Home News GRADUATES DISCOVER SUSPICIOUS SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS

GRADUATES DISCOVER SUSPICIOUS SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS

11/5/2020

A new media forensic technique used by two Richland Northeast High School (RNHS) graduates has led to an interesting discovery. RNHS alums Mary “Gracie” Boyce and Scotty Moore are enrolled in a Creative Inquiry Research class at Clemson University. They have been analyzing media artifacts and conversations centered on the 2020 Presidential election to uncover misleading information. Boyce and Moore discovered with their classmates that the account @ZIENAAB_313 sent out a tweet with erroneous information. This account and others like it were linked to Iran and believed to have been established for the purpose of interfering in the U. S. Presidential election.

Boyce says every week, they learn new techniques to detect suspicious accounts and learn more about them. “Before beginning this particular project, we learned about reverse image searching and a number of different websites that can be used to analyze the activity of Twitter accounts. We found using a reverse image search that the image from the tweet was from the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, not from Arizona like the tweet seemed to imply, which was our cue to do further research,” Boyce said.

By using resources such as Hoaxy, a website which allows you to see the interactions an account has with others, and by simply looking at other accounts that were suggested by Twitter or had interactions with @ZEINAAB_313, the students were able to discover a rather large network of very similar accounts, and they all seemed to point to @master_shojae.

Boyce graduated from Richland Northeast High School in 2019 and Moore in 2020.