Untitled Document

Hijacking the Romney Search

At 8:00 am (CDT) I checked the searches for Twitter messages. Between midnight and 8:00 am the search for Obama found 30,000 messages. The search for Romney found 44,000 messages. There have never been more Twitter messages mentioning Romney than mentioning Obama. So, I started looking at the messages accumulated by the Romney search. A remarkably large number did not contain the word Romney, had an image of a scantily clad young woman, and had a url that pointed to a website offering business tips. I did not see messages with scantily clad young men so you can tell who the 'suckers' are according to the planners of the search takeover.

MarianneGoodman | 7/19/2012 | 0:59 | #taurus Aid me Enable me help meeee How could I fix this particular!!! http://t.co/gDybL54j

JerriFoley4 | 7/19/2012 | 0:59 | Let the songs beginning!! http://t.co/xGF559Qk

EdithConway6 | 7/19/2012 | 0:59 | #cheatingisokayif jajajaja the reason funny because heck ajajaja http://t.co/VJ6Du0ZR

BettyWi17903825 | 7/19/2012 | 0:59 | Brenda is in fact such a stupid girl, she cannot understand why hahaha: http://t.co/AVa1fzA6

The messages had nothing to do with Romney or politics. Like these four they did not seem to have much point at all. They were filling space in a stream of messages produced by the search.

I thought it might by my computer that had been hijacked so I tried another one. It produced the same results. So I thought it might be the ip address of my modem that had been hijacked. I started a search on a computer in my office at the university, and it produced the same results. I tried two online systems that do search. One is Tweettronics that gives me a considerable amount of information on a small sample of messages; it was hijacked as well. The other is monitter that displays the results of a search in real time. It was also hijacked. Then I tried Twitter's search. That produced only messages containing Romney. The hijacking seems to have been quite widespread though it did not get to Twitter.

The search was being hijacked. And it is easy to detect the messages infecting the search since they did not contain Romney.

The dark line is the total number of messages found per hour and the lighter line is the number containing Romney. Between midnight and 1:00 am 5,000 messages were found and only 1800 contained Romney. Three out of five were invaders. Between 4:00 and 5:00 am another 5,000 messages were found and only 915 contained Romney -- four of five were invaders. The number of messages found per hour peaked at 11:00 am with 15,718 total messages and 11,512 contained Romney. By that point the balance had shifted and two of three contained Romney. The number per hour declined after that, and by 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm the messages that did not contain Romney was the difference between 7,510 and 7,266. The number of messages without Romney was down to 284.

For the entire search from midnight to 9:00 pm the total number of messages was 186,661; and the number containing romney was 131,603. In that twenty-one hour period 55,000 messages were found that did not contain the search term.

Astroturfing is the term used when messages are injected into a stream to give the appearance of a high level of support/interest for whatever is the object of the communication. For Twitter that takes a bit of doing because there has to be an account. If you want to broadcast 55,000 messages it would take a large number of accounts as well as producing the messages and submitting them. However, this does not seem to fit the definition. Someone had to generate the accounts, but there was nothing about Romney in the messages so they would hardly look like high levels of support. And it is equally hard to imagine that many people would want to get business tips from this stream. Unless the motivation was angering people wanting to read about Romney it is pretty hard to imagine what the motivation was.

What is most unusual about this stream of messages was that they were found when doing a search for Romney. The search found 55,000 messages that did not contain the word along with the 131,000 that did. It was sneaky hijacking.