Mass Scale Manipulation Of Twitter Trends Discovered
https://techxplore.comNew EPFL research has found that almost half of local Twitter trending topics in Turkey are fake, a scale of manipulation previously unheard of. It also proves for the first time that many trends are created solely by bots due to a vulnerability in Twitter’s Trends algorithm.
Now, new EPFL research focused on Turkey, from the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory, part of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences has found a vulnerability in the algorithm that decides Twitter Trending Topics: it does not take deletions into account. This allows attackers to push the trends they want to the top of Twitter Trends despite deleting their tweets which contain the candidate trend shortly afterwards.