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posted by martyb on Friday September 09 2016, @02:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the astroturfers-gets-a-trim dept.

An algorithm developed at Carnegie Mellon University makes it easier to determine if someone has faked an Amazon or Yelp review or if a politician with a suspiciously large number of Twitter followers might have bought and paid for that popularity.

The method, called FRAUDAR, marks the latest escalation in the cat-and-mouse game played by online fraudsters and the social media platforms that try to out them. In particular, the new algorithm makes it possible to see through camouflage that fraudsters use to make themselves look legitimate, said Christos Faloutsos, professor of machine learning and computer science.

In real-world experiments using Twitter data for 41.7 million users and 1.47 billion followers, FRAUDAR fingered more than 4,000 accounts not previously identified as fraudulent, including many that used known follower-buying services such as TweepMe and TweeterGetter.

Bad news for the nascent astroturfing industry.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @04:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @04:19PM (#399669)

    Where I live. I think people are scared to say who they are voting for. There are pretty much 0 signs. I have lived here fore 20 years. I have never seen this time of year with 0 signs. It is usually fucking bonkers how many signs. People usually have 3 or 4 in their yards. All intersections have 15-20 of them. This year? None.

    I also never hear of a Hillary voter saying they are afraid of what a trump supporter will do. But the other way around I hear people saying things like 'I am just keeping it to myself as I dont want any trouble'.

    That would explain why the polls radically shift every other day.
    The polls are massaged every day to keep them 'close'. To the media organizations this is their Christmas. Most of these groups hemorrhage money. This is when they make bank on everything. So keep it close, keep people tuning in. Take the CNN one from a few days ago. At first Trump is up by 2. They change it around a bit and he is down by 2 a 4 point swing. They can pretty much make those numbers say what they want. Do you think they actually like talking about Trump? They obviously hate the hell out of him. But those left who are paying attention to them it draws viewers. They desperately need viewers. CNN once the powerhouse of 24/7 news is down to 600-700k viewers per day. Estimates are 500k of those are 'default stations'. Basically walk into a bank and CNN will be on the TV there, walk through and airport. So they are putting more and more outrageous stuff up to draw viewers. They are mixing the polls up a bit to keep people looking. If it just says one or the other all the way down people will ignore them and the org publishing them.

    If we look at historical voting. it usually is about 49.7 to 49.7 with a small group of people actually picking the winners. Hell the 2000 election came down to a couple of hundred people deciding it. The spread will be a bit wider this year as Johnson will snag some from both groups but not as much as he is polling by. Historically it has been ~3-5% for someone like him.

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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday September 09 2016, @04:43PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday September 09 2016, @04:43PM (#399689)

    With a 50/50 split, you don't need to massage the number to have the "horse-race" swing 1 or 2 points every day. The polls are only accurate to within 2%. Every 20 days or so, the poll will be off by more than that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @05:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @05:24PM (#399713)

      MoE for pretty much all of the polls are 5-9% right now. That is a pretty big range and lets room for interpretation (by design, I think someone like NBC can figure out how to do a poll by now). If they really had them in in the 1-2% range I could give them a bit more credence. One major aggregate poll is using data from May as a bellweather of how the election is going.

      Usually until about 1-2 weeks out there is surprisingly 20% or so people who 'dont know'. But it almost always ends up 50/50. The news stations make it seem like it is close and all over the place. They *need* viewers to sell to their customers. The whole news media is imploding. No one wants print anymore. People are cutting the cord. Sound bites rule the internet. Investigative journalism takes time and large amounts of resources. If someone gave you 1 million dollars to invest. Would you put money into a news media company? You would think long and hard about that.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @05:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @05:26PM (#399715)

    I also never hear of a Hillary voter saying they are afraid of what a trump supporter will do. But the other way around I hear people saying things like 'I am just keeping it to myself as I dont want any trouble'.

    This may not count since it's online and I'm posting AC, but I will likely vote for Clinton. I am terrified of what a Trump supporter may do. I realize they're not all nutbars, but enough of them are. I'm not even really afraid of Trump himself. It's his supporters. Even before Trump was a candidate, what would become the alt-right this year were getting themselves riled up and physically intimidating people they thought were trying to make Christmas illegal.

    I've been seeing Trump bumper stickers. A house on my street has a Trump flag. A flag for a political candidate! Flying at the same height as the US flag! But I've also noticed the yard signs are missing.

    Trump won't be the end of it. Trump wasn't the start of it. After the total economic collapse in 2017, this all will finally ignite violent riots in every major city by 2018. A race war? Hah. Not just a race war.

    I'm only voting for Clinton because I don't want to be quietly rounded up for the FEMA concentration camps because of a medical condition that the alt-right believe is unpossible. They can round me up because I post here instead. The FEMA concentration camps are coming whether Trump or Clinton wins.