Well I would say that is up to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit shareholders to decide since it is their property.
You don't get to cancel property rights because you don't like the reporting there. You also don't get to cancel freedom of speech because you don't like what someone is saying.
A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech. I believe that the point being argued is that they have a responsibility to filter out automated messaging.
I'm not going to answer such a question pretending you are a 3 year old that really doesn't know how media + government collude and operate to control society.
You are incapable of seeing how it poses a threat to freedom of speech when all major media combined call for censorship? There's no point for me to engage in a discussion with you.
I'm sorry, but I think I'm asking a different question.
I'm not asking about whether Facebook can engage in censorship. That was addressed by you here:
> A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech
It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship.
I'm asking how a third party (someone other than Facebook or the government) can force Facebook to censor.
I think figuring out how to create a constructive online community is an important and complex issue. It's not as simple as letting everybody do whatever they want. And limiting what can be done includes limiting speech in some way. How you do that in a way that's not censorship is a legitimate question.
I know Germany's free speech laws are different from those in the US. Is the censorship you're referring to as a result of these free speech laws, or something else? I'm interested in learning about non-government entities forcing Facebook to censor, which is why I asked "a third party other than the state".
> No, there is no responsibility whatsoever. Users are free to not use the service if they don't like it.
I own private property. It's true that I'm free to paint my house an obnoxious color and let it fall into ruin. It doesn't mean that I don't have a responsibility to my neighbors and community to provide upkeep to my house and ensure it's aesthetically pleasing.
Similarly, I believe social media and the media has a larger responsibility to our civic discourse even if they are a private company. Is that a legal obligation? No, but it's a moral obligation.
> It doesn't mean that I don't have a responsibility to my neighbors and community to provide upkeep to my house and ensure it's aesthetically pleasing.
Can your neighbours sue you if you paint your house in an obnoxious color? No? Then there is no responsibility.
Why is it that I, for whom English is only my 4th language has to explain to you what the English word responsibility means?
If for you responsibility is just a fuzzy term with some feelings attached then we don't need to discuss this matter as FB can't be held accountable to that kind of responsibility anyways.
> Similarly, I believe social media and the media has a larger responsibility to our civic discourse even if they are a private company
I do not doubt that you believe many things, but first you have to show what responsibility actually exists and then show if and how that applies to Facebook if you are going to make such an argument.
Just saying "it's their property" might not address the underlying question. Should it be? How important does a platform get before it needs public regulation to prevent harms to its users?
And additionally, in a democracy, isn't one voice per human being the only appropriate principle? Why should the angriest, shrillest people with the deepest pockets get to swing public discussion by just bombarding the rest of us with their propaganda until we regurgitate it?
If everyone must speak at the same volume, then broadcasting or any kind or public speaking are impossible. All communication must consist of 1-on-1 conversations or among small groups.
If you allow broadcasting, then eventually some voices will be louder than others.
I think the point is that if a voice is speaking louder, than it has a larger responsibility to the public. If the voice is automated on a platform, and isn't serving the public good, then the platform has a responsibility to prevent it.
The main point of eli_gottlieb's comment was that money is effective at swaying public opinion. This is obvious. It's the whole point of advertising and marketing.
I think whether the source is automated or not is a secondary concern, since all broadcasting involves some automation.
I don't agree that a broadcaster has a responsibility to their audience. If a broadcaster starts screwing up consistently -- for example, by relaying false or unsubstantiated information -- the audience has the choice to move on to the next guy.
I also don't agree that it's necessarily the platform's responsibility to control what's on it, although it has that option.
>If everyone must speak at the same volume, then broadcasting or any kind or public speaking are impossible.
No, you can have one voice broadcasting, and as long as it's still one very loud voice, it's only one voice. This is part of the psychology of how people measure veracity of information: through apparent public consensus. So you can have CBS broadcast something, and that's fine, but it becomes problematic when CBS buy themselves a thousand Twitter bots with names like "Joe Smith" or "DankMemes88", thus giving the false impression that thousands of people are all in consensus.
This is the second NYT article I see here today that is calling for more censorship because of some unsubstantiated claims. These people must be completely out of their minds.
I am guessing a reaction to total loss of trust in media by general public. Now they have launched a mass propaganda against alternative news by calling them "fake news" . Nytimes just doesn't get it.
I don't know if you have never met anyone who thought Obama was born in Kenya, or that Hillary Clinton murdered one of her campaign staffers but there is definitely fake news out there.
Likely because of your tone and the way you conveyed your point, rather than the point yourself. That attracts down votes as well. If your message was that this happens regardless of party, you can say just that. FWIW, I think the tone of your parent could be better as well, which may have contributed to the manner in which you posted.
Given no one has commented on why they down voted, this is just speculation on my part based on what I've seen elsewhere on HN.
Yeah, and sometimes it's in the actual news. For example, I just saw an investigated a tweet from election day claiming that voters in Chesapeake had to be escorted by the police due to intimidation by Trump supporters, and found an local news article debunking it:
It's not uncommon these days for news organisations to lazily use Twitter as a source in this way. Actually contacting the police force which had supposedly escorted voters would involve actual reporting.
there is pretty good circumstancial evidence that the Clintons have had several people killed. The most recent is the reporter in Haiti who was investigating the Clinton foundation's alleged child trafficking.
I really dislike the basis of their research which is:
Twitter provides free access to a sample of
the public tweets posted on the platform. The
platform’s precise sampling method is not known, but
the company itself reports that the data available
through the Streaming API is at most one percent of
the overall global public communication on Twitter
any given time. [6]
So...we aren't going to mention a selection issue at all? Is that 1% of global Tweets a truly random sample? Can you confirm Twitter isn't manipulating the output? We have examples of them censoring stuff this cycle...
In order to get the most complete and relevant data set, the tweets were collected by following particular hashtags identified by the team as being actively used during the debate.
What's the methodology for selection? I'd hope research out of Oxford would be a little better argued. But of course since it's Oxford this research will get quoted in the New York Times by people who probably don't understand the paper they are reporting on and we'll have talking heads endlessly parroting why this justifies censorship.
All this research is showing evidence of is that the stream Twitter provides is pro-Trump. It's a massive leap of faith to assume this data truly is representative and non-biased.
> Ignoring whether it's pro-Trump or pro-Clinton, don't you find the idea of automated parroting of political speech via bots a bit obnoxious?
In a way, I'm terrified that fascism can now just "chatterbot" its way into the popular consensus. In another way, I'm incredibly relieved that a significant portion of the fascist speech I see on the web isn't real.
This has always been my concern about Twitter. If taken as an actual sample of the behavior of the population, anyone with a reasonable amount of money and time can portray the population as they choose. It's too easy to manufacture scandal, racial tension, phobias, inflammatory news and then treat a response as somehow reflective of the populace.
I've grown up and spent my entire life in the south. I've never had a parent, relative or friend even hint that I should view/treat any race differently than any other. You'd hear the occasional bad joke at school...but that was about it.
From the news cycle at this point, I feel like I'm supposed to have been mailed my own KKK gear as an expected housewarming gift.
Looking at that map could explain my experience then. I'm in South Carolina and there seems to be significantly less here than surrounding areas. For what it's worth though, SPLC is a political organization that's generally know for trying to create issues.
Just as an example, it looks like they have a store that sell confederate flags in Abbeville listed as a hate group...which seems like more than a little bit of a stretch. Looks like there's a flag store in Charleston also listed as a white nationalist group?
What was the local reaction to e.g. Black Lives Matter, or did the subject never come up? There definitely are communities where politics is a taboo subject, but I think it's increasingly rare these days.
Ironically, that's a large part of the reason that I don't read social media often or read much on the daily news. I tend to read after the fact analysis that provides more perspective instead of breathless reporting.
That tends to help me more in my job and having an informed perspective as a citizen.
I find it surprising that degree-less, low-income, conservatives (classical trump supporters) are going to be techy enough to program Pro-Trump bots.
The tech hackers are not on the conservative scene, but on the liberal front. This is why Obama had such a great campaign in both terms, and the conservative I-want-it-too failed outright.
Edit: LOL! I get downvoted for being demeaning, but my points stands. No apologies.
Non-automated, boiler-room conversation disruptors from the Clinton campaign overwhelmed online forums throughout the election. They all disappeared the day after; most of them seemed to disappear at around 5:00 CST on election day. I still don't know how press-releasing that you were going to have people on discussion boards paid to disrupt negative messages, and who were not going to identify themselves, was a good move. It didn't seem like a legal requirement to go public; could it have been to drum up business for Brock himself to do the same service for other companies or politicians, or just a way to seem forward-looking and tech-savvy (and Obama-like?) It's strange that the left-identified candidate would openly use a tactic that was previously associated with China and Russia (employing boiler-room internet trolls at scale.) Especially for Clinton, who spent a lot of time during the campaign trying to promote new Cold War fears. In addition, it ended up compromising the advocacy of her honest supporters by putting them under the suspicion of being paid people.
It was pretty terrifying how many fake people were used from both major candidates this election. This bot/shill divide between the campaigns looks like another way in which Trump went frugal and still managed to be effective. I think that in the end, Brock's people ended up repulsing voters rather than helping their candidate.
>“Anyone who claims that automated spam accounts that tweeted about the U.S. election had an effect on voters’ opinions or influenced the national Twitter conversation clearly underestimates voters and fails to understand how Twitter works,” said Nick Pacilio, a Twitter spokesman.
The general approach to propaganda is to analyze the target audience and look for vulnerabilities (messages that might work) and susceptibilities (the effectiveness of a given message.)
The research link from politicalbots.org looks like a first-order pass using hashtags as a proxy for actual content, which is usually harder to analyze in an automated fashion. Understandable, but prone to errors, such as using pro-candidate hashtags with anti-candidate content.
But getting to the heart of the matter, it's hard to say how effective computational propaganda was in this election without more detailed testing and analysis.
Generally, a political campaign aims to do three things -- 1) motivate their followers to vote; 2) convert undecideds; 3) demoralize opponents. I could see bots doing 1) and 3) pretty well, but 2) not so much.
Of course, a well-designed experiment could prove me wrong.
> For example, the top 20 accounts, which were mostly bots and highly automated accounts, averaged over 1,300 tweets a day
That works out to about 1 tweet/minute per day... how is this not spam? Why can't Twitter do the most basic of spam filtering? And you know why I don't use Twitter anymore? It's because of this. They optimized for the wrong metric: the number of accounts, or the number of tweets/day.
What about the fact that Twitter deleted trending hashtags that were negative to Clinton? And the takeover of reddit's /r/politics by the Correct the Record PAC? This story is far bigger than a few twitter bots. It's hard to know anymore who is genuine and who is a paid sock puppet in certain forums.
I'm not sure what you mean by the entire makeup changed? It seemed that a lot of democrats were upset by the election, but I didn't notice anything that would leave me to believe that shills had left or ever even existed there in the first place.
(disclaimer: i m not american). Well a visit to /r/politics at the time would convince you. Also note how /r/the_donald had like ~250.000 users while /r/hillaryclinton ~30.000 . So it seems most hillary supporters would deflect to /r/politics because they liked what they saw there.
Didn't CTR have one million dollars total? That buys a large number of bots or a small number of commenters. In either case, pro-Clinton comments were much too diverse that CTR could have played a big role in them.
Closer to 10 million[1]. They are also unlike other superPACs. The FEC is limited in it's online jurisdiction to regulate paid political ads because of an “Internet exemption” clause. So they can freely coordinate with a campaign and skirt traditional FEC rules.
"And the takeover of reddit's /r/politics by the Correct the Record PAC? This story is far bigger than a few twitter bots."
This is interesting. Can you expand on this? Is it that CTR was involved? It sounds like the source(s) of the Twitter bots won't likely be found. What's the reach of reddit's /r/politics in comparison to Twitter?
"It's hard to know anymore who is genuine and who is a paid sock puppet in certain forums."
Isn't that the truth! Same goes increasingly for sources in general.
Twitter has every right to support a candidate against another. After all it's only a private company, and its leaders were not coy about which candidate they want to help to win. If you want to support another candidate, use another platform.
Jesus Christ, he's not saying Twitter broke the law, he's saying that the article (which is about internet groups helping candidates) ignored a number of powerful internet groups helping candidates.
I swear, every time someone brings up twitter's political censorship, there's at least one comment to the effect of "they're allowed to!" or "if you don't like it, you can leave!". Yes, everyone knows! We're talking about the morality, outcome, or effectiveness of twitter doing such a thing, not whether or not they're entitled to do it.
Agreed. The whole point of morals and ethics is to establish a code of behavior that defines what is or is not ok to do even if it's not against the law.
There isn't a law that forbids people from gossiping about others behind their backs but most of us can generally agree that it's simply something that decent people should not do.
I was playing devil's advocate in that comment. Sadly it got upvoted. Twitter 's mission is to "watch events unfold, in real time, from every angle". It has no business in manipulation. There are 2 social media monopolies and they play increasingly important roles in our democracies. If they keep using their power to manipulate people, people will demand their regulation. How can this be? maybe open up their data channels so competitors can enter the space.
The idea of CTR-controlled subreddits seems to be some form of mass hysteria. You will never see anyone post any evidence of the alleged CTR conspiracy, other than "people upvote news I don't like".
Correct The Record will invest more than $1 million into Barrier Breakers 2016 activities, including the more than tripling of its digital operation to engage in online messaging both for Secretary Clinton and to push back against attackers on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram. Barrier Breakers 2016 is a project of Correct The Record and the brainchild of David Brock, and the task force will be overseen by President of Correct The Record Brad Woodhouse and Digital Director Benjamin Fischbein. The task force staff’s backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize.
2) People on Reddit and elsewhere noted pro-Trump videos with thousands of shares and a couple hundred views repeatedly. The only way that would happen is with bots since to trigger the share link on YouTube would be by viewing the video.
Frankly, I see whataboutism being used regardless of political persuasion. (Is this a whataboutist response to whataboutism?)
I think the only way to combat accusations of whataboutism is to rigorously apply the same standards whenever these things are brought up and do one's best to remove even the appearance of partisanship when making them. That can be tough to do.
You know, stuff like this is actually where people can cross party lines and work together. Find an issue that should be non-partisan, set aside the other issues they may disagree on, and get something positive done.
Edit to add: I didn't think this was controversial. If you down vote, I'd appreciate it if you would take the time to comment in the interest of communication.
The CTR conspiracy theory claims that certain parts of Reddit are controlled by a CTR conspiracy, pro-Hillary commenters are usually "shills", pro-Hillary news is usually upvoted by bots and/or interns. What I asked for is evidence of this grand conspiracy.
A PAC that does "online messaging" on certain platforms isn't evidence of this grand conspiracy. Everyone does online messaging. You're claiming something far wackier is being done by one specific group of people that you singled out.
There's a reason that account has been flagged for bot removal consistently. Their account consists of pro-Clinton articles every single day for months, lots of them upvoted and heavily-commented on. Yeah, there are some people who just don't have a life, but at some point you have to just start looking at evidence.
A network of people manipulating social networks is not going to come out and reveal themselves. Though we do have Correct the Record coming out saying they are "messaging" and we know they've spent $10 million. Where do you think that money went? What do you think messaging is? How is it by definition not paid shilling?
You just had to be on some of the reddits during the election season and you could literally see the tone change when the weekend would end.
We know the Clinton campaign did engage in a strategy of manipulating media attention (see Wikileaks). We don't know CTR is manipulating social media but we have a lot of reasons to suspect so.
I agree. Half the country supported Clinton so labeling anyone saying anything positive about her as a CTR shill got really old real fast.
Then there was the narrative that the politics sub suddenly became more neutral after the election was over since CTR was no longer spending money, but if you check the sub now, it's still very anti-Trump, showing that the Sanders and Clinton support were organic.
Honestly did you frequent /r/politics before and after? CTR absolutely dominated that subreddit.....this new phenomenon where people won't believe anything unless there is "proof" is strange.
Because it was their actual stated goal, and they even mention Reddit specifically. Why would they ignore Reddit and only target other social media platforms?
What's strange is that accusations are believed without any evidence. There are swarms of people that really dislike Trump, how are you distinguishing between the two on /r/politics? Long before the 2016 election even started, before CTR was ever started, Trump-like views would have been despised. So saying that CTR dominated /r/politics is not believable on its face. Unless there had been a sudden chance of character for /r/politics and at the same time a CTR swing back. Which would be easy to show.
Accepting anything without proof is strange and foolish.
If you were a regular user at /r/politics, you would have noticed that there were tons of new users with no history coming in and throwing ad hominem attacks at everyone who said anything about clinton. You would also notice that bots were doing keyword searches on certain negtive titles and automatically downvoting them the instant they were posted. The day after the election was over, this all ended.
The Correct the Record PAC had 6 million dollars in funding specifically for spreading opinion on social media sites, of which Reddit is one of the most influential, being a source of long-form discussion. In fact, I believe CTR even directly mentioned that they target Reddit. Why wouldn't they, considering it was their stated mission?
What on earth do you think politicians do with their media budgets? Only buy newspaper and TV ads? Do you think they just ignore the internet, which is the number one form of media now? That's just plain absurd.
if you've read wikileaks, you would know that the New York Times is a known colluder with the Clinton Campaign and therefore can't be trusted with any political coverage.
This election taught me an important lesson about our media. I stop subscribing to CNN, FoxNews, NYTimes, and Washington Post. I will not click on any of their links or tweet their links for that matter. I signed up for Intercept for my daily dose of news. So far the reporting is excellent!
I think it's good to keep a critical eye on the news you consume. Perhaps I'm misreading, but please don't rely on just one source. I encourage you to read a variety of sources.
I think you have to say more than this else it just amounts to a non-constructive partisan comment.
Wikileaks does zero curation. No human-being has the time to read everything they post, and there is still a problem of verifying the authenticity of sources.
WikiLeaks have been out for a rrally long time. They have been a key focal point of the political discussion for over a year. There are thousands of reddit and other forum posts that have sifted through and analyzed them. There are hundreds of published articles about them in the media. I don't "have to say more than this" because it has already been said a thousand times over.
At what point does it become willful ignorance on your part? Seriously, spend 20 minutes today, do a bing search, find an article or reddit thread that links to the relevant emails, and do some reading and decide for yourself.
I'm worried about the sudden drumbeat of post-election "fake news" articles. It's really just a subtle form of censorship (and an attempt to control the social media narrative).
Producing false statements about people with intent is libel. The people who deploy such bots should be held accountable every bit as much as any journalist. Job title means nothing: a fake news purveyor and a journalist should be held to the same standard.
100 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadThese companies have all the tools to figure out orchestrated efforts.
You don't get to cancel property rights because you don't like the reporting there. You also don't get to cancel freedom of speech because you don't like what someone is saying.
It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship.
> I believe that the point being argued is that they have a responsibility to filter out automated messaging.
No, there is no responsibility whatsoever. Users are free to not use the service if they don't like it.
If you see this different then we have different views on what private property is.
Would you expand on this? I don't follow how a third party other than the state could force Facebook to censor?
You are incapable of seeing how it poses a threat to freedom of speech when all major media combined call for censorship? There's no point for me to engage in a discussion with you.
I'm not asking about whether Facebook can engage in censorship. That was addressed by you here:
> A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech
It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship.
I'm asking how a third party (someone other than Facebook or the government) can force Facebook to censor.
I think figuring out how to create a constructive online community is an important and complex issue. It's not as simple as letting everybody do whatever they want. And limiting what can be done includes limiting speech in some way. How you do that in a way that's not censorship is a legitimate question.
I own private property. It's true that I'm free to paint my house an obnoxious color and let it fall into ruin. It doesn't mean that I don't have a responsibility to my neighbors and community to provide upkeep to my house and ensure it's aesthetically pleasing.
Similarly, I believe social media and the media has a larger responsibility to our civic discourse even if they are a private company. Is that a legal obligation? No, but it's a moral obligation.
Can your neighbours sue you if you paint your house in an obnoxious color? No? Then there is no responsibility.
Why is it that I, for whom English is only my 4th language has to explain to you what the English word responsibility means?
If for you responsibility is just a fuzzy term with some feelings attached then we don't need to discuss this matter as FB can't be held accountable to that kind of responsibility anyways.
> Similarly, I believe social media and the media has a larger responsibility to our civic discourse even if they are a private company
I do not doubt that you believe many things, but first you have to show what responsibility actually exists and then show if and how that applies to Facebook if you are going to make such an argument.
I don't agree that a broadcaster has a responsibility to their audience. If a broadcaster starts screwing up consistently -- for example, by relaying false or unsubstantiated information -- the audience has the choice to move on to the next guy.
I also don't agree that it's necessarily the platform's responsibility to control what's on it, although it has that option.
No, you can have one voice broadcasting, and as long as it's still one very loud voice, it's only one voice. This is part of the psychology of how people measure veracity of information: through apparent public consensus. So you can have CBS broadcast something, and that's fine, but it becomes problematic when CBS buy themselves a thousand Twitter bots with names like "Joe Smith" or "DankMemes88", thus giving the false impression that thousands of people are all in consensus.
Given no one has commented on why they down voted, this is just speculation on my part based on what I've seen elsewhere on HN.
http://wavy.com/2016/11/08/police-no-reports-of-voter-intimi...
And right below that, an IBT page repeating it verbatim without investigation:
http://www.ibtimes.com/voter-fraud-2016-where-election-day-r...
It's not uncommon these days for news organisations to lazily use Twitter as a source in this way. Actually contacting the police force which had supposedly escorted voters would involve actual reporting.
http://politicalbots.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Data-Mem...
I really dislike the basis of their research which is:
Twitter provides free access to a sample of the public tweets posted on the platform. The platform’s precise sampling method is not known, but the company itself reports that the data available through the Streaming API is at most one percent of the overall global public communication on Twitter any given time. [6]
So...we aren't going to mention a selection issue at all? Is that 1% of global Tweets a truly random sample? Can you confirm Twitter isn't manipulating the output? We have examples of them censoring stuff this cycle...
In order to get the most complete and relevant data set, the tweets were collected by following particular hashtags identified by the team as being actively used during the debate.
What's the methodology for selection? I'd hope research out of Oxford would be a little better argued. But of course since it's Oxford this research will get quoted in the New York Times by people who probably don't understand the paper they are reporting on and we'll have talking heads endlessly parroting why this justifies censorship.
All this research is showing evidence of is that the stream Twitter provides is pro-Trump. It's a massive leap of faith to assume this data truly is representative and non-biased.
And maybe the platforms - Twitter, etc - have a responsibility to not publish those posts?
In a way, I'm terrified that fascism can now just "chatterbot" its way into the popular consensus. In another way, I'm incredibly relieved that a significant portion of the fascist speech I see on the web isn't real.
I've grown up and spent my entire life in the south. I've never had a parent, relative or friend even hint that I should view/treat any race differently than any other. You'd hear the occasional bad joke at school...but that was about it.
From the news cycle at this point, I feel like I'm supposed to have been mailed my own KKK gear as an expected housewarming gift.
I also live in the South and had different childhood experiences, but I'm older.
https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map
Just as an example, it looks like they have a store that sell confederate flags in Abbeville listed as a hate group...which seems like more than a little bit of a stretch. Looks like there's a flag store in Charleston also listed as a white nationalist group?
That tends to help me more in my job and having an informed perspective as a citizen.
Some bots might say useful things on Twitter. Asking Twitter to decide what's acceptable for a bot to say is asking for trouble.
The tech hackers are not on the conservative scene, but on the liberal front. This is why Obama had such a great campaign in both terms, and the conservative I-want-it-too failed outright.
Edit: LOL! I get downvoted for being demeaning, but my points stands. No apologies.
It was pretty terrifying how many fake people were used from both major candidates this election. This bot/shill divide between the campaigns looks like another way in which Trump went frugal and still managed to be effective. I think that in the end, Brock's people ended up repulsing voters rather than helping their candidate.
The general approach to propaganda is to analyze the target audience and look for vulnerabilities (messages that might work) and susceptibilities (the effectiveness of a given message.)
The research link from politicalbots.org looks like a first-order pass using hashtags as a proxy for actual content, which is usually harder to analyze in an automated fashion. Understandable, but prone to errors, such as using pro-candidate hashtags with anti-candidate content.
But getting to the heart of the matter, it's hard to say how effective computational propaganda was in this election without more detailed testing and analysis.
Generally, a political campaign aims to do three things -- 1) motivate their followers to vote; 2) convert undecideds; 3) demoralize opponents. I could see bots doing 1) and 3) pretty well, but 2) not so much.
Of course, a well-designed experiment could prove me wrong.
That works out to about 1 tweet/minute per day... how is this not spam? Why can't Twitter do the most basic of spam filtering? And you know why I don't use Twitter anymore? It's because of this. They optimized for the wrong metric: the number of accounts, or the number of tweets/day.
Who optimized for this, Twitter or the SV VCs?
http://i.imgur.com/fItaEy9.png
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
Also, evidence needed for "take over" as CTR messages would be labeled as such.
This is interesting. Can you expand on this? Is it that CTR was involved? It sounds like the source(s) of the Twitter bots won't likely be found. What's the reach of reddit's /r/politics in comparison to Twitter?
"It's hard to know anymore who is genuine and who is a paid sock puppet in certain forums."
Isn't that the truth! Same goes increasingly for sources in general.
I swear, every time someone brings up twitter's political censorship, there's at least one comment to the effect of "they're allowed to!" or "if you don't like it, you can leave!". Yes, everyone knows! We're talking about the morality, outcome, or effectiveness of twitter doing such a thing, not whether or not they're entitled to do it.
There isn't a law that forbids people from gossiping about others behind their backs but most of us can generally agree that it's simply something that decent people should not do.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
And we know their mission:
Correct The Record will invest more than $1 million into Barrier Breakers 2016 activities, including the more than tripling of its digital operation to engage in online messaging both for Secretary Clinton and to push back against attackers on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram. Barrier Breakers 2016 is a project of Correct The Record and the brainchild of David Brock, and the task force will be overseen by President of Correct The Record Brad Woodhouse and Digital Director Benjamin Fischbein. The task force staff’s backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize.
http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project-of-...
It it just a conspiracy?
2) People on Reddit and elsewhere noted pro-Trump videos with thousands of shares and a couple hundred views repeatedly. The only way that would happen is with bots since to trigger the share link on YouTube would be by viewing the video.
2) Yeah. Trump and Russia are doing it, too. It's just as nefarious there. Why is the standard defense of Clinton whataboutism?
I think the only way to combat accusations of whataboutism is to rigorously apply the same standards whenever these things are brought up and do one's best to remove even the appearance of partisanship when making them. That can be tough to do.
You know, stuff like this is actually where people can cross party lines and work together. Find an issue that should be non-partisan, set aside the other issues they may disagree on, and get something positive done.
Edit to add: I didn't think this was controversial. If you down vote, I'd appreciate it if you would take the time to comment in the interest of communication.
If I stab you and you try to defend yourself, it is whataboutism now?
Politics is about offense and defense. You can't fight a guy with bot networks pushing a false narrative without one of your own.
You honestly think unilateral disarmament is the way to go?
Having said, I think the above poster is correct that the idea of CTR taking over reddit as some settled reality is a sort of mass hysteria.
It is something that is simply repeated over and over again until people accept it.
A PAC that does "online messaging" on certain platforms isn't evidence of this grand conspiracy. Everyone does online messaging. You're claiming something far wackier is being done by one specific group of people that you singled out.
https://www.reddit.com/user/wardsalud/submitted/
There's a reason that account has been flagged for bot removal consistently. Their account consists of pro-Clinton articles every single day for months, lots of them upvoted and heavily-commented on. Yeah, there are some people who just don't have a life, but at some point you have to just start looking at evidence.
You just had to be on some of the reddits during the election season and you could literally see the tone change when the weekend would end.
We know the Clinton campaign did engage in a strategy of manipulating media attention (see Wikileaks). We don't know CTR is manipulating social media but we have a lot of reasons to suspect so.
At some point the burden of proof is on you.
Then there was the narrative that the politics sub suddenly became more neutral after the election was over since CTR was no longer spending money, but if you check the sub now, it's still very anti-Trump, showing that the Sanders and Clinton support were organic.
Accepting anything without proof is strange and foolish.
http://i.imgur.com/fItaEy9.png
If you were a regular user at /r/politics, you would have noticed that there were tons of new users with no history coming in and throwing ad hominem attacks at everyone who said anything about clinton. You would also notice that bots were doing keyword searches on certain negtive titles and automatically downvoting them the instant they were posted. The day after the election was over, this all ended.
The Correct the Record PAC had 6 million dollars in funding specifically for spreading opinion on social media sites, of which Reddit is one of the most influential, being a source of long-form discussion. In fact, I believe CTR even directly mentioned that they target Reddit. Why wouldn't they, considering it was their stated mission?
What on earth do you think politicians do with their media budgets? Only buy newspaper and TV ads? Do you think they just ignore the internet, which is the number one form of media now? That's just plain absurd.
Wikileaks does zero curation. No human-being has the time to read everything they post, and there is still a problem of verifying the authenticity of sources.
At what point does it become willful ignorance on your part? Seriously, spend 20 minutes today, do a bing search, find an article or reddit thread that links to the relevant emails, and do some reading and decide for yourself.
But they could just have 25 bots post twice a day..