Astroturfing attacks use automated accounts to artificially propel a chosen
keyword to the top of Twitter trending topics. Lateral astroturfing is a
sophisticated subset of such attacks in which the automated tweets 1) are
posted by compromised accounts and 2) are deleted immediately after they are
created. The former makes the attack more effective and the latter aids in
evading detection. We present the first large-scale analysis of lateral
astroturfing attacks. We detected over 20 thousand astroturfing accounts that
were used between February 2019 and June 2019 to manipulate 3,710 unique
keywords --- at least 10% of daily trending topics in the region analyzed.
Lateral astroturfing pollutes trending topics; allows for the manipulation of
users' opinions; and permits content that could otherwise be filtered by the
platform, such as illicit advertisements. Our results aid in understanding user
manipulation on social media and more generally shed light on the type of
adversarial behavior that arises to evade detection.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊)
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the