Observatory of Social Media: Cambridge Analytica

Looks like the Cambridge Analytica story is gaining traction. Here is some data from the Observatory of Social Media.

This is what people are tweeting about when they tweet about Cambridge Analytica. Mostly Facebook. Bannon also is on there. Trumprussia and impeachtrump. This was just tweets for the last few days. You can explore the graph here.

There has been a huge up tick in tweets about #cambridgeanalytica. 

These are the people that are tweeting about it. Examine the graph here.

Finally, who are these people? Using Botometer, we can see if these accounts or bots or not. One of the weaknesses of this approach is that organizational accounts often have quite high scores.

Anyways, a lot of the users don't have high bot scores, but some do. Like MassAGO, which is the official account of the Massachusetts Attorney General, Maura Healey. So I decided to go through her followers looking for bots. Why? Because the data above was a bit boring. She was one of the more interesting hits. Here is a list of followers with a bot score 60% or higher. There are also interesting examples of followers with no tweets. Has she paid a service to inflate her follower numbers? I'll save that for another time. Here are the first 30 potential bots discovered. 

In coming posts, I will attempt to examine some of these users in more detail.