Flap’s Links and Comments for September 8th through September 9th

These are my links for September 8th through September 9th:

• Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams – Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced annotations.

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• How Political Operatives Use Astrotweeting to Spread Lies About Candidates– As part of my research for The Voting Wars, I have been reading a great deal of computer science and related research on Twitter and politics. Some of the most interesting work is coming out of Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing.The research on astrotweeting, though too tangential to my book, is worth flagging for readers. In this paper, the authors describe how political operatives set up fake accounts to spread rumors or false statements about candidates. This is done in a way to make it appear as though the information is coming from numerous sources, to convey the impression that the information is reliable. Here is a description of one such effort the researchers uncovered:=======

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• Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Daily Drill: September 9, 2011 – The Daily Drill: September 9, 2011
• Dilbert September 9, 2011 – It’s Complicated » Flap’s California Blog – Dilbert September 9, 2011 – It’s Complicated
• @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-09-09 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-09-09 #tcot #catcot
• Day By Day September 9, 2011 – Russian to Judgment | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Day By Day September 9, 2011 – Russian to Judgment #tcot #catcot
• Flap’s Links and Comments for September 7th through September 8th | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Flap’s Links and Comments for September 7th through September 8th #tcot #catcot
• President 2012: Rick Perry Gets Physical …..Against Ron Paul | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012: Rick Perry Gets Physical …..Against Ron Paul #tcot #catcot
• President 2012: FBI Raids Obama-Backed Solyndra | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012: FBI Raids Obama-Backed Solyndra #tcot #catcot
• Flap’s Dentistry Blog: 5 Years Enough for Use of Fosamax and Other Bisphosphonates? – 5 Years Enough for Use of Fosamax and Other Bisphosphonates?
• Socal Power Outage: @nbcla helicopter over San Clemente wher… on Twitpic – RT @tarawallis: Socal Power Outage: @nbcla helicopter over San Clemente where intersections are without power.
• Gregory Flap Cole: “RT @latimes: For blackout …” « Deck.ly – RT @latimes: For blackout updates, San Diego Gas & Electric (@SDGE) is a good source; they’re live-tweeting th… (cont)
• Obama Pleads With Congress ‘Pass This Plan’ — Or Else – RT @businessinsider: Jon Huntsman calls Obama’s plan a “list of regurgitated half-measures”