Twitter politics in Mexico: #PueblaConBarbosa
Artificial Twitter trending topics
Introduction
Twitter is an important component to do politics, as it is common to see politicians, citizens, political experts, press, and organizations develop themselves in this platform, and even debate with each other about any given topic.
The social media platform has become a 140-character battlefield among a broad set of actors, from USA’s president, to the common citizen. It is a place in which actors converge through a direct channel with each other.
“Twitter can set the agenda for what journalists are covering — just think about the ways Trump’s tweets have, over the course of the past six months, set the agenda,” — The Guardian, John Parmelee, author of Politics and the Twitter Revolution.
And she continues explaining that:
“Twitter’s basically used by politicians to influence other influencers. It’s a very small universe of people, but it’s people who can move an agenda. It’s like the practice of lobbying — people might say, ‘How can that be effective when you’re talking to such a small group of people?’ But they’re the group that’s making legislation.”
Simply put, Twitter is not only another social media, but it is a political tool aimed to change public opinion and set forward a political agenda.
Additionally, no matter how much the individual is known in real life, in Twitter anyone can become a well known person as well. US examples would be President D. Trump and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mexico’s would be Sen. Jesusa Rodríguez that became popular after tweeting a video of herself saying that every time you eat a taco you commemorate Tenochtitlan’s downfall. Another interesting account to watch Hijas De La Mx, an opposition group conformed by women.
“Social media is allowing individual politicians to further their own careers at the expense of their party’s reputation. The result is that U.S. politics is quickly changing into a parade of celebrities.” — Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen
Being a political tool is a double-edged sword, as not only individuals use it to make politics, but a large set of organizations or groups employ bots and fake accounts to artificially push hashtags and trending topics too. This helps to popularize any given political agenda and shape public opinion.
No country is exempt from this practice, and to demonstrate this further, this article will analyse the recent Mexican hashtag #PueblaConBarbosa. This is a phenomenon that happens on a daily basis in every country, and it is something we should be aware of in order to tackle disinformation and false perceptions. We should develop a verification culture.
Context
Puebla’s elected governor Martha Erika Alonso perished in a polemical helicopter crash, leaving a vacuum in the governor’s seat. This meant that new elections had to be called.
Campaigns started the 30th of March and will end the 29th of May. The candidates are Miguel Barbosa for Morena (current ruling party), Enrique Cárdenas for PAN/PRD, and Alberto Jiménez for PRI. The controversy is that Miguel Barbosa was the main contender against Martha Erika Alonso in the past election, and will compete again, showing a desire to win this time.
As elections started, the hashtag #PueblaConBarbosa (#PueblaWithBarbosa) quickly became a trending topic on Mexican Twitter, with thousands of tweets using said hashtag.
So, how did this happen so quickly?
Twitter algorithm
Before explaining my methodology I think it is important to understand how trends work on Twitter. On their FAQ one can read that:
“Trends are determined by an algorithm and, by default, are tailored for you based on who you follow, your interests, and your location. This algorithm identifies topics that are popular now, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help you discover the hottest emerging topics of discussion on Twitter.” — Twitter FAQ
Meaning that the users will see what is trending on each different day, or better said, what is popular regarding your Twitter-fingerprint or simply by location. In addition, the way trends are calculated is by a similarity process, i.e. tweets that are similar will be grouped together:
“The number of Tweets that are related to the trends is just one of the factors the algorithm looks at when ranking and determining trends. Algorithmically, trends and hashtags are grouped together if they are related to the same topic. For instance, #MondayMotivation and #MotivationMonday may both be represented by #MondayMotivation.” — Twitter FAQ
Furthermore, the FAQ also answers how anyone can participate in a trend, which is the core on how artificially creating a trending topic works.
“Simply post a Tweet including the exact word or phrase as it appears in the trends list (with the hashtag, if you see one). Due to the large number of people Tweeting about these specific trends, you may not always be able to find your particular Tweet in search, but your followers will always see your Tweets.” — Twitter FAQ
In other words, by solely using the word or hashtag in one’s tweet, it will contribute in making said hashtag or word a trend. This is important to remember.
Methodology
I mined 5k tweets that contained #PueblaConBarbosa and that were created since the 30th of March. I then proceeded to extract the top 15: 1) users that retweeted the most, 2) most retweeted tweets, 3) and the most liked tweets.
I chose to mine 5k tweets over mining more, as the results remained almost the same with minor variations, and because it was faster to process in my computer.
Moreover, from those 5k tweets I extracted the tweets that are not retweets and ended with 973 tweets. Afterwards I extracted the users, and found that those 973 tweets were created by only 398 accounts. As additional information, 1735 accounts contributed to the creation of the 5k tweets I mined without discriminating between retweets.
Moreover, I made a discrimination of all tweets posted by accounts created in 2019, as well as making a distinction of the creation year of all users in the sample.
Phrased differently, to start a trend ~398 users need to tweet 2.5 times each with the hashtag continuously for the retweet waves to start. Then, additional ~1337 users need to retweet 3 posts each with said hashtag for it to become a trending topic.
Very low numbers.
Results
Users that tweeted the most
Most of the users that (re-)tweeted the hashtag the most were created days prior the start of the campaign. During the launch of the hashtag, the accounts repeatedly tweeted it in the span of the day, many tweeting it over 50 times, some over 100 times, and one over 300 times, as seen in the graphic below.
Ten of the above shown users were created in 2019, from which five of them were created just in March as seen in the table below, along with some example accounts. Other accounts were created also recently with the sole purpose on pushing #PueblaConBarbosa as a trending topic. Many of these accounts have already been flagged as suspicious accounts, prompting users the warning if they want to proceed to see the account or not.
“Warning: This account is temporally restricted. You are seeing this warning because this account has showed suspicious activity. Do you still want to see it?”
Another interesting fact is that from the 398 accounts that tweeted the “original” 973 tweets, 106 accounts were created in 2019, most of them in the month of March and even some in April. We should keep in mind that the sample was taken on April 1st.
Even more interesting is that of those 106 accounts, the ones that tweeted the hashtag the most were the ones created in February and in March, just before the campaign as seen in the graphs below. The accounts created in February probably served to push other trending hashtags as well.
It is highly probable that most of the accounts created in 2019 and in the months of March and April are fake accounts, or accounts solely used to promote further the hashtag.
Furthermore, the accounts created in 2019 posted one third of the 5,000 sample (1648 tweets), without discriminating retweets. This indicates further that the majority of the tweets with #PueblaConBarbosa were most probable fake accounts or automated accounts tweeting and retweeting the hashtag.
Needless to say, it is clear that there was some sort of manipulation to push the hashtag into a trending topics, portraying the notion that many people were tweeting about it, and distorting the perception of how many actually are, in this case, in favor of Barbosa, making it seem in Twitter that he is the strongest candidate.
Another peculiar characteristic of many tweeting accounts is the prevalence of #RedAMLOVE or #RedAMLO. As seen below, these accounts are in the top 15 that tweeted the most, they were created in March, and they have the mentioned hashtags in their descriptions. #RedAMLO is a group of people and fake accounts that target president-critical individuals on Twitter, especially the press, and help support any tweet in favor of Morena, Mexico’s ruling party.
If you want to know more about it, ITESO made a great analysis of this network.
Most retweeted and liked tweets
Regarding the most retweeted and liked tweets, most of them are the same tweet with minor differences between how much it was liked and retweeted. What can be seen in the graphs below is that accounts tend to like more a tweet instead of retweeting it, probably meaning that it had a big reach towards their audience. A liked tweet appears in the feed of all the followers of any account, helping its dissemination.
I will show some examples from the graph below. Besides this, I will list the first ten most retweeted tweet IDs at the end. To look them up simply put the ID at the end of the following URL: https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/[ID]. Example:
Coincidentally, three of the top retweeted tweets are against Barbosa, especially one of them is exposing that #PueblaConBarbosa is a paid hashtag by Morena. Ironically, they also contribute into bringing the hashtag to the trending topics. Still, the majority are in favor of Morena‘s candidate.
Explore them by yourself:
- 1112414637205577728
- 1112436678872965120
- 1112402600446562306
- 1112454104599719949
- 1112476930908004353
- 1112472303512641536
- 1112417561021476864
- 1112390886393085953
- 1112467191922937857
- 1112420299293814784
Conclusion
To conclude, this is a good example to show how a hashtag can make it into the day‘s trending topic artificially and with just a few accounts. Not all accounts are necessarily bots, with many also being manually operated by real people. Additionally, using an upcoming hashtag to criticize it, also contributes to make it popular.
This gives the perception that many are talking about the topic, and that it has many supporters or is the best one. It is important to take any political hashtags with a grain of salt, as perceptions might be biased, just as demonstrated above.
This is also how disinformation can easily occur and disseminate. A fake news or defamatory hashtag might be pushed artificially into the trending topic, making it seem that the topic is true and many are supposedly talking or tweeting about it, whilst in truth it is just an attempt to distort reality.
It does not matter if the news is later uncovered as a fake one, the damage is done and many might believe that the fake news is true. This is how disinformation operates, and this is possible since most of the people do not verify the source or the veracity of said news.
To combat this, the people should develop a verification culture, i.e. to develop the habit of fact-checking every piece of information that might seem odd, sensationalist, or that has a clear political intention.
We are already in the Information Era, hence everyone should learn how to handle the constant stream of information we receive. The three recommendations I can give are the following:
1) Verify the source of the news.
2) Check the information with two or three other sources.
3) Read only what reputable sources report about. Even here one has to be careful given that there are also sources that follow a political agenda with certain topics.
4) Do not receive your information through social media, such as a Facebook Site or through memes.
5) Do not only read the title of a news, read its content as well.
Bonus
Just to accentuate the irony of bots/fake accounts usage in politics, last week Monda Observanto tweeted a graphic showing the users that retweeted #PueblaConBarbosa the most. The main account, Pueblan politician @ELIZABETHGOC, blindly retweeted it:
The tweet reads:
“Today #PueblaConBarbosa rapidly became a trending topic artificially. Many of these accounts were created in past days. We have to be careful with disinformation and its origins.”
She had probably a bot or a person retweeting and liking every tweet with said hashtag without analyzing anything further, hence this automatized retweet.
