“What surprises me is that these puppet and bot accounts were active in a case that didn’t get mainstream media coverage and where the person involved is not that famous,” says Lacina.
About 30 minutes following Van Sciver’s tweet to his video, Wendig received about 600 tweets from legitimate accounts-and about 400 from automated and anonymous accounts, amplifying and distorting the real outrage from ultra-conservative groups, who prior to the YouTube video had typically not follow Wendig’s tweets. The Botometer allows closer examination of Twitter accounts to determine the likelihood of automated (so-called bots), anonymous, or semi-automated accounts (so-called sockpuppets).Īfter the video, the number of tweets from real people spiked-and so did the numbers from bot and sockpuppet accounts. In a study, detailed in a Vox article, Lacina dug deeper into the Twitter backlash, using Botometer, an algorithm developed by scientists at Indiana University. To her, the ultra-conservative trolling that proved Wendig’s professional undoing seemed suspicious. The automated and semi-automated accounts sowed discord, amplifying online outrage between ultra conservative and liberal Star Wars and science fiction fans on Twitter.Ĭhuck Wendig, by his own account, was fired as a freelance writer for Marvel’s Star Wars comic Shadow of Vader and a forthcoming Star Wars book because of the controversy his own tweets had generated.Įnter Lacina. Using data science, Bethany Lacina, an associate professor of political science at the University of Rochester, found that a recent Twitter spat that ended up causing a science fiction writer to lose his job, was in part fueled by bots and sockpuppets-online identities used for purposes of deception. Really, a Twitter sockpuppet got you fired? What sounds like an absurd premise might actually not be far off the mark.
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