Manipulating Twitter Through Deletions

Abstract

Research into influence campaigns on Twitter has mostly relied on identifying malicious activities from tweets obtained via public APIs. These APIs provide access to public tweets that have not been deleted. However, bad actors can delete content strategically to manipulate the system. Unfortunately, estimates based on publicly available Twitter data underestimate the true deletion volume. Here, we provide the first exhaustive, large-scale analysis of anomalous deletion patterns involving more than a billion deletions by over 11 million accounts. We find that a small fraction of accounts delete a large number of tweets daily. We also uncover two abusive behaviors that exploit deletions. First, limits on tweet volume are circumvented, allowing certain accounts to flood the network with over 26 thousand daily tweets. Second, coordinated networks of accounts engage in repetitive likes and unlikes of content that is eventually deleted, which can manipulate ranking algorithms. These kinds of abuse can be exploited to amplify content and inflate popularity, while evading detection.Our study provides platforms and researchers with new methods for identifying social media abuse.

Detecting and identifying the reasons for deleted tweets before they are posted

“…Current literature suggests that deleted tweets are more likely to have aggressive and negative emotions. Torres-Lugo et al (2022) analyze "abusive" deletion behavior on Twitter. Using the Compliance Firehose Stream provided by Twitter, they extracted users who had more than 10 deletions over a 1-month period, which amounted to approximately 11 million users.…”