LinkedIn Usage by SBF120 CEOs
18 Jun 2024
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Phil. P. the first Astroturfing / Botting act of the presidential election
It was bound to happen. I've just unearthed the first actual use of bots in the French presidential election. And it may well have influenced some quantitative statistical studies based on tweets. Let's take a look.
And for good reason: it's obvious that he's bought followers on Twitter:
The profile is fairly easy to spot when you look at his tweets, since he retweets Marine Lepen quite often
When he's not tweeting Fdesouche articles:
Or in accounts that were among those that propagated the Ali Juppé phenomenon:
If you put together his tweets on the Primary, you can clearly see the montage:
If you look at the people who retweeted the various tweets, you can clearly see that they are robots or real accounts paid for by the resale platforms:
In addition to these accounts, which are clearly purchased accounts, there are also this type of account:
I estimate the number of different accounts promoting Trump, the FN, etc. to be no less than 135!
He has had to spend between 1000 and 2000 euros this month alone.
His name is Phil P., he calls himself a research manager and he's been on Twitter for barely 3 months. I first spotted him because of the large number of retweets in my political panels. I found it quite astonishing that he had over 1,200 retweets for a single political tweet.
And for good reason: it's obvious that he's bought followers on Twitter:
The profile is fairly easy to spot when you look at his tweets, since he retweets Marine Lepen quite often
When he's not tweeting Fdesouche articles:
Or in accounts that were among those that propagated the Ali Juppé phenomenon:
If you put together his tweets on the Primary, you can clearly see the montage:
If you look at the people who retweeted the various tweets, you can clearly see that they are robots or real accounts paid for by the resale platforms:
In addition to these accounts, which are clearly purchased accounts, there are also this type of account:
I estimate the number of different accounts promoting Trump, the FN, etc. to be no less than 135!
How do we do it?
- For the qualitative via his 135 accounts, he uses a technique that I've already debunked here: "How does a young troll reach the trending topics?" i.e. using multiple accounts and a tweetdeck that sends the same tweet/retweet via all the accounts. The technique is the same. They all tweet at the same second from Tweetdeck.
- For quantitative volume, he has bought his followers and retweets from follower/RT factories. However, the cost of this type of service has become quite high:
And why is that?
- When we look at a hashtag via the Twitter application, the number of tweets is increasingly filtered so as not to inundate us with messages. Tweets from accounts with a certain authority (number of followers/certified accounts) are the ones that appear most often. (number of followers/certified accounts) This allows us to be more visible.
- It gives the illusion of a majority, which is a principle used in the "bandwagon effect" theory, i.e. following a majority.
- At a time when so many studies are being published on social networks, this has a powerful influence on dashboards such as word clouds and others.
- Tweetdeck accounts can be used to place an item in trending topics, as I demonstrated with the young troll.
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