinaJo, @redhead4645 is now @my2006bmw, and @patriotpete101 is @TruckinPete101.

@MAGANinaJo has retweeted almost 600 tweets since Tuesday, according to the Twitter analysis tool AccountAnalysis. Earlier today, for example, the account retweeted a picture of Ives and her running mate, Richard Morthland, with the statement: “Enough with sanctuary cities. Let’s work together to put these people in place to work for legal IL residents. #ArmyOfTrump #RedWaveRising2018.” That tweet has received 82 retweets and 94 likes as of Wednesday afternoon.

@MAGANinaJo has close to 39,000 followers.

posted by Rich Miller
Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 1:44 pm

Comments

On one hand, I completely believe Ives’ campaign doesn’t know anything about this.

On the other hand, this is really scary stuff, this mechanism by which propaganda circulates and fake news takes on a life of its own. Pretty alarming use of technology to sow discord and widen divisions.

I am really glad that people like Ajay Jain are out there looking into and exposing this stuff.

Comment by 47th Ward Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 1:52 pm
I doubt the Ives campaign has any larger role than unwitting puppet in this operation. It sounds to me like the Russian troll farm MO. Ives probably made it onto their radar when her hateful and disgusting ad found its way to the national airwaves, and she definitely fits the profile of candidates that could inflame civil tensions.

Comment by Chicago_Downstater Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 1:54 pm
Obviously it’s Mike Madagan and the Russian tweet bots that he controls

Comment by Pieroge tirebiter Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 1:55 pm
This isn’t Ives, but it should give pause that things are never going to be the same, our elections are under attack by those wanting America at loggerheads, and “they” will insert themselves wherever that can be accomplished.

Comment by Oswego Willy Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 2:06 pm
From a look at twitter it seems some of these ives tweets are including shout outs to trump’s digital director brad parscale. super weird.

Also funny to see the accounts arguing with the bots about how ives is bad because she supports mike madigan

Comment by hisgirlfriday Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 2:07 pm
I would still be embarrassed by this if I were Ives or an Ives supporter. It seems Vladimir approves of her message.

Comment by Cheryl44 Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 2:33 pm
It would certainly make sense for the ongoing digital warfare effort by Russia to see opportunity in the GOP primary race for Gov. Russia has long engaged in disinformation campaigns, but with social media and those corporations having no effective way to control their own platforms coupled with the tremendous success in the 2016 presidential election, the efforts will only intensify. It seems we are seeing it here.

The references to Parscale are quite interesting. Probably chumming the waters a bit.

Comment by LakeCoQ Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 2:34 pm
I am old and definitely not really much in social media. I had a twitter account for a week when I tried to use it it said u was shut down for inappropriate content. I had one follower and never tweeted anything. So why can’t these people who were smart enough to design this stuff be smart enough to shut down a bit? (Another made up word). I would think once someone re tweets something a few thousand times it might be a clue

Comment by DuPage Saint Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 3:00 pm
By god, there really is a commie plot. Kruschev said it nearly sixty years ago….”We will bury you”. (In bots).

Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 3:15 pm
===So why can’t these people who were smart enough to design this stuff be smart enough to shut down a bit?

They can, they don’t want to. Jain and Bambaneck have both shown it’s possible and Twitter just refuses to act.

Comment by ArchPundit Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 3:31 pm
How do you say “I approve this message in Russian?” Asking for a comrade … er, friend …

The comment by the Ives spokesperson may be the most honest thing said thsi entire campaign.

Comment by The Way I See It Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 3:47 pm
BissBots are the worst, IMO. Hateful people. At least you can identify the Kennedy and Pritzker people.

Comment by Anon Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 4:14 pm
FYI, Hamilton 68 tracks Russian bot activity on Twitter. It’s a handy way to tell if trends are organic or nyet.

Comment by Northsider Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 4:48 pm
This is even more trivial than the tiny Russian troll farm that clumsily placed a few ineffective social media ads in2016.

Comment by Chris P. Bacon Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 4:57 pm
Ok I am ancient. I looked up twitter bot. Robots. Ok. But what makes this importAnt. These arent votes are they? Just aaking you youngsters.

Comment by Blue dog dem Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 5:15 pm
Blue, I think the idea is to get and keep the Ives (or Trump, whatever) “brand” ever-present in one’s Twitter feed, perhaps along with comments from like-minded followers.

That won’t happen in AA’s carefully curated Tweeter. The only brand there is mine. /s

Comment by Arthur Andersen Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 5:52 pm
So now that this is in Capitol Fax, what is MAGANinaJo’s new name?

Comment by Radio Flyer Thursday, Mar 15, 18 @ 6:13 pm
But Putin

Comment by PublicServant Friday, Mar 16, 18 @ 8:39 am