Sports Team and Burner Accounts

tarheelhockey

Offside Review Specialist
Feb 12, 2010
84,982
137,355
Bojangles Parking Lot
FC Barcelona has been accused of hiring a company to create social media accounts aimed to improve the reputation of president Josep Bartomeu and other board members.

Do you think this could happen in the NHL? If so, what would be the consequences?

FC Barcelona Social Media Scandal Rocks Club’s Global Presence

This may come as a huge surprise, but it was the Sens.

[URL="https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/how-a-collection-of-apparently-fake-twitter-accounts-launched-a-troll-campaign-to-support-the-ottawa-senators"]How a collection of apparently fake Twitter accounts launched a troll campaign to support the Ottawa Senators | Ottawa Citizen
[/URL]
 
Jan 21, 2011
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3,797
Massachusetts
I mean, how can you tell who has a burner/bot account? When I used to use Twitter back in 2010-2014, I supported the owners during the lockout stage and users would always call me out on being a 'burner/bot' account because I voiced my opinion proudly with the owners side.

Besides that, how Messi stayed in that Barca disaster is beyond me.
 
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tarheelhockey

Offside Review Specialist
Feb 12, 2010
84,982
137,355
Bojangles Parking Lot
I mean, how can you tell who has a burner/bot account? When I used to use Twitter back in 2010-2014, I supported the owners during the lockout stage and users would always call me out on being a 'burner/bot' account because I voiced my opinion proudly with the owners side.

Besides that, how Messi stayed in that Barca disaster is beyond me.

This article talks mainly about political bot attacks, but a lot of the principles are the same.

The entire article is seriously worth a read at this specific point in time, but the answer to your specific question is here:

So how are sockpuppet accounts detected, both by the social media giants and in academia? There are, broadly speaking, five techniques that we look for – or we would say features that are used.

  1. IP-based correlation (accounts that are closely linked geographically)
  2. Temporal-based correlation (closely linked in time)
  3. Signs of automation in username/handle and other account metadata
  4. Social subgraphs
  5. Content similarity

Algorithms are getting better and better at identifying sockpuppet accounts. But honestly, there will always be a certain amount of this as long as accounts are not linked to an actual human ID. To some extent we are obsessively reading the modern equivalent of bathroom-wall graffiti.
 
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