While dozens of heavily forwarded posts are absolutely genuine, a steady influx of posts keeps the keyword trending at the top.
If you use Twitter, you may have noticed posts with the #fuelshortage hashtag. And with good reason, according to Visibrain data collected by Tech&Co, more than 100,000 tweets have addressed the topic since October 7th. Many messages, especially the most forwarded ones, were posted from authentic accounts. But at the same time, thousands of fake accounts were created to promote this keyword.
On the social network, on October 10, several specialists saw a swarm of tweets about the same model, revealing a random phrase in English appended to the keyword #fuelshortage. All these messages come from accounts that seem to have been created for the occasion, with no subscription or subscribers, English-language names and profile photos, again following a common model: a gradient background decorated with some emojis.
Florent Lefebvre, specialist in data analysis on social networks, analyzed a sample of these publications on October 10 between 9 and 10 p.m. A total of 2,744 tweets used the #penuriecarburant hashtag during this period. In 61% of cases, they came from accounts suspected of being robotic. In the image below, the white dots represent as many accounts that used the keyword but don’t have any subscriptions or subscribers.
With Tech & Co, Florent Lefebvre claims to have launched a new analysis on October 11 while continuing the stream of fake news related to the fuel shortage.
For the organizers of such an information manipulation operation, the success is there: on October 11, Twitter still chooses the keyword #fuelshortage at the forefront of these trends, sending netizens to the most forwarded messages, often from opponents (left and right) of the government .
If it is impossible to determine the paternity of this operation, the latter aims to “maintain tension on the subject, encourage people to speak out on the subject” and “encourage the press to talk about it”. Analysis by Eric FreyssinetScientific Director at the National Gendarmerie.