Sunday, June 3, 2012

Propaganda

“We rely on media to serve as our window on the world, but media can also distort what we see. It can act as a lens or as a filter, enlarging some topics and minimizing others”
Propaganda is defined as “the systematic dissemination of information meant to support or discredit an idea.” A new study out of Georgia Tech [ link ] identifies four ways to recognize propaganda sent by political advocates over Twitter. They refer to them as hyper-advocates, whose actions separate them from typical users.  Their tactics:
 
1. Send a high volume of tweets over a short period of time. 2. Re-tweet frequently, sending little in the way of original content.  3. Quickly re-tweet the content of others and   4. Coordinate with other, seemingly unrelated users to send duplicate or near-duplicate messages on the same topic simultaneously.

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