Via Club des Cordeliers we find an army of Twitter bots which is, on first sight, spreading negative propaganda about Syria.
These robots, hundreds or thousands of them, are artificial Twitter accounts which tweet every few minutes around the clock. They seem to be programmed to recite single short sentences on Syria. Many of these accounts add the hash-tag #NaturalHealing to their tweets.
Currently a search on twitter for "syria's media outlets" produces a long list with similar tweets:
The tweets are all the same basic sentence: "Nearly all of Syria's media outlets are state-owned, and the Ba'ath Party controls nearly all newspapers." with some of them attaching the "#NaturalHealing" hash-tag. A Internet search for that sentence points to the Wikipedia article on Syria as the source. A closer look at several of these bot accounts and their tweets shows that this is a recurring phenomenon.
It is thereby somewhat dubious that these bots were hired for anti-Syrian propaganda. They just quote random sentences from the Wikipedia entry on Syria which have no specific propaganda value like:
Cami Vestal @CmVstl530 1h1 hour ago
#NaturalHealing The Abbasiyyin Stadium in Damascus is home to the Syrian national football team.
Other tweets these robot accounts currently put out are from the Wikipedia entry of Richard Nixon, the Wikipedia entry of the city of Manchester in England, the entry on Academic dress and several others. None of which have of course anything to do with "natural healing" but also nothing to do with anti-Syrian propaganda interests.
All the robots have English sounding names, have the registered country USA and the attached photos of their personalities are mostly attractive and young Caucasian people. The quoting of Wikipedia articles and endless retweets of other bots in that network are just fillers to make these accounts seem "alive" and to then use them to deliver paid-for advertising for health related products.
I have some reason to believe (but can not prove) that this bot army is run (or rented) by the British company Marketing Runners which says it is:
Assisting Businesses and Individuals to Increase Their Online Presence, Generate Leads, and Discover Opportunities.
The Twitter account of Marketing Runners has some unbelievable 83,500 followers of which 99.9% are likely artificial. Marketing Runners is registered by Ad Easy Ltd, Kemp House, 152 City Road, London, UK which is run by one Derin Cag. Cag is involved in various "new media" marketing companies in London.
So while this on first sight seemed to be an anti-Syrian campaign a deeper look shows that it just a run-of-the-mill marketing scam. Its twitter bots are programmed to put out quotes from various Wikipedia articles to make them look "human", attractive and seemingly alive.
All of which does not mean that there are no anti-Syrian campaigns on Twitter and elsewhere. There surely are. But those I have come across are run more intelligently. They use sock-puppets, dozens of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts with similar propaganda but run by one human or a human group. Such accounts are better individualized with more specific content that random Wikipedia quotes. In March 2011, just in time for its Syria campaign, the U.S. military purchased software that helps running such sock-puppet armies. Unfortunately they are hidden and hard to detect.