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Can One Researcher & a Lot of Bots Manipulate Social Movements on Twitter?
Twitter was concerned a boon for protesters in Iran and Egypt who used the social networking service to communicate. We have a tendency to presume that the movement was widespread — that all protestors were using digital services equally. Of course, that was not quite the case and researchers at the Web Ecology Project asked a simple question. Can you game social movement using bots, instead of humans: Can one person controlling an identity, or a group of identities, really shape social architecture? Actually, yes. The Web Ecology Project’s analysis of 2009’s post-election protests in Iran revealed that only a…