Really, a Twitter sockpuppet got you fired? What sounds like an absurd premise might actually not be far off the mark.<\/p>\n
Using data science,\u00a0Bethany Lacina<\/a>, an associate professor of political science at the URochester, found that a recent Twitter spat that ended up causing a science fiction writer to lose his job, was in part fueled by bots and sockpuppets\u2014online identities used for purposes of deception. The automated and semi-automated accounts sowed discord, amplifying online outrage between ultra conservative and liberal\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0<\/em>and science fiction fans on Twitter.<\/p>\n Chuck Wendig, by his own account, was fired\u00a0as a freelance writer for Marvel\u2019s\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0comic\u00a0Shadow of Vader <\/em><\/a>and a forthcoming\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0book because of the controversy his own tweets had generated.<\/p>\n Enter Lacina. To her, the ultra-conservative trolling that proved Wendig\u2019s professional undoing seemed suspicious. In a study, detailed in a Vox article<\/a>, Lacina dug deeper into the Twitter backlash, using\u00a0Botometer<\/a>, an algorithm developed by scientists at Indiana University. The Botometer allows closer examination of Twitter accounts to determine the likelihood of automated (so-called bots), anonymous, or semi-automated accounts (so-called sockpuppets).<\/p>\n Lacina discovered that fewer than 250 “people” (some of them also automated accounts), replied directly to Wendig\u2019s tweets in the first 24 hours. That changed dramatically after a conservative\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0fan, Ethan Van Sciver, made a YouTube\u00a0video attacking Wendig<\/a>, whose posts are liberal-leaning.<\/p>\n\n