Month: August 2018

“Justin” set his Twitter location as Austin, Texas, but his time zone was set to Moscow Standard Time.

When a Smart Data Science Friend (hi Scott!) shared this in October 2017, I knew that organizations in Russia had mounted used social media to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but I hadn’t realized the scale or effectiveness of their efforts. Looking back, we can see that “Justin” wasn’t alone. How many other Russians were out there on Twitter pretending to be Americans?

I’d like to find out.

Last Wednesday, I wrote about an article published on FiveThirtyEight.com: “Why We’re Sharing 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets. As I said there, I downloaded the dataset that they generously made available on GitHub (technically, I forked the repository into my own GitHub space) and then loaded it into the SciServer online science suite. Let me know if you’d like to join this effort.

I used Python’s regular expression features to do a quick search through 1,849,687 million English-language tweets in the FiveThirtyEight dataset. I looked for tweets that showed evidence of claiming to be Americans – featuring “I’m” or “I am” plus some form of “USA” or “America” or “American”. The screenshot below shows me running that command inside a Jupyter notebook in SciServer Compute:

The search returned 177 tweets from 84 separate authors – counts that should in no way be considered scientific or used for any kind of analysis, either quantitative or qualitative. I then read through all 177 tweets and selected only those that unambiguously claimed to be American citizens/voters.

I was left with 29 tweets from 20 separate Twitter handles, covering the period from December 2014 to August 2017. (Of course, there is no reason to think that Russians impersonating Americans suddenly stopped in August 2017.) Here are five selected randomly:

• @ISRAEL_WILLS on February 9, 2015: Hope everyone had a great day yesterday. I’m happy we don’t have a war on the American soil. Thank you to all the military serving today. 🙂
• @JANI_S_JAC on July 4, 2015: #HappyIndependenceDay I’m a patriot and it’s sad for me to see what’s happening to America today
• @TEN_GOP on February 3, 2016: If I were a dem I’d be embarrassed by who represents my party. But I could never be a dem. For I’m American! #TCOT
• @TEN_GOP on March 25, 2016: ‘@COJeepGirl well b/c I’m American and Hussein is the President atm’
• @JANSKEESTR on August 15, 2017: I voted for Trump because I knew he’s the only man who could save America from liberal degeneracy. I’m still sure that I made a right choice

It’s worth reiterating: all of these people are claiming — directly, unambiguously — to be American citizens. All of them are Russian. It is not illegal in most circumstances to claim that you are someone else online. Nor is it illegal for a foreign citizen to have an opinion on a U.S. election. But I find it profoundly disturbing that we are only now realizing the full extent of these Russian operations. The best we can do right now is to try to understand how these trolls have operated in the past in hopes of preventing similar incidents in the future.

One thing is clear: America has never been so ready for your Rocky & Bullwinkle references. Russian catfisher @TEN_GOP says it best:

Trump was a strong & fearless LEADER today. I’m proud to be an American.

P.S. Here is an Excel spreadsheet containing the tweets that I identified, if you’d like to play with the data yourself.

As I mentioned on Friday, when I first heard about the Italian Space Agency’s announcement of water on Mars, I was skeptical. Various space agencies have cried wolf on major discoveries before – most famously, with “NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today’s Mars (it’s actually sand) and Discovery of “Arsenic-bug” Expands Definition of Life (it wasn’t, and it doesn’t). This is not a conspiracy — it’s just overexcitement. Scientists work hard to keep themselves free of confirmation bias, but they’re still human, and sometimes they still see what they want to see.

Given this history, how do we know that it really is a wolf this time? I’ve found that it helps to ask the obvious question.

Aside… This is what bothers me most about global warming deniers. They will go on for pages and pages about July temperatures in Paraguay, without even trying to answer the obvious question: why did global temperatures start to increase at exactly the time when we started releasing into the atmosphere a gas that is known to increase temperatures?

In the case of water on Mars, here is the obvious question. We know for sure that there is liquid water on one of the nine planets in the Solar System: here on Earth. The research team claims that there is liquid water under the polar ice caps on Mars. Could the same techniques they used have detected water under Earth’s polar ice caps, where we know there is water?

It’s right there in the second sentence of the paper that published the announcement (Orosei et al. 2018): “Radio echo sounding (RES) is a suitable technique to resolve this dispute, because low-frequency radars have been used extensively and successfully to detect liquid water at the bottom of terrestrial polar ice sheets.”

The technique they used is the IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE version of a commonly-used technique called ground-penetrating radar (GPR). GPR involves transmitting radio waves into the ground, then listening for the echoes of those waves reflecting off various underground layers. The strength of the return signals reflected off each layer tells you what the layer is made of, and nothing reflects quite like water. And that water-related pattern is exactly that kind of reflection that the research team saw on Mars.

Obvious question answered, wolf found. We really did it this time!

We found water on Mars!

We found water on Mars!

We found water on Mars!

(“We” = humans)

I’ll admit that when I first heard the news, I was skeptical. Although we try to avoid it, scientists can sometimes fall victim to their own wishful thinking just like anyone else can. But I read the report, and the evidence is solid. We really did it this time.

We’ve known for a while that there is H₂O on Mars, as water vapor in the atmosphere and as layers of dust and ice near the north and south poles. The question was whether we could find liquid water.

The answer came from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. It carries a radar instrument that broadcasts radio waves at the Martian surface and listens for those waves reflecting back from layers under the surface. When the spacecraft flew over a region near Mars’s south pole – shown below – it picked up echoes from a layer buried below the surface.

The radar echo was so strong that it could only be one thing: liquid water.

There’s a lot more to say about this discovery, but first:

WOW!

One of the most fascinating stories of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election was the story of how a well-planned social media campaign based in Russia may (or may not?) have influenced the result.

There is now no doubt that this campaign existed, according to multiple reliable sources. And the fact that we had no idea at the time should make us very, very worried.

If we didn’t know it at the time, can we at least look back with hindsight understand how it happened? That’s the idea behind a new analysis, published yesterday on my favorite source for news and analysis, FiveThirtyEight.com.

The article describes the research of two professors at Clemson University, Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. They used Clemson’s Social Media Listening Center to recover tweets from 3,841 Twitter handles associated with the Internet Research Agency, the most prominent of the Russia-based organizations accused of creating fake accounts to influence the election. Their dataset covers the period from June 2015 to December 2017, and includes nearly three million tweets.

The result of the two researchers’ work is a preprint called “Troll Factories: The Internet Research Agency and State-Sponsored Agenda Building,” currently undergoing peer review (PDF available on Warren’s website).

The image below, from the FiveThirtyEight article, shows how the number of tweets from these accounts varies with time.

The best part of all this is that Linvill and Warren have worked with FiveThirtyEight to publish their entire dataset online through FiveThirtyEight’s GitHub account. And I have uploaded their dataset into the SciServer online science platform. If you’re interested in looking at this data with me, send me an email.

Of course, a dataset is only as useful as the questions that you ask of it. So what can we learn from this one? I have no interest in questions that reduce to “lol Trump voters are stupid” – that is neither useful nor even true. What questions will give us insights into how social media can influence public perception? And what questions will give us insights into how to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the 2018 elections?

Here are a few questions off the top of my head:

• How did the topics discussed by these troll accounts change after Trump won the election?
• What strategies did the trolls employ when talking to Democrats?
• If we identify a control sample of accounts who are genuine Trump supporters (or genuine Black Lives Matter activists, etc.) and blindly run a content analysis, can we tell the difference? If so, how?

What research questions occur to you?