A team of US researchers has developed a unique method that, after analysing online comments or tweets, can find dishonesty levels behind posting those thoughts - a practice also called ‘astroturfing’. The method analyses multiple writing samples. Choo and his co-authors used writing samples from the most prolific online commentators on various news websites. They discovered that many people espousing their opinions online were actually all linked to a few singular writers with multiple accounts. “In addition to raising public awareness of the problem, we hope to develop tools to detect astroturfers so that social media users can make informed choices and resist online social manipulation and propaganda,” Choo noted.

Source: Hindustan Times October 24, 2016 07:07 UTC