3 April 2014:Ā For every success story, like Twitter’s role in organising movements in Egypt and Libya, there are examples of spam, unwanted marketing and astrosurfing, that undermine the utility of social media platforms.
Astrosurfing refers to the creation of an artificial āgrassrootsā movement to advance an agenda or promote a commercial product. By artificial, we mean an entity or collection of entities that disguise their efforts to influence public discourse by making it appear as a legitimate, independent reaction by real people.
While astrosurfing has been around since the mid 80s, online astrosurfing is a relatively newer phenomenon, about which little is known. In addition, astrosurfing is qualitatively different from other malicious activities like spam, as the focus is more on propaganda as opposed to selling or marketing. Hence known techniques to detect spam may not work for detecting astrosurfing behavior.
Our project aims to perform a thorough characterisation of astrosurfing profiles as gathered by the Truthy project. We show that known methods to detect spam are marginally successful in detecting astrosurfing behavior. Our study of temporal and social properties of such profiles shows that there is no single distinguishing characteristic of astrosurfing profiles. Our study points towards the set of methods that can be used to uncover such profiles.
The ultimate aim of this project is to provide a service to media companies who want to receive accurate and authentic information streams and not be overwhelmed with malicious content.
