Finding Korean Astroturfing Accounts

The next ICA 2018 session I’m attending has started with JungHwan Yang, whose focus is on political astroturfing by non-bots. The 50-Cent Party in China, and the Russian troll army are examples of this, and these are more difficult to detect than bots, because of the human factor.

In the 2012 Korean election, conservative Korean agents were busted for using Twitter accounts to influence the election, and a list of such accounts and the agents was subsequently released; this list of 1,008 accounts and their behaviours was used in the present study to identify the typical behavioural patterns of non-bot astroturfers, and to detect additional suspicious accounts.

One pattern in this is related to the election campaign itself: account creation dates and activity patterns may therefore be similar across a larger number of accounts. It is also possible that there is one principal agent that sets out the tweeting agenda, and that the (less well-paid and less motivated) account handlers will cut corners by simply interacting with each other and copying each other’s content into their own account feeds.

This study therefore examined the unique patterns in the initial list of accounts, and then sought to find additional suspicious accounts based on this activity. They found another 106 suspicious accounts through this process, all of which were also subsequently deleted after the original list of known astroturfing accounts was deleted.