Eric Lach November 4, 2010, 5:44 PM

Researchers at Indiana University are looking into how political groups can manipulate Twitter to push their message under the appearance of grassroots activity, the Technology Review reports.

The Truthy project, at Indiana University, analyzed networks, tracked memes and followed-up on tips of suspicious messages and accounts to identify instances of astroturfing on the social networking site.

“Wherever there are lots of eyes looking at screens, spammers will be there; so why not with politics?” Filippo Menczer, an associate professor at UI and one of the researchers, said.

Menczer says the research group uncovered a number of accounts sending out duplicate messages and also retweeting messages from the same few accounts in a closely connected network. For instance, two since-closed accounts, called @PeaceKaren_25 and @HopeMarie_25, sent out 20,000 similar tweets, most of them linking to, or promoting, the House minority leader John Boehner’s website, gopleader.gov.

In another case cited by the Technology Review, 10 different accounts sent thousands of tweets, slightly tweaked to avoid spam filters, and all linking to the conservative website Freedomist.com.

Twitter has become popular among politicians, as a way to reach out and create news quickly. The underside of politics appears to be tweeting away as well.

Read the rest from the Technology Review here.

Astroturfing, John Boehner, Twitter