Bots tweaking pre-election Twitter trends in India: US experts

Agencies
April 9, 2019

New Delhi, Apr 9: In the run-up to the general elections, automated Twitter bots made a massive attempt to boost political hashtags, both in support of and in opposition to Prime Minster Narendra Modi, according to a research conducted by US experts. 

The automated accounts were deployed on a massive scale on February 9-10, with small groups of accounts pushing out thousands of posts an hour, according to the team from the US think-tank Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). 

The accounts were domestic in origin and substance, researchers said. 

While bots were used on both sides on February 9-10, the pro-Modi traffic was far more heavily manipulated than the anti-Modi traffic. 

According to the team, the pro-Modi traffic far more heavily manipulated than any large-scale traffic flow the DFRLab has analysed as of yet. 

"The incident highlights the sheer scale of attempts to manipulate Twitter traffic as India's main political parties head to the polls. It also underlines the extent to which social media more broadly has become an electoral battleground," the researchers wrote in a blog post.

Ben Nimmo, Senior Fellow for Information Defense at the DFRLab took to Twitter to highlight the findings. 

"These manipulation attempts ranged from large to extreme," Nimmo wrote in a Twitter post. 

"They were too clumsy to have much impact, but the sheer scale of the attempts on both sides is worrying, ahead of the election," Nimmo said. 

While the scale of the activity was vast, its impact was rather muted given the relatively low number of followers of the accounts. 

The massive scale of the attempted manipulation nevertheless bodes ill for the quality of online debate in India as the election approaches. 

It remains important to be able to expose such efforts, researchers said. 

The DFRLab scanned traffic on the hashtag #TNwelcomesModi, short for "Tamil Nadu welcomes Modi," which trended in India on February 9-10 and was mentioned over 777,000 times in two days. 

The most frequently posting account was @SasiMaha6, which posted #TNwelcomesModi tweets 1,803 times during the scan, or roughly one tweet every 15 seconds. 

Another high-volume account was @priyamanaval6, which posted the hashtag 1,677 times, or roughly one tweet every 17 seconds for over seven hours. 

These sustained rates are far too high for human posting, researchers said. The top three accounts alone posted #TNwelcomesModi 4,914 times, or roughly 10 percent of all traffic in the scan. 

The 50 most active accounts generated 30,446 tweets, or 61.2 percent of all traffic. 

The bot-driven praise for Modi's visit was countered, in part, by bots. On February 10, the hashtag #GoBackModi also trended, pushing messages that supported the Congress Party. 

This hashtag trended even faster, racking up 49,538 tweets in just over three hours in the early morning of February 10. It peaked at a lower rate, however, generating 447,000 posts on February 9-10. 

Just like #TNwelcomesModi, #GoBackModi was heavily pushed by a small number of high-volume accounts that posted hundreds of times an hour. Unlike #TNwelcomesModi, these accounts were still not suspended at the time of drafting. 

The most active was @PhillyTdp, which posted on #GoBackModi 2,179 times as the hashtag took off -- a staggering one tweet every 5.3 seconds for over three hours. 

Other accounts were similarly hyperactive. The second most active, @nritdpusa, posted 1,899 times in three hours, or roughly one tweet every 6 seconds. 

Overall, the nearly 50,000 tweets in the #TNwelcomesModi scan were posted by just 891 accounts, while the nearly 50,000 tweets in the #GoBackModi scan were posted by 7,394 accounts. 

By any measure, #TNwelcomesModi saw a much more aggressive attempt to make the hashtag trend from a much smaller user base, researchers wrote in the blog.

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News Network
May 11,2020

New Delhi, May 11: Shares of Indian Railway Catering And Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) jumped 5 per cent in early trade on Monday after the Indian Railways said it will gradually resume passenger train services from May 12.

The company's shares gained 5 per cent to Rs 1,302.85 -- its highest trading permissible limit for the day -- on the BSE. At the National Stock Exchange (NSE), it rose 5 per cent to Rs 1,303.55 -- its upper circuit limit.

Booking for reservation in these trains will start at 4pm on May 11 and will be available only on the IRCTC website.

The Indian Railways will gradually resume passenger train services from May 12 and will ask passengers to arrive at the station at least an hour before departure, the national transporter said on Sunday.

Initially, the all air-conditioned services will begin on 15 Rajdhani routes and the fare would be equivalent to that of the super-fast train, it said.

The special trains will run from New Delhi to Dibrugarh, Agartala, Howrah, Patna, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Madgaon, Mumbai Central, Ahmedabad and Jammu Tawi.

All passenger services were suspended due to a lockdown announced on March 25 and the railways later started the on-demand Shramik Specials to ferry migrants stranded across the country. It, however, has been running freight and parcel services.

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News Network
April 28,2020

Los Angeles, Apr 28: People who experience loss of smell as one of the COVID-19 symptoms are likely to have a mild to moderate clinical course of the disease, according to a study which may help health care providers determine which patients require hospitalisation.

The findings, published in the journal International Forum of Allergy & Rhinology, follows an earlier study that validated the loss of smell and taste as indicators of infection with the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

According to the scientists from the University of California (UC) San Diego Health in the US, patients who reported loss of smell were 10 times less likely to be hospitalised for COVID-19 compared to those without the symptom.

"One of the immediate challenges for health care providers is to determine how to best treat persons infected by the novel coronavirus," said Carol Yan, first author of the current study and rhinologist from the UC San Diego Health.

"If they display no or mild symptoms, can they return home to self-quarantine or will they likely require hospitalisation? These are crucial questions for hospitals trying to efficiently and effectively allocate finite medical resources," Yan said.

The findings, according to the researchers, suggest that loss of smell may be predictive of a milder clinical course of COVID-19.

"What's notable in the new findings is that it appears that loss of smell may be a predictor that a SARS-CoV-2 infection will not be as severe, and less likely to require hospitalisation," Yan said.

"If an infected person loses that sense, it seems more likely they will experience milder symptoms, barring other underlying risk factors," she added.

Risk factors for COVID-19 previously reported by other studies include age, and underlying medical conditions, such as chronic lung disease, serious heart conditions, diabetes, and obesity.

In the current study, the scientists made a retrospective analysis between March 3 and April 8 including 169 patients who tested positive for COVID-19 at UC San Diego Health.

They assessed olfactory and gustatory data for 128 of the 169 patients, 26 of whom required hospitalisation.

According to the researchers, patients who were hospitalised for COVID-19 treatment were significantly less likely to report anosmia or loss of smell -- 26.9 per cent compared to 66.7 per cent for COVID-19-infected persons treated as outpatients.

Similar percentages were found for loss of taste, known as dysgeusia, they said.

"Patients who reported loss of smell were 10 times less likely to be admitted for COVID-19 compared to those without loss of smell," said study co-author Adam S. DeConde.

"Moreover, anosmia was not associated with any other measures typically related to the decision to admit, suggesting that it's truly an independent factor and may serve as a marker for milder manifestations of Covid-19," DeConde said.

The researchers suspect that the findings hint at some of the physiological characteristics of the infection.

"The site and dosage of the initial viral burden, along with the effectiveness of the host immune response, are all potentially important variables in determining the spread of the virus within a person and, ultimately, the clinical course of the infection," DeConde said.

If the SARS-CoV-2 virus initially concentrates in the nose and upper airway, where it impacts olfactory function, that may result in an infection that is less severe and sudden in onset, decreasing the risk of overwhelming the host immune response, respiratory failure, and hospitalisation, the scientists added.

"This is a hypothesis, but it's also similar to the concept underlying live vaccinations," DeConde explained.

"At low dosage and at a distant site of inoculation, the host can generate an immune response without severe infection," he added.

Loss of smell, according to the study, might also indicate a robust immune response which has been localised to the nasal passages, limiting effects elsewhere in the body.

Citing the limitations of the study, the scientists said they relied upon self-reporting of anosmia from participants, which posed a greater chance of recall bias among patients once they had been diagnosed with COVID-19.

They added that patients with more severe respiratory disease requiring hospitalisation may not be as likely to recognise or recall the loss of smell.

So the researchers said more expansive studies are needed for validating the results.

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Agencies
January 9,2020

The World Bank says that a lack of credit and drop in private consumption have led to a gloomy growth outlook for India with a steep cut in growth rate for the current fiscal year and only a modest gain projected for the next year.

India's growth rate is forecast to be only 5 per cent for the current fiscal year, weighed down by a growth of only 4.5 per cent in the July-September quarter, according to the 2020 Global Economic Prospects report released on Wednesday.

"In India, [economic] activity was constrained by insufficient credit availability, as well as by subdued private consumption," the Bank said.

The growth rate is forecast by the Bank to pick up to 5.8 per cent in the next fiscal year and to 6.1 per cent in 2021-22.

India's growth rate was 6.8 per cent in 2018-19.

The 5 per cent growth rate projection for the current financial year is a sharp cut of 2.5 per cent from the 7.5 per cent forecast made by the Bank in January last year, toppling it from the rank of the world's fastest growing economy.

India's performance follows a global trend of lowered growth weighed down by developed economies.

The report estimated world economic growth rate to be only 2.4 per cent last year and forecast it to edge up 0.1 per cent to 2.5 per cent in the current year.

Even with the lower growth rate of 5 per cent in the current fiscal year and 5.8 per cent forecast for the next, India holds the second rank among large economies, behind only China with an estimated growth rate of 6.1 per cent for 2019 and 5.9 per cent this year.

The report blamed "weak confidence, liquidity issues in the financial sector" and "weakness in credit from non-bank financial companies" for India's slowdown.

The Bank predicated India's recovery to 5.8 per cent in the coming financial year for India but "on the monetary policy stance remaining accommodative" and the assumption that "the stimulative fiscal and structural measures already taken will begin to pay off."

It also warned that sharper-than-expected slowdown in major external markets such as United States and Europe, would affect South Asia through trade, financial, and confidence channels, especially for countries with strong trade links to these economies."

The Bank said that the growth of advanced economies was 1.6 per cent last year and "is anticipated to slip to 1.4 per cent in 2020 in part due to continued softness in manufacturing."

In contrast the growth of emerging market and developing countries is expected to accelerate from 3.5 per cent last year to 4.1 per cent this year, the report said.

In South Asia, Bangladesh is estimated to have the highest growth rate of 7.2 per cent in the current fiscal year, although down from 8.1 per cent last fiscal year.

But its higher regional growth rates are coming off a lower base with a per capital gross domestic product of $1,698 compared to $2,010 for India.

Bangladesh is expected to grow by 7.3 per cent in the next financial year.

Pakistan's growth rate is estimated at only 2.4 per cent in the current fiscal year and is projected to rise to 3 per cent in the next, according to the Bank.

The Bank blamed monetary tightening in Pakistan for a sharp deceleration in fixed investment and a considerable softening in private consumption for the fall in growth rate from 3.3 per cent in the 2018-19 fiscal year.

Sri Lanka's growth rate was estimated to be 2.7 per cent last year and forecast to grow to 3.3 per cent this year.

Nepal grew by an estimated 6.4 per cent in the current fiscal year and will rise to 6.5 per cent in the next.

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