School of Humanities and Social Science Division of Social Science 231 Political Astroturfing Worldwide: How to Manipulate Public Opinion on Twitter Supervisor: KELLER Franziska / SOSC Student: CHAN Sum Yee / QSA Course: UROP1000, Summer Twitter political astroturfing means the use of automated accounts, known as “social bots”, “cyborgs” and accounts run by actual human to tweet, retweet and post videos to influence public opinions and political stance, with the aim to acquire certain political outcomes. Twitter political astroturfing is common in many countries and over the years, social scientists have been trying to find out the characteristics and patterns of astroturfing accounts for the easier identification of disinformation campaign, which helps to crack down on activities that are detrimental to democracy. Previous research has discovered patterns of astroturfing accounts affiliated with the Chinese government (Schliebs, Bailey, Bright and Howard, 2021) and the South Korean government (Keller, Schoch, Stier and Yang, 2019). In this report, I am going to investigate in the characteristics and patterns of suspected twitter accounts affiliated with the Russian government. Political Astroturfing Worldwide: How to Manipulate Public Opinion on Twitter Supervisor: KELLER Franziska / SOSC Student: LAM Ka Yan / GCS Course: UROP1000, Summer Since individuals are prone to adopting the opinions of most people, governments across the globe have launched various astroturfing campaigns to deceive the public into believing that their opinion or position is shared by the majority. By political astroturfing, participants are likely to pretend to be ordinary citizens acting independently in order to influence electoral outcomes and other forms of political behavior. However, without enough data, it is neither convincing nor persuasive to evaluate the occurrence and effectiveness of political astroturfing. As a result, it is of most importance for us to identify the information providers and information spreaders in various political astroturfing campaigns. Political Astroturfing Worldwide: How to Manipulate Public Opinion on Twitter Supervisor: KELLER Franziska / SOSC Student: WANG Yiren / QSA Course: UROP1000, Summer Political astroturfing is a centrally coordinated disinformation campaign in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens acting independently, with the intention to influence the public voice. This study will identify and examine suspicious accounts among the followers of the Chinese diplomatic ambassador's Twitter account. By using various tools of RStudio to analyze the account creation dates, number of tweets, language, content and time of the last tweet of the suspicious users, the results showed that a large number of accounts were created on March 17, 2020, which further narrowed down the list of suspects.
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