IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 9
fake news and bots have manipulat-
ed public opinion online by spread-
ing false and malicious information.
She said: "Today we have fake sites,
bots, trolls - things that regener-
ate themselves, reinforcing opin-
ions with certain algorithms and we
have to learn to deal with them" [36].
The right-wing Alternative for Germa-
ny (AfD) already has more Facebook
likes than Merkel's Christian Demo-
crats (CDU) and the center-left
Social Democrats (SPD) combined.
Merkel is worried the AfD might use
Trump-like strategies on social media
channels to sway the vote.
It is not just that the bots are gen-
erating fake news [35], but that the
algorithms that Facebook deploys
as content are shared between
user accounts, creating "echo cham-
bers" and outlets for reverberation
[37]. However in Germany, Facebook,
which has been criticized for fail-
ing to police hate speech, in 2016
has just been legally classified as
a "media company," which means
it will now be held accountable for
the content it publishes. While the
major political parties responded by
saying they will not utilize "bots for
votes," it is now also outside geopo-
litical forces (e.g., Russians) who are
chiming in, attempting to drive social
media sentiment with their own hid-
den agendas [35].
FIguRE 4. Twitter image taken from [41].
ian mokhabarat (intelligence) agents
with poor command of both written
Arabic and English, and an endless
arsenal of bile and insults" [38]. But
when protesters continued despite
the harassment, spambots created by
Bahrain company EGHNA were co-
opted to create pro-regime accounts
[39]. The pro-regime messages then
flooded hashtags that had pro-revo-
lution narratives.
This essentially drowned out pro-
testers' voices with irrelevant infor-
mation - such as photography of
Syria. @LovelySyria, @SyriaBeauty
a nd @DNNUpdates dominated
#Syria with a flood of predetermined
tweets every few minutes from EGH-
NA's media server [40]. Figure 4 pro-
vides an example of such tweets.
Others who were using Twitter to
portray the realities of the conflict in
Syria publicly opposed the use of the
spambots (see Figure 5) [43].
Since 2014, the Islamic State ter-
ror group has "ghost-tweeted" its
Spambots and Hijacking
Hashtags in Syria
During the Arab Spring, online ac -
tivists were able to provide eyewit-
ness accounts of uprisings in real
time. In Syria, protesters used the
hashtags #Syria, #Daraa, and #Mar15
to appeal for support from a global
theater [18]. It did not take long for
government intelligence officers to
threaten online protesters with ver-
bal assaults and one-on-one intimi-
dation techniques. Syrian blogger
Anas Qtiesh wrote: "These accounts
were believed to be manned by Syr-
june 2017
∕
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
messages to make it look like it has a
large, sympathetic following [44]. This
has been a deliberate act to try and
attract resources, both human and
financial, from global constituents.
Tweets have consisted of allegations
of mass killings of Iraqi soldiers and
more [45]. This activity shows how
extremists are employing the same
social media strategies as some gov-
ernments and social activists.
Sweeping Surveillance
in China
In May 2016, China was exposed for
purportedly fabricating 488 million
social media comments annually
in an effort to distract users' atten-
tion from bad news and politically
sensitive issues [46]. A recent three-
month study found 13% of messag-
es had been deleted on Sina Weibo
(Twitter's equivalent in China) in a
bid to crack down on what govern-
ment officials identified as politi-
cally charged messages [47]. It is
9
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