I have been actively tracking election activity on Twitter for two weeks now. The impact of strategic communication on Twitter is very clear. There are sockpuppets and shills everywhere. They eclipse organic use of the network. Here is a chart:

Well, I guess this is what you see when hundreds of users retweet the same content basically simultaneously and the entire network seems designed around communicating one perspective. That chart is garbage. Inferences made based on that chart are highly suspect.

It’s cleaning time.

Some of the first users I removed were clearly sockpuppets. One user sends dozens of posts per hour including pictures from Victoria’s Secret, Bob Marley, popular image macros (such as keep calm memes), and retweets of popular figures like Joel Osteen, along with some libertarian content. This seems like it could be the work of a robot as it maps what would be popular content.

Sorting out what it means for such a large percentage of links to include rich media is also difficult. Could half of people want to share an image with every conversational tweet, or is this just another indicator that this is an artifact of autotelic speech?

Here is a cleaner chart:

Suddenly Scott Walker is everywhere because of an extreme position on immigration, Trump is in the pack, and the polls don’t seem to matter. The top two clusters are still a bot retweeted tweet and a counter effort to that tweet. This is not an organic conversation network.

In short, Twitter is not a poll. Twitter is a microbroadcasting network utilized by a variety of groups to create the illusion that they enjoy broad popular support. Although this will not curtail research on Twitter, or the coverage of Twitter by the legacy media, it is important to remember that it isn’t a transparent window in the social now, but a contested rhetorical field.

The alternative to the consideration of Twitter as a rhetorical struggle is to suppose that a spammer retweeting pictures from Victoria’s Secret and cool pictures of guitars  is an expression of genuine politics.