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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Agencies
July 7,2020

India's COVID-19 tally raced past the seven lakh-mark with 22,252 fresh infections on Tuesday, five days after crossing the six lakh post, while the death toll climbed to 20,160 as 467 more people succumbed to the disease, according to the Union health ministry.

With this, the country has recorded over 20,000 cases of the infection for the fifth consecutive day.

India's coronavirus infection caseload stands at 7,19,665, the ministry's data updated at 8 am showed.

With a steady rise, the number of recoveries stands at 4,39,947, while there are 2,59,557 active cases of coronavirus infection in the country.

"Thus, around 61.13 % of patients have recovered so far," an official said.

The total number of confirmed cases also includes foreigners.

Of the 467 deaths reported in the last 24 hours, 204 are from Maharashtra, 61 from Tamil Nadu, 48 from Delhi, 29 from Karnataka, 24 from Uttar Pradesh, 22 from West Bengal, 17 from Gujarat.

Telangana and Haryana reported 11 deaths each; Madhya Pradesh nine; Andhra Pradesh seven; Jammu and Kashmir six; Rajasthan and Punjab five each; Bihar, Kerala and Odisha two each; and Arunachal Pradesh and Jharkhand one each.

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Agencies
March 15,2020

Jakarta, Mar 15: Indonesia's transport minister is in intensive care after testing positive for the novel coronavirus, an official has said, as schools and tourist attractions were ordered to close over the health threat.

Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi was receiving treatment at an army hospital in Jakarta, State Secretary Pratikno said on Saturday.

A hospital spokesman said Sumadi was encountering difficulty breathing but that his condition was improving.

Pratikno said Sumadi was involved in virus mitigation efforts, particularly the evacuation of Indonesians from epicenters of the outbreak, and that President Joko Widodo had called for tests to be carried out on other ministers.

Cases of the virus in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, have jumped from zero two weeks ago to 96, with five deaths, according to government spokesperson Achmad Yurianto.

He also said the virus has spread outside Greater Jakarta to Bandung in West Java, Solo in Central Java, Manado in North Sulawesi, Pontianak in West Kalimantan, as well as holiday havens Yogyakarta and Bali.

Following the increase, the government on Saturday established a task force on COVID-19 mitigation.

Jakarta's Governor Anies Baswedan announced that schools would close for two weeks starting Monday, and ordered the closure of city-owned tourist attractions, such as Ragunan Zoo and Ancol beach.

He emphasized that Jakarta would not be locked down but urged people "to be responsible" and called for social distancing when possible.

Similarly, the administration of Solo, Central Java, Friday announced that schools and tourist attractions would close after a coronavirus patient died in the region.

The World Health Organization has said it is particularly concerned about high-risk nations with weaker health systems, which who may lack the facilities to identify cases.

A day after declaring the coronavirus outbreak to be pandemic this week, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called Indonesia's president Widodo and both agreed to "scale up cooperation."

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News Network
June 11,2020

Beijing, Jun 11: Floods and mudslides in south China have uprooted hundreds of thousands of people and left dozens dead or missing, state media reported Thursday.

The bad weather has wreaked havoc on popular tourist areas that had already been battered by months of travel restrictions during the coronavirus outbreak.

Torrential downpours unleashed floods and mudslides that caused nearly 230,000 people to be relocated and destroyed more than 1,300 houses, official state news agency Xinhua reported, citing the Ministry of Emergency Management.

In southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, six people were reported dead and one missing, Xinhua said.

Streets were waterlogged in popular tourist destination Yangshuo, forcing residents and visitors to evacuate on bamboo rafts.

The local government said more than 1,000 hotels had been flooded and more than 30 tourist sites damaged.

One owner of a family-run hotel told Xinhua that the guest rooms were submerged in one metre (three feet) of rainwater.

The extreme weather has dealt a hefty blow to the region's tourism sector, which is still reeling from the COVID-19 epidemic.

The emergency management ministry said there were direct economic losses of over 4 billion yuan (more than $550 million) from the flooding, Xinhua reported.

In Hunan Province, at least 13 people were killed in rain-triggered disasters, and another eight people are missing or killed in southwestern Guizhou province, according to the local emergency response departments, Xinhua said.

The heavy downpours began at the beginning of June and have led to "dangerously high water levels" in 110 rivers, Xinhua reported.

Further rainstorms are expected in the next few days across the south.

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