Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends

We uncover a previously unknown, ongoing as-troturfing attack on the popularity mechanisms of social media platforms: ephemeral astroturfing attacks. In this attack, a chosen keyword or topic is artificially promoted by coordinated and inauthentic activity to appear popular, and, crucially, this activity is removed as part of the attack. We observe such attacks on Twitter trends and find that thes...