The manipulation of social media metadata
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mso-char-type:symbol;mso-symbol-font-family:Symbol”>· Check if an account has been tagged by other verifiable platform users
· Consider parody or organizational change as explanations before concluding that something is malicious manipulation
On detecting imposter accounts
· Locate date of when account was started, user joined
· Look at how many tweets/posts have been created since account start date
· View attached media (pictures, videos, links) and look for duplicates
· Consider the date of the last post or activity and if the account has been dormant
· If it is listed as an official account, search for the personality/institutional homepage to cross-reference and confirm existence of an official account
· Search the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for crawls of the account
· Scan multiple crawls if possible and look to see if the account was dormant or has ever been deleted or suspended
· Reverse image search the profile pics and banners to see if and where copies occur
· Explore followers and commenters for their authenticity to assess if they appear to be real people or bots
· Read to see if the comments are substantive and engaging with the content or are they simply reactions or emoji
Other
· Use social dashboards to see account creation time and date and average daily active posts, comparing the date of the account establishment and the posts per day
· Examine promoted posts and ads policies of platforms, research
· Consult the page administrator’s user account and page, comparing the rate of posting promoted content to free content
· Examine how often content is shared (e.g., are memes or videos frequently re-shared but with different captions?)
— Read more in Amelia Acker, Data Craft: The Manipulation of Social Media Metadata (Data & Society, November 2018)