School of Humanities and Social Science Division of Social Science 205 Political Astroturfing Worldwide: How to Manipulate Public Opinion on Twitter Supervisor: KELLER Franziska / SOSC Student: LUI Hiu Lum / ACCT Course: UROP1100, Fall This report aims to investigate the characteristics of Twitter accounts that may be participating in political astroturfing. Target accounts are accounts that followed multiple Russian official accounts. Account information is being examined, for example, creation date and profile details. Two account creation spikes have been identified in 2017 and 2020. Further analysis is conducted on these 2 groups of accounts. Both groups demonstrate similar behavior – spike groups have more inactive accounts with less active accounts, smaller proportion of private accounts and larger proportion of accounts that have never tweeted, comparing to their respective control groups. However, the 2017 spike group has shown statistically significant difference in mean follower number, while the 2020 spike group does not. Political Astroturfing Worldwide: How to Manipulate Public Opinion on Twitter Supervisor: KELLER Franziska / SOSC Student: MOON Kyoungin / QSA Course: UROP2100, Fall This report examines the Twitter accounts that are affiliated with South Korean diplomatic accounts in an attempt to trace any suspicious pattern that possibly indicates the presence of political astroturfing. Oftentimes, politicians use astroturfing accounts to elevate their status or to influence public opinion on social media (Keller et al., 2020). This report is divided into two sections: 1) overall analysis of the South Korean-affiliated accounts and 2) comparative analysis with follower accounts that are affiliated with Chinese diplomatic accounts. The first section finds no suspicious patterns among accounts affiliated with South Korean diplomatic accounts. By comparing South Korean-affiliated accounts with Chinese-affiliated accounts, this report highlights several patterns, including accounts’ profile and activity status, that help to examine how the behavior of astroturfing accounts differ from that of regular accounts.
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