The ultimate guide to bust fake tweeters: A video toolkit in 10 steps by Henk van Ess.
From the post:
Twitter is full of false information. Even Twitter co-founder Ev Williams recognizes that there is a “junk information epidemic going on,” as “[ad-driven platforms] are benefiting from people generating attention at pretty much any cost.”
This video toolkit is intended to help you debunk dubious tweets. It was first developed in research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Arena Program at the London School of Economics to detect Russian social media influence during the German elections. It was also the basis for a related BuzzFeed article on a Russian bot farm and tweets about the AfD — the far-right party that will enter the German parliament for the first time.
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This is an excellence resource for teaching users skepticism about Twitter accounts.
For your use in creating a personal cheatsheet (read van Ess for the links):
- Find the exact minute of birth
- Find the first words
- Check the followers
- Find Twitter users in Facebook
- Find suspicious words in tweets
- Searching in big data
- Connect a made up Twitter handle to a real social media account
- Find a social score
- How alive is the bot?
- When (and how) is your bot tweeting?
Deciding that a Twitter account maybe a legitimate is only the first step in evaluating tweeted content.
The @WSJ account belongs to the Wall Street Journal, but it doesn’t follow their tweets are accurate or even true. Witness their repetition of government rumors about Kerpersky Lab for example. Not one shred of evidence, but WSJ repeats it.
Be skeptical of all Tweets, not just ones attributed to the “enemy of the day.”