‘Obscure accounts’ to make Twitter rowdy pre-elections

OBSCURE accounts and online mudslinging are expected to make Twitter a rowdy platform as the country inches closer to the May 2022 presidential polls, according to the University of the Philippines-based Philippine Media Monitoring Laboratory (PMML).

On Wednesday, researchers from the UP Communication Research Department, Jon Benedik A. Bunquin and Marie Fatima I. Gaw, shared their findings which revealed that unidentifiable actors have already dominated what was previously reputed as an “elite” platform hosting many of the world’s movers and shakers.

These unidentifiable actors are those owned by people whose identities online are not verifiable but are able to actively participate and significantly influence the discussion on Twitter. They have even crowded out news media in terms of directing electoral discourse on the platform.

“So far, we are seeing a lot of suspended and unidentifiable, obscure accounts rising in terms of influence. So I think there’s a tendency for that pattern to continue. We will be expecting a larger volume of obscure accounts, being noisier on the platform, having more influence in shaping the electoral discourse as we approach the elections,” Bunquin said.

“In terms of sentiment, later on we’ll see more attacks toward specific candidates. Right now, we’re seeing them happening. But in the succeeding months, as we draw closer to the elections, I think [there] will be more salient, more incendiary, more inflammatory discussions happening on the platform,” he added.

“If you are Twitter users, you probably have seen this happening already but the value of the research really is, you only have a portion of the network [and you need to see] the network from [how] a macro perspective looks at the trend. Because there are things that are invisible to us as things are personalized,” Gaw said.

Red flag

THE danger created by these obscure Twitter accounts, Bunquin said, is that these accounts are able to take part in “coordinated campaigns and tactics that can manufacture and mislead electoral discourse.”

He said many of these account holders are also able to skirt Twitter’s fair use policy. The ways by which these accounts circumvent Twitter’s rules include keeping long threads and being more “human like” in their tweets, preventing the platform from flagging them.

Gaw added that bots online are behaving less like bots by behaving more like humans. They even fool data scientists and even Twitter. She said platforms should try to make a bigger effort in addressing and identifying these instances.

Others take advantage of their numbers. Bunquin said while platforms like Twitter respond to reports, particularly mass reporting of accounts that violate their fair use rules, not all of these violators are being reported and being reported en masse.

This allows such account holders to hide behind their “anonymity,” keep themselves below the radar of mass reporting, and continue participating and influencing the public sphere in favor of or against one issue or candidate, particularly on Twitter.

“One of the ways, I think, that could be useful is to make the creation of new accounts more visible.

In the data, you saw, there’s a lot of suspended accounts so on hindsight, Twitter might help, but somehow the damage has been done because they were able to Tweet and contribute to a trending topic,” Gaw said.

“In that way, after being suspended, you are able to create new ones. So, are there parameters that Twitter can do to increase the barriers in creating new accounts? Do you need a maturity threshold to be able to do a particular thing? So those are the things that I have read recently to minimize manipulation and harm on platforms,” she explained.

Results

BASED on the results, in terms of in degree centrality which measures the popularity of users, politicians were the most interacted with on Twitter in the first and second quarters. They received the largest volume of tweets, retweets, mentions, and replies on the platform during the period.

In terms of out-degree centrality, which measures the amount of noise created by Twitter users, obscure accounts have been very active on the platform in the first and second quarters.

“Unidentifiable accounts, and accounts that have been suspended and have become inexistent during the period of classification have been generating more noise compared to other actors during Q1, and their networked activity significantly increased during Q2 compared to others,” Bunquin said in a presentation.

In terms of betweenness centrality, which is created by so-called bridge users or those linking two or more communities on Twitter, politicians do this best on the platform. They serve as focal points for communities in the network.

Eigenvector centrality, which measures the impact of VIP accounts that have high re tweets, mentions, and replies from other users, showed that socialmedia influencers and politicians serve as the focal point of attention from wellconnected accounts in the network.

“Influencers served as the center of attention from other central users during Q 1 followed by political actors. however, political actors took the lead during Q2, and influencers dropped further below news media,” Bunquin said.