of 'bots' allegedly used to send 3.6million tweets to malaysia pm najib razak during janji ditepati

Information, Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Rais Yatim announced that some 3,611,323 tweets were recorded between 8.15pm and 9.15pm nationwide last night to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s account, @NajibRazak, during the “Janji Ditepati (Promises Fulfilled)” gathering at Stadium Bukit Jalil.

Some websites claimed that it was evident that bots were used to tweet the same text at the exact same time.

PoliTweet.org, which tracks social media use in Malaysian politics, posted

Mentions of #Merdeka55 were climbing rapidly at an est. 720 tweets/minute. Noticeable use of bots tweeting the exact same tweet at the exact same time, as seen in this screen-capture (screenshot below).

From 815-915pm we collected 107K tweets from 19K users. This represents a by-the-minute sample of what was tweeted. 38% of tweets came from 14% of the users, all of whom used TweetDeck. That's 41K tweets from 2761 users. These were the likely spammers.

Read more (On Twitter, doubts over Putrajaya’s Merdeka record claim)


According to the log files gathered by PoliTweet,

111 users tweeted 3 versions of this same tweet - 1 mixed-case, 1 lower-case, and 1 with a '.' in front. Tweets were made at 8.19PM, 8.28PM, 8.36PM, 8.46PM, 8.52PM on 31 August 2012.

#Merdeka55