Conservative non-profit behind AstroTweets against Coakley

A conservative group in Iowa was behind a viral attack on Coakley during her race against Republican Scott Brown, according to a new paper by Wellesley College researchers that analyzed Twitter activity during the special election.

The authors, Panagiotis Takis Metaxas and Eni Mustafaraj, examined more than 185,000 campaign-related tweets and “retweets’’ during the week leading up to the election.

In the course of the research, they found that one of the more active accounts was that tied to the American Future Fund, a conservative organization based in Des Moines that also ran television ads critical of Coakley. But because messages were done anonymously through a social networking site, it would have been difficult for any voter to tie the messages to the group.

The American Future Fund apparently set up nine accounts that sent 929 tweets over the course of about two hours — a method the study calls “Twitter-bomb.’’