Sorry, what? This is spam, but the potential effect is significantly greater. This is someone trying to buy an election and circumvent democracy. I'd say it's not sensationalized enough given the stakes.
Seems like it is the context. The bots are pretending to be something they're not - normal Bloomberg supporters, instead of a paid political campaign. If someone sees 50 signs in an empty lot, they're likely going to assume they were stuck there by Bloomberg's campaign staff.
The difference is that the bot is pretending to be a person. People are herd animals, they are easily manipulated to follow views that the herd sees as "correct". Having bots that are pretending to be people expressing their views is essentially an attempt at large-scale psychological manipulation. It is not simply about making people aware of a candidate or a certain point of view, it is about trying to make people believe many others believe that point of view to try and manipulate them into believing it as well.
Exactly this. A single person can put up 50 yard signs. Seeing 50 signs for a candidate just means there’s someone really enthusiastic about that candidate (or paid by them), it’s not automatically an indicator of wide support.
On the other hand, if every second house in a large area suddenly sprouted a sign for a candidate, you might rightly interpret that as strong support. Having 10,000 likes on a post is akin to this latter scenario - showing that there’s a whole lot of “actual people” who are on the bandwagon.
How are signs not also an example of people attempting "large-scale psychological manipulation"?
Signs don't just grow naturally out of the ground. Someone had to make them and put them there. And those signs aren't there to decarate yards. They're there to convince passerbys that a lot of people support a particular candidate.
There is absolutely no difference. Why is it ok for politicians to pay for signs to be posted in front yards, show to all of the neighborhood "network". Yet, the same action is somehow evil when the "neighborhood" is instead a social media platform?
It’s because this exists in meatspace where there is almost always a significant Proof of Work required. This helps limit/prevent the most egregious abuses.
No it doesn’t: one person and a backpack of stickers or posters will tag all the light poles in a neighborhood in an evening.
That’s no more “proof of work” than a day of Twitter posts, and is exactly the same false signaling of broad support.
I suspect that targeting Bloomberg and not the paid shills of other campaigns is itself a form of false signaling from a Twitter employee with a political bias.
The issue is not that people tend to follow the herd, nor that people try to influence each other’s opinions, those are just facts of life. The issue is when someone creates a fake herd that only they control.
If 100 different Twitter accounts all weigh in on a thread, arguing for one side, but they are all secretly controlled by one person, that creates a false picture of widespread support for that person’s stance.
It’s true that traditional advertising has always been used to create artificial buzz around candidates, and this is often a bit manipulative. But creating a crowd of fake supporters, with fake photos and bios, and deploying them in conversations with unsuspecting real humans, is a whole different level of manipulation.
Bots are not "pretending" to be anything. Humans have a false assumption that everything posted on social media was hand typed by another human, at the time it was posted. This is not, and almost never had been true, therein lies the problem. There have been "bots" posting online since day 1
Technically, the humans running the accounts are pretending to be a lot of different people. But since the HN audience is aware nobody has achieved artificial consciousness, we casually attribute characteristics to the puppets, not the puppeteers.
When bots have human names and human profile pictures they are most certainly pretending to be human. But even if they do not have these, by not explicitly mentioning they are bots on social networking sites (including sites like reddit) they are effectively pretending to be humans as well, because like you mentioned people assume that other users on the site are human.
It's a false assumption. People shouldn't assume anything, there are plenty of places to do legitimate research, political or otherwise, social media isn't one of them
> Having bots that are pretending to be people expressing their views is essentially an attempt at large-scale psychological manipulation.
Paid celebrity endorsements on TV like we see for products are the same. I don’t know if you can legally do that for campaigns, but you could definitely hire them to the staff as a surrogate (any rules against doing so at an inflated rate)?
>The difference is that the bot is pretending to be a person. People are herd animals, they are easily manipulated to follow views that the herd sees as "correct".
If this is true (and I'm not saying it isn't), the entire premise of Democracy is incompatible with modern technology. We could keep trying to bandage it with "fake news filters", but at some point we will need to admit defeat on that front and start fiddling with suffrage rather than fiddling with free speech.
It's fine to create bots if the social media platform allows it. Just make it clear that they're bots if that's the platform's policy.
If you disagree with Twitter's policy here, then that's a separate question, but here's my (I think, uncontroversial) opinion on that: Banning the automatic creation and puppeteering of masses of fake people seems like a pretty good policy along a number of dimensions - especially just for keeping authentic users from leaving your platform.
These are not bots, the article doesn't imply they are. They are campaign supporters expressing their support for a candidate, paid or not. How many of these folks do you presume would post the same messages if paid by Trump 2020? I'd argue very few would.
I don't think they're even bots in the first place. If he's spending hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm assuming he can get real people to post for him. It's the same thing as canvassing for a candidate.
> If I go to an empty lot and I put up 50 Mike yard signs, what’s the difference between that and a bot that makes 50 Mike tweets?
Because you're viewing it as solely advertising, you're missing it.
If you go out and buy a newspaper, and direct them to publish only favourable articles about certain people, you begin to run into problems. Like laws that govern bias and fairness.
Because this isn't advertisement - this is where people, rightly or wrongly, are going to get their information.
Out of curiosity, what laws which govern bias and fairness are you referring to? I tried searching for some, and the closest I found was the FCC fairness doctrine which was revoked (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine).
How is a distributed advertisement campaign different from bots on Twitter? Should we ban automated mail as well?
>This is someone trying to buy an election and circumvent democracy
The only differences between Bloomberg's behavior and that of a typical candidate are that Bloomberg is a late comer and he isn't beholden to donor interests - that doesn't mean he can't represent the people (not saying he can either).
If anything this is dangerous on the part of Twitter because now it's approaching publisher territory where it chooses which bots are allowable and which campaign bots are not. Twitter deciding the outcome of an election is far less democratic than a bunch of people possibly being swayed to vote for a candidate because of advertising. You can't apply different standards to a campaign you don't like - that's partisan and undemocratic. Buying ads is not.
First of all there could easily be a scenario where bots crowd out people by some order of magnitude. People would realize it and lose trust in Twitter and leave.
Then it is absolutely unclear what Twitter and other web companies are, or should be. There is a lot of moderating, banning and rule setting going on and these platforms are currently absolutely not "infrastructure". I hope that in the end we'll have something that brings people together and makes everyone better informed.
Why is Russia so special and unique in this regard?
I am honestly curious because there are countries with more impactful and tangible geopolitical interests (e.g. Saudi Arabia - who owns a substantial portion of Twitter), and yet it's only the comic-book villain, Putin's Russia who apparently does this.
The other alternative is that Russia does this, but so ineffectively that they stand out, but that seems unlikely because it would also imply that other countries do it so effectively that no one notices.
The third alternative I can think of is that interested parties are okay with the direction in which some foreign powers want to sway American public opinion. Those interested parties control the mainstream media - or enough of it - to be able to decide which countries' bots get reported on and which get ignored. Honestly it's this option that I find exponentially more likely.
That isn't about Russia trying to influence the US, I believe, but using bots to influence the public in Russia.
Also, I'm fairly certain that "let's influence the US public" is such a large undertaking that most small countries won't even attempt it. And you need to be strong enough to not get bombed if it becomes public, that narrows down the pool of countries a lot, so it's basically only Russia and China, possibly India (but they are allies), everyone else is either too small or too weak (ignoring Europe, they are much too close to the US).
Smaller / weaker countries might try to just buy influence, like Saudi Arabia, by hiring a PC agency and printing fancy brochures, or using lobbyists.
There's really nothing special about how Russia does this. I'd say Russia is mediocre at best in all this propaganda warfare. But since accusing other party of propaganda warfare is a part of propaganda warfare, whoever does this the best won't be the main talking point on the subject, usually.
And, yes, of course all other countries do that. And of course it would be silly to say that "nobody notices".
Because Russia's 50,000 dollar Facebook ad budget doesn't toe the line. There is tremendous propaganda (billions and billions worth) coming from everything from Israel to the BBC. But since that is roughly in line with the views of US media owners, it's not "manipulation" or "interference". It isn't anything.
Russia was experiencing democratic protests against their czar and might have had a peaceful transition to democracy in 1918. German-supported propaganda ended up ruining their 20th century. Russia is copying that playbook.
The Germans definitely sent Lenin because he would pressure whichever government Russia ended up with to withdraw from the war. It's wrong to call Lenin a German agent the same way it's disingenuous to call Corbyn a Russian agent in the UK just because he's a critic of NATO.
Anyway, it's a fallacy to think that Russia would be fine without the Revolution. Peaceful transitions to liberal democracy are an exception that only happen on very particular cases.
I think you have it opposite. Aren't there far more examples of peaceful transitions to liberal democracies (ie, almost every country who had a monarchy in Europe and or were under control of said countries... and now has a parliament/republic).
Albeit it took longer and it was "gradual" but few of them had the hyper-violent post "vanguard" revolutions events that resulted in some of the worst tragedies in history?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge (note famous french liberal Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to cover up news of this event in the west because he thought it would hurt the spread the revolution to the global "politeriat")
Almost all violent revolutions have resulted in a stain on world history. Yet the (less news worthy) numbers who gradually adopted independent courts and shifted from monarchy to republican/parliamentary power are much higher, and none of them had awful mass murders of people whose ideas weren't "in line" with the revolutionary ideology, not long after the revolutions.
These activities aren't what makes Putin's Russia a villain. They're just cited as more evidence in a book that was written long ago. How many dissidents have been murdered by the Kremlin?
Also, there's that whole thing about how Russian intelligence phished and leaked the email of a US presidential campaign manager. But that's only bad if you didn't win, apparently.
> Why is Russia so special and unique in this regard?
I’m with you, if it’s as comically easy to undermine American elections as has been reported (just takes a few hundred thousand bucks worth of Facebook ads), it’s only logical to assume that China or literally any other country with an axe to grind is doing the same thing as Russia.
But to answer the question, Russia is a great scapegoat (as apparently the only country in the world engaging in disinformation campaigns) because the villains are white. If you were to accuse, say, China of doing what Russia is doing (which let’s face it, they probably are), the argument could instantly be shot down with “that’s racist.”
> Why is Russia so special and unique in this regard?
Also holding Russia responsible doesn't mean singling it out. Pretending that holding it responsible at all would be singling it out is, in practice, like asking for special and unique treatment it doesn't deserve, neither being special nor unique.
The Russians are somewhat unique in that their Soviet predecessors studied and were very effective at these types of tactics in the old world.
The West did this type of thing, but sucked at it — western powers usually backed traditional or incumbent people in power, and usually for a more specific purpose.
What these guys do now is just push narratives of fringe or divisive people, with or without cooperation or knowledge of the principals. The goal is chaos. Normal, more effective political figures Having oddballs like Trump, Jill Stein, Sanders, etc in positions of fleeting or lasting prominence happens when messages get magnified and legitimized.
Because the neoliberal weasels in our chattering classes are still butthurt they don't get to feed off Russia's corpse the way they are in Ukraine, mostly.
The Israelis, Chinese and Saudis have vastly more influence over the US than any twitter operation that mentally ill "reporters" blame the woes of the country on. Those countries bribe our politicians the old fashioned way, and don't show up in the fevered imaginations of these dimwits when they get owned in twitter mentions.
The parent poster claimed to be a Russian citizen complaining about Kremlin shills manipulating people in Russia itself, not ones trying to sway Americans.
> As part of a far-reaching social media strategy, the Bloomberg campaign has hired hundreds of temporary employees to pump out campaign messages through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These “deputy field organizers” receive $2,500 per month to promote the former New York mayor’s candidacy within their personal social circles
Accusations of paid shills have been thrown around so freely on the Internet, it's refreshing to have actual textbook examples for once!
All government employees should be banned from participating in elections related discourse because they are paid shills for big government and never support small government and balanced budget.
If private sector employees shill for their boss, that's none of my business and likewise Twitter should leave them alone.
Wow, how can get paid $2,500/month to post Bloomberg spam? That sounds like a fantastic deal! If you extrapolated that to an annual salary, about 35% of Americans work jobs that pay less than that.
Bloomberg taking the most practical approach to wealth inequality. All the other candidates just talk about it but Bloomberg is sending billions hurling down the wealth gradient!
Realistically tens of millions at best. Assuming the Bloomberg campaign hires 200 people for this strategy (the article states "hundreds") it would take 167 years for him to spend $1 billion on it.
And that is very minuscule fraction of his wealth.
This is really scary because it means that if somehow billionaires and companies that received assistance from Quantitative Easing decided to spend their wealth, it would cause considerable inflation.
He could spend his entire fortune and it wouldn't even make the smalle blip in our economy. While he's wealthy, $55 billion isn't really much money in the American economy with a GDP of over 21 trilion.
Quantitative easing has literally zero to do with what you're proposing, the amount of money infused was pretty small compared to the size of our economy (arguably way too little), and the rest of us would've been even more fucked had it not happened.
Correlating QE to billionaire spending and inflation is like correlating how much change you find in your couch to your maximum potential earnings. It doesn't make sense.
And don't get me wrong, I totally hate Bloomberg and I know he has literally zero business being president. I'm not shilling for him, he's a piece of crap, don't vote for him...
I just really fucking hate it when people say things that sound "right" or even "informed" about economics that aren't because the whole science gets shit on daily by people who have no business talking about it without stating "I know nothing" before posting. If you don't make posts on physics theories don't make them about economics; it's actually even more hurtful because getting through the misinformation is harder and more prone to error.
QE had a huge effect on our economy and the wealth distribution in our county and was a disastrous policy.
Edit: to be clear, we essentially bailed out the banks with absolutely no repercussions except to the working class through deflated bonds and interest rates.
In regards to wealth distribution: no, absolutely not; it didn't have an effect on wealth distribution other than leaving it as-is and then mostly flat-lining it for a few years (before continuing the status-quo of increasing wealth inequality).
Here's the Gini coefficient from 2000 until now for the USA; which, measures income inequality:
It was anything but a disastrous policy, it was a disaster mitigating policy... it was one completely underfunded by any sane measure, but did mitigate disaster.
Yeah, the banks got bailed out and no one got tried. Those two things are completely independent of each other. One has to do with economic policy and the other one is with governmental policy.
Don't blame the bailout because the motherfuckers didn't go to jail.
Sorry, but the Gini coefficient is a not the data we are looking for here. It doesn’t capture at all rising prices and price to income ratio over time, inflation, interest rates, and most importantly, rent and land cost. You’d have to point at a much more robust analysis to prove the point either way, and there’s no way to look at it that doesn’t show a massive wealth transfer over the last ~decade.
Look at capital gains vs savings rates over the last 12 and cry. Then look at pension funds debts.
Finally, the Gini coefficient did go up from the highest of all first world countries to the highest by a significant amount.
The bailout wasn’t the problem. There was no punishment, yes, and QE was a hands down unmitigated robbery and the major factor in the populist upswings around the world.
> Correlating QE to billionaire spending and inflation is like correlating how much change you find in your couch to your maximum potential earnings.
Of course you have to correlate it. Do you know what QE was? Without QE fixing the balance sheets of the banking system and low interest rates, we'd most likely be facing major deflation. Without QE and low interest, bloomberg's net worth would be much smaller and that most definitely would affect his spending.
> it's actually even more hurtful because getting through the misinformation is harder and more prone to error.
The fact that you correlated economics to physics/science makes it difficult to take your argument seriously.
Dody T. Eid is a fucking nobdoy. Straight up just some jackass who has no background in economics writing very conservative op-eds. Next up is Joris, who let me quote the wikipedia block from google: "[..] is a Dutch non-fiction author, anthropologist, news correspondent, and TV interviewer. Wikipedia"
You can credit my Economics background for my astute bullshit detector.
> Of course you have to correlate it. Do you know what QE was? Without QE fixing the balance sheets of the banking system and low interest rates, we'd most likely be facing major deflation. Without QE and low interest, bloomberg's net worth would be much smaller and that most definitely would affect his spending.
Yeah, great idea deflation, that's how the great depression happened because the government at the time and federal bank said "piss off wankers." It triggers a deflationary spiral, which stops spending, and causes economic collapse, here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Deflationary_spiral
It's safe to say it's you, friend, who does not know anything about QE, economic history, theory, or its application.
FWIW, I hate Milton Friedman and think he was an asshole who had an enormous amount of bullshit ideological driven policies that strayed far from the science, but god damn he hit the nail on the monetary policy preventing the great depression... which is exactly what happened in 2008/9 by the FED holding interest rates low or negative.
I do like Keynes mostly, but unfortunately, because a lot of America has no idea about how economics works, especially on a macro scale, we didn't get the "new deal." We should have we got "the shitty deal," which was no investment infrastructure.
> You can credit my Economics background for my astute bullshit detector.
Is that because of all the bullshit in economics gave you ample practice in detecting bullshit? Well be patient with me because my limited economics background most likely pales in comparison to yours.
> Yeah, great idea deflation
I didn't say deflation is great. You are reading into things too much. I just said QE and low interest rates had an impact on inflation. Something which you cavalierly dismissed. I said QE and low interest rates prevented deflation.
> It's safe to say it's you, friend, who does not know anything about QE, economic history, theory, or its application.
All you've provided are just ad hominems and just cnbc talking points with nonpertinent rants on the side. Everything you disagree with is "bullshit" and everything you say is "gospel". Typical economics background behavior.
For someone "with an economics background", you would know how it has so many "gurus" and so much unsettled "science" in it. How one nobel prize winning economist could say the world economy is going to collapse after the previous election and another can say it will be great and economics couldn't settle the issue either way.
But then again, this comment thread is precisely why I view economics as a religion rather than a science. Where people make up shit that aligns with their agenda and worship their prophets ( Keynes, Marx, etc ). Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between a religious zealot and someone with "an economics background".
I only want to quote you from a couple days ago because I think you need to reflect here and take time to stop spewing non-sense which you're making up... and I don't think you're seeing it clearly; so, maybe this will help you out...
In reply to this:
>> I rely on Matt Levine to explain, more clearly than I could, how brokerages make money
You wrote:
> You rely on someone who never worked for a brokerage to teach you how brokerages worked?
Maybe you should really think that through in the context of economics.
You are invested in this. That's the type of religious zeal I'm talking about.
> Maybe you should really think that through in the context of economics.
Only if economics worked like brokerages work.
The fact that you have to go "3 days back into comment history" rather than using the "science" in economics to support your argument should tell you something. That's the difference between religion, economics, political science, etc and physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. One responds with straw man and red herrings, the other responds with actual science and facts.
That would be a great story. If Bloomberg employed hundred thousand people in his shilling campaign, and then Trump took the credit for reducing unemployment.
Or maybe people should just stop relying on Tw/Fb/etc for their news.
Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareblue_Media is a textbook example of how wildly unpopular Dem candidates lose elections after rigging their own nomination and outspending their opponent 2:1. See also Media Matters and Correct The Record. In the runup to the election, every single forum was full of rather obvious shills. If Bernie doesn't hire these people, they _will_ be deployed against him, and later (unsuccessfully) against the incumbent.
How is hundreds of political campaign volunteers considered far-reaching? Surely it's less than the number of normal non-shill people involved in the campaign legitimately. I feel like the scale of these numbers is off in a way that suggests the campaign messed up in more than one way.
It's more about time per person and organization, someone who is paid and working on a specific goal in communication with others doing the same thing will probably be a lot more effective than a loose group of supporters.
That is assuming they appear to not be organized and paid...
"We ask that all of our deputy field organizers identify themselves as working on behalf of the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign on their social media accounts."
We can point to Shareblue as something similar for a pro-Democrat, anti-Trump marketing organisation. However there's no evidence that they have hired hundreds of people to work for them.
Basically it's marketing. Every other campaign does run marketing and there are going to be some employees devoted to that, but I don't think we have any reports of hundreds of paid employees. Even Russian troll farms are opaque in their hiring practices.
edits: Shareblue has changed to https://americanindependent.com/ it appears. Mainly anti-trump. Can't see any specific pro-bernie content.
I'm surprised they don't do it for the obviously fake accounts posting in favour of Donald Trump. There's something very fishy with some of those comments, and the profiles that they come from are very sparse. It should be easy enough to flag/detect automatically.
I've had sarcastic supported upvoted by Trump bots as true support to the tune of hundreds of accounts. It's almost embarrassing how manipulated Twitter is. Facebook is a lost cause. The climate change stuff they repost alone convinces me we're not going to win the 21st century propaganda war.
I don't know why you're getting down voted. Perhaps I exist in a bubble, but everything you say makes complete sense to me, and I can corroborate it with my own experiences. I can't imagine why someone would down vote it, unless...
Twitter does remove a lot of bot/spam accounts, and always has. But you don't generally notice it, because you only see the accounts that remain. Because of a quirk in how some spammers operate, one of my accounts gets a few spam DMs requests per day. I know about them because I get an email about the DM. But when I look at my DMs, those accounts have almost always been removed by the time I get there.
How would it get status as a recognized "fundamental small group primate behavior" without proven examples? You're saying that you want the 200th floor penthouse without any of the apartments below it.
Some people have purposely avoided studying any of the last 3000 years of human history involving communications. Especially those involving deception.
Despite the fact that Dang explicitly tells users that this user is involved in some kind of multi-year pro Google campaign, there are dozens of posts protesting that the very concept of a thing could ever exist.
The more I look at platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the more I start liking the WeChat “anti-viral” timeline concept. Posts on your WeChat timeline show only likes from your friends. This applies even on posts from other people - you can only see likes on those posts from your friends, not any of that person’s friends. Boom - no more platform manipulation, since everything on your timeline is 100% driven by your friends.
Unfortunately the Chinese government can and will censor posts on these feeds, which is made super easy by how slow things usually spread on that platform - but that’s a different issue entirely. I’m not advocating literally switching to WeChat - just that the concept feels at once far more “social” and rather less prone to certain kinds of manipulation.
It sounds like even the like count on posts is scoped to likes that come from your friends. So if a post has 1000 likes globally but was only liked by 10 of your friends the like count would be 10.
Does WeChat have an equivalent to "Trending"? Part of the strategy of campaigns like this one is to get something globally trending, and Twitter seems to like the idea of global (or even local) trends existing. It'd be interesting to have a per-user concept of "Trending," scoped to just the people you follow, but I suspect Twitter wouldn't like it because it's harder to onboard new users and get them engaged.
The other part of campaigns like this is replying to major accounts to push something, so you'd have to have your "anti-viral" timeline hide replies that weren't endorsed by people you don't follow. That is, if friend A retweeted something by a famous politician, and a thousand people replied including none of your friends, and friend B liked one of those replies, only that one reply would show up for you if you looked at the tweet. Again, I suspect this is bad for engagement (so I'm wondering if WeChat actually does this?).
In my recollection, Tencent (WeChat's owner) derives a lot of their revenue from microtransactions, so engagement in the core app isn't as big a deal for them.
I think it's not giving the whole picture of paint WeChat/tencent as a normal company trying to make profit. They are providing a national service, it doesn't need to be profitable.
Wechat doesn’t have trending. Trending is literally the opposite of something you want if your #1 fear is bad news about the government going viral.
The closest thing to trending is that you notice that a bunch of your friends are all posting about similar stuff. Like when Li Wenliang, the whistleblower-doctor in Wuhan, died, or when everyone bored at home in quarantine was posting photos of brooms balanced to stand on end.
You know its the old boiling frog trope - until you pointed that out
> this model tends to separate social from news.
i hadn't realised how much the two had become intertwined. FB, twitter etc all started off as interacting with your friends then drifted very far from that.
I’ve been living in China for 7 years and I really like Wechat, aside from the censorship and privacy concerns aside. It’s basically WhatsApp with a dumb timeline — literally the algorithm is “show me everything my friends have posted, in chronological order”. It’s wonderful.
That’s probably possible for two reasons. First, the app’s principal designer maintains Steve Jobs-level creative control on the product. Second, as a sibling pointed out, Wechat primarily makes money from other stuff besides posts going viral﹡.
There’s not even a “repost” feature. You literally have to open the article, copy the URL, and create an entirely new post on your timeline. It cuts down on low effort sharing (of course, if you’re the government, you like this because it also slows the spread of so-called “improper information”)
Facebook died for me when it became possible for me to see Nazis arguing in the comments of an article my grandma posted. I mean what the fuck, how did we ever get there.
﹡ which unfortunately involves vacuuming up as much data about every aspect of everyone’s life as possible. It’s impossible to understate how pervasive Wechat is: if you only have this app and no other, you can still live very comfortably here.
Yes that’s the whole point as the poster pointed out. The Nazis arguing on the grandma’s post would also disagree with the censors too —it’s not a matter of censorship vs none, is a matter of what is considered worthy of censorship in China vs here.
This sounds like it will fall into the same "echo-chamber" problem platforms like Youtube fell into. Note that with the social-credit system, you are docked points if you are friends with the "wrong" people. Thus, you naturally friend with people with similar interests. I don't think they designed it with "anti-viral" as a motive, but instead as a way to weed out and isolate people with contrarian thoughts.
When I lived in China 10+ years ago, the West would criticize the Chinese government for limiting the spread of "opinions" on social media. Today, in the West, we call that "fake news", and limit its spread too.
Give it another 10 years and, at least here in Europe, we will have the first countries copying the "social points" system China is currently rolling out.
We, along with Europe, had "social points" system for a long time. If you smoked weed, were associated with communist/socialist circles, etc, you were or could be barred from certain jobs (public and private), banks, voting, etc. The idea that it's bad when china does it is just hypocrisy or borderline jealousy.
> Today, in the West, we call that "fake news", and limit its spread too.
We say/use "civility" or "western values" to censor, attack, etc. The chinese use "harmony", "chinese characteristics", etc to censor, attack, etc.
We shame the chinese and demand they treat muslims better while killing millions of muslims and destroying a few muslim countries. The chinese shame the west and demand we treat muslims better while interning millions of muslims.
Too bad hypocrisy isn't a currency or we'd all be rich and living large.
Your false equivalence here is absurdly full of shit on both points.
The highly decentralized, mostly non-computerized western social shaming that existed for decades for certain social beliefs and practices, which to some extent still exists in certain limited contexts was in no meaningful way comparable to a systematic, almost entirely centralized government-directed formal social credit scoring system that dictates one's "worthiness" and so many aspects of their social life, economic life and literal freedom to move around based on what political opinions they publish, who they're friends with, what things they read, share on social media or even what things they buy. Comparing the two is ridiculous. It's either blatantly blind or you're trolling for some other reason. No western state has anything like this. No notable number of people in the west are literally ruined economically or banned from travel, or the victims of their friends being nudged by the government into abandoning them because they posted something against Trump, or against Obama or in any other context. Very public, very open debate and protest against numerous government policies is still very much alive and well in the west. In China this is blatantly not the case.
> Your false equivalence here is absurdly full of shit on both points.
Ah "false equivalence". It gets me every time because at this point it's so obvious. A talking point by people who don't know what it means.
> The highly decentralized, mostly non-computerized western social shaming that existed for decades for certain social beliefs and practices
Highly decentralized? FBI background checks are decentralized? Credit checks are highly decentralized? If you think "the west" is decentralized, you really have bought into the propaganda hard. Let me guess you think "the west" is individualistic while the east is "collectivist".
> No notable number of people in the west are literally ruined economically or banned from travel, or the victims of their friends being nudged by the government into abandoning them because they posted something against Trump, or against Obama or in any other context.
And notable number of people in china have been? Or is it just parroting propaganda you just choose to believe in.
> Comparing the two is ridiculous.
Only to people with an agenda.
> It's either blatantly blind or you're trolling for some other reason.
This is called a false dichotomy with a dash of ad hominem.
> In China this is blatantly not the case.
The hong kong protests don't happen? How come there are so many protests in china?
Just because they aren't identical doesn't mean they aren't comparable. Just because one is bad doesn't mean the other is good. You can cherrypick nonsense to fit an agenda or just look at the obvious objectively.
If you can't plainly see the difference between the west's flawed but essentially democratic and mostly liberal systems of government, media rules and management of free expression (even if they sometimes veer into the authoritarian in an ad-hoc, sporadic way) and the overtly authoritarian, systematically repressive systems of social and political control that exist in the Chinese state, then there's no debating your nonsense. Spare me the claims of it all being anti-China propaganda too. The CCP is quite blatant about what it does and numerous creditable NGOs and media sources have reported on these subjects extensively.
"Twitter says duplicative messages violate its policy against platform manipulation and spam"
Sounds like retweeting should also be banned under this policy. But that would require some semblance of continuity and fairness in policy enforcement.
I couldn't use normal view to read the page without agreeing to the ToS so I switched to Firefox's reader view. That doesn't include the image.
My reading is that the caption (which I can read by view-source) is a second-hand interpretation of Twitter's statements. I think the direct Twitter quote, which I copied earlier, is more relevant, and addresses vinniejames's concerns about retweets.
I can see opposing candidates pretending to be Bloomberg’s paid people saying stuff to make Bloomberg look bad. Any country who wants Bloomberg to not be a viable candidate could do the same.
At this point I think anyone telling me to vote for Bloomberg received a check from him. It’s not true always of course, but it’s the first thing that pops into my head.
Valid point, it's fuzzy. I just remembered New Knowledge [1] who ran false flag operations to make it look like their opponent was supported by Russian bot nets.
There's likely a bit of both. Would Bloomberg pay $2500 per month for simple copy & paste jobs? Doubtful, I'm sure he has better media people that know they could get that for tiny fraction of the price. There may be pro-Bloomberg paid posting while somebody also pays for dumb multiplication bots to spread a message (or false flag it).
The Bloomberg campaign was doing this following the FEC regulations, meaning that the shill accounts had to identify themselves as such. If an account pretends to be a shill account, the Bloomberg campaign can simply show that the account was not one of theirs.
This is how democracy dies. When we, as a society, permit the election outcome to be determined by the executive leadership of a handful of tech companies.
"Russia" has absolutely no power compared to the implications of this
Look how much money Bloomberg had spent and isn't doing all that great in national polls. Also look at the 2016 election, Hilary spent almost double what Trump spent and still lost.
Money doesn't mean automatic votes unless people agree with your message at least some.
Also, Russia had very little impact in 2016 election (if you have proof otherwise, I'd love to see it). It did make much of the media and Washington go crazy for a couple years, but that seemed just an amplification of Russia's attempt to mess with things.
In contrast, look at how far along Bloomberg would be if he was not able to spend any of his own money. I'd say his money has had quite an effect.
The 2016 election margin was very slim. A great number of factors could plausibly have made the difference. Russian social media manipulation is likely within that margin. Russia's hack of the DNC is definitely within that margin.
The Bloomberg example demonstrates @kyrra’s point. Bloomberg is moving up rapidly in the polls because Democrats are desperately looking for a “not Bernie” candidate. Bloomberg is using money to get his message out there. But money alone wouldn’t have done it. Tom Steyer spent $127 million of his own money and couldn’t buy any support.
Clinton spent twice as much on her campaign, and adding in pro-Clinton PACs spending on her behalf was three times as much. If money was as important as people say, it should never have been close enough for Russian media manipulation to matter.
I don't think anybody is saying that money alone is enough. For one thing, just like any ad campaign, you have to spend it well.
But if you really believe money isn't very important, you'll have to explain why successful candidates all spend a great deal of time raising money. And then keep on doing so despite the clear advantages of incumbency.
Ah, come on. "Democracy" was always like that. "Democracy" is a meme, and always has been, maybe except to the times when all the quorum could fit on Agora and voice their opinions.
I imagine if Bloomberg (or whoever the next billionaire is) was more friendlier with the Twitter C-levels, or was a big investor, they wouldn't have dared to do anything...
So that's the new first step for the next billionaire (or fake one) who wants to be president: buy a significant share of Twitter.
Maybe it’s just me, but it doesn’t seem like the Bloomberg campaign was trying to pass that video off as real. They edited crickets chirping into the audio.
See for example: the professional Instagram shills like fuckjerry (of Fyre Fest fame) always mention it was paid for by Mike Bloomberg in the text area
That's why Bloomberg discloses the sponsored posts on Instagram as: (yes this was really sponsored by @mikebloomberg) in the description.
The entire message is often ironic, so other nonsponsored people are also using (yes this was really sponsored by @mikebloomberg) in their posts to make fun of Bloomberg, so although everyone is disclosing they're being paid, you don't actually know if someone is being paid or not.
from what i've seen, the people "disclosing" they're being paid fall into two camps: the people who are actually getting paid, and are saying nice things about bloomberg. and the people who are sarcastically saying they're getting paid, and are definitely not saying nice things about bloomberg.
so it's pretty easy to distinguish who's using that disclosure honestly.
On Instagram influencer wannabees have been known to publish fake ads in order to make themselves look important enough to get high profile sponsers. I would imagine the same will could happen in elections.
Yeah I don’t know how you handle something like this and don’t end up in a place where only sanctioned decrees and declarations from the ministry of truth in information is allowed. Not that there’s an obvious solution to this mire
I would say paying off media outlets, think tanks, state party leaders, plotting with the DNC for a brokered convention, is beyond a parody of manufactured consent.
You’re analogy to Hillary also doesn’t hold much water because his intent is not to become president, but to prevent Sanders from getting the nomination, or, if he does keep Trump in power by poisoning the well in the primaries.
In the Iowa caucuses, Sanders won a plurality, but tellingly he did terribly in second alignments. (I.e. when other candidates were not viable, those candidates’ supporters avoided Sanders.) That strongly indicates that his support is strong, but has a low ceiling—confined to a plurality of the party.
That’s not surprising. The Democratic Party as currently constructed is a third-way coalition including traditional progressives, labor, neo-liberals, and minorities. Sanders might have a plurality of the support in the party, but he threatens to blow up that coalition.
A successful Presidential candidate has to win 95% of their own party. But only 76% of Democrats say that they would vote for a socialist: https://news.gallup.com/poll/285563/socialism-atheism-politi.... A successful Presidential candidate has to evenly split independents—who comprise 30% of the electorate—with the other party’s candidate. But independents’ views of socialism are much closer to those of Republicans than to those of Democrats: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/807047941/poll-sanders-rises-.... Any successful democratic candidate must win super-majorities of non-white people (90% of African Americans, and 75% of Hispanics and Asians.) But just 33% of non whites have a favorable view of socialism.
Bloomberg isn’t “buying” the support of “media outlets, think tanks, and state party leaders.” These are the people who established the third way coalition after devastating losses in the 1980s. These people are already looking for an alternative to Sanders. Bloomberg’s money is just getting his candidacy out there to help coalesce the “not Sanders” majority of the party.
Your analysis is certainly plausible but I think recent history, especially 2016, has shown that it's hard to trust any analysis that seems to have it all figured out.
"Never Trump" seemed to be a bipartisan certainty and we all know how that went.
It’s telling that you try and pull the whole socialism card and not Sanders’ actual numbers, where he does things like beat Trump with independents by 18 points:
Leads with Latino voters, is first or second with African American voters, depending on the polling, and is literally the most popular senator in the country:
You’re supposition that there’s going to be some outbreak of pearl clutching about “socialism” is about as plausible that Bloomberg isn’t buying the election.
I don’t think the national polling at this stage is elucidating. It’s like Biden’s numbers in the Democratic primary. Once the campaigning and debates started, and people became familiar with the candidate, his poll numbers collapsed.
That’s why I’m pointing to the polling for socialism. My projection is that Trump will be very effective at making the election a referendum on socialism. It’s going to be wall to wall ads of Sanders’ praise of the USSR, Venezuela, etc. When that starts, I think Sanders’ poll numbers are going to collapse.
Respectfully, this is as much unfounded speculation as any other questioning of national polling. You’re free to your skepticism of it, but you can’t base arguments on a cherry picking of that skepticism.
I think Sanders will have an uphill battle against Trump (as would any of the primary candidates), but the Democrats are guaranteed to lose if he wins a plurality, they broker the convention, pick someone else, and disenfranchise Sanders’ massive base of support. And that is the documented outcome Bloomberg is pursuing:
rayiner, you cite poll numbers a lot -- "x% of y say they do|do not support z" -- which is good, it says a lot, but I want to bring something else to your attention, which I'm increasingly realizing is vitally important: personality, likability.
I think pg has talked about this before too, one of great tests has been "is this person charismatic?" And further, that charismatic, assertive personalities can do wonders in changing and winning people's minds. No doubt Hillary would have won had she been more likable (or a man, America is still lagging behind when it comes to having a woman in charge). Sanders is more charismatic than Trump so he'll probably win, whatever the labels.
Oh hey, you raise a good point here. When it was Trump vs. Hillary I remember thinking this was a great test of pg's charisma theory, since it predicted Trump while nearly everything and everyone else was predicting Hillary. (Alan Lichtman's "keys" test also predicted Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/tr...)
But what would the charisma test say about Trump vs. Sanders? I hadn't thought about that one. If it's Trump vs. Bloomberg, that's as much a no-brainer as last time. But Trump vs. Sanders? Not so clear. You say Sanders is more charismatic than Trump, but many people would disagree. In an all-American context, I think Trump is probably more charismatic than Sanders, though by a smaller margin than with Hillary or Bloomberg. To really decide that, though, we'd have to get into definitions of charisma.
Lichtman's system is interesting since, like pg's theory, it depends on fundamentals and ignores polls. Lichtman also includes charisma as one of his keys. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/12/th.... A quick look at his "13 keys" list suggests to me that Lichtman will probably predict a Trump win this year (even though he despises Trump), whether or not the challenger is charismatic. That's mostly because of economic indicators. If those change, the prediction probably changes. It will be interesting to see how Lichtman interprets his list this year.
Trying to measure charisma is obviously very subjective, but I bet even if you asked Clinton supporters, many would admit that Trump is more charismatic than Hillary (it would be interesting to see a poll testing this). That's likely to be a very bad sign. I think you need it to at least be a toss up where reasonable people can disagree, and your own supporters should consider you the more charismatic one.
Right, it's like if you found a poll asking "would you vote for a pro-Russia game show host who mocks disabled people?" with predictably negative results, ignored polls asking directly "would you vote for Trump?", and then tried to claim that as evidence that Trump could never win.
Why would you try to extrapolate from results in Iowa? It's a.) a caucus, which has weird effects on turnout, and b.) not at all representative of Democrat voters. And if you are going to extrapolate from Iowa, you can't simply ignore Sanders' dramatic over-performance with the few minorities that do live there.
You're also referencing polls on who would vote for a Democratic socialist, while ignoring polls of who would vote for Sanders specifically, overall approval ratings of Sanders (consistently near the top for any politician in the country), and head-to-head polls of Sanders vs. Trump.
It's pretty clear that you're just cherrypicking to fit a narrative. You're entitled to your opinion, but don't pretend it's supported by data in any sort of definitive way when that's plainly not the case.
I’m extrapolating from Iowa because it provides concrete data about the nature of Sander’s plurality support. He’s clearly the #1 choice of a significant minority of democrats. But is he the #2 choice of a sufficient number of others? Or is he only winning a plurality because the anti-Sanders candidates can’t pick an alternative? (On this front, it’s critical to note that Biden was leading Sanders by large margins until he fell apart in Iowa.)
Matchups against Trump this far out are not helpful. In the months before the nomination, Clinton had up to a 10 point lead on Trump. That closed significantly once the campaigning started. The nomination is when the rubber hits the road. That’s when the attack ads will start, going into Sanders’ lengthy record of anti-Amrrican, communist sympathizing statements. That’s not baked into the poll numbers for Sanders yet. (Meanwhile, all of Trump’s bad statements are already baked into his poll numbers.)
"He’s clearly the #1 choice of a significant minority of democrats. But is he the #2 choice of a sufficient number of others? Or is he only winning a plurality because the anti-Sanders candidates can’t pick an alternative?"
"Matchups against Trump this far out are not helpful."
Ah, so we can base all kinds of conclusions on a poll asking "would you vote for a Democratic socialist?", but one taken at the same time asking "would you vote for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump?" is not helpful? :-/
I wonder if "inexplicable Republican best friends"* like Rayiner, who try to tell Democrats who their candidate should be, know that they are actually showing their hand and telling the rest of us who they're most afraid of.
Your own link shows that people went to Buttigieg more than 2:1 over Sanders in the second alignment.
Apart from that, the movement in vote total between the first and second rounds combines two effects, but we’re interested in just one of those. Your analysis of the second round data marks a positive count for a candidate where someone moves to that candidate in the second round from a candidate that didn’t hit the 15% threshold in the first round. (That’s the only way for someone to switch.) But it also marks a negative count where a candidate doesn’t meet the 15% threshold in a precinct and his or her supporters have to move to another candidate. We don’t really care about that second effect, because that just measures whether a candidate is able to consistently get above 15%.
What we want to predict is, as you knock out Biden, Warren, etc., where do their supporters go? You can find that out directly from the released caucus data, by looking at where supporters of those candidates go in precincts where those candidates don’t hit the 15% threshold. Most of those supporters don’t go to Bernie, which means Bernie is not their first choice or their second choice.
Polling backs that up: https://civiqs.com/documents/Civiqs_ISU_banner_book_2020_01_.... Right before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders was the first or second choice of 37% of eligible Iowa primary voters. That means for 2/3 of the party, Sanders was neither the first nor the second choice.
Bernie just won 70%+ of the Hispanic vote in Nevada, and came in second to Biden with African Americans, so please adjust your caucus extrapolations accordingly:
> You’re analogy to Hillary also doesn’t hold much water because his intent is not to become president...
People floated this theory about Trump, 4 years ago. But let's be honest: if bloomberg, or any other billionaire, has an opportunity to seize ever-unchecked control over the richest nation in the world, can you honestly expect them to flinch at taking power and using it to their direct enrichment?
"Need" isn't really the issue, or, for example, Trump would have divested from his businesses. Instead, he raised prices and has attempted to host the G7 on his own property. Does he NEED that money? No. He WANTS it.
It's pretty obvious that Bloomberg is not running for his direct enrichment. He has a record as mayor of NYC for 12 years. The most nefarious notion you could come up with, while keeping your head grounded in reality, is self-aggrandizement.
He bought all of his mayoral re-elections by ensuring his opponents were patsies. He hates talking to regular people, not to mention the poor and the brown, and from the outside would appear to be operating primarily in terms of ego. He's certainly not inclined to justify any of his positions, all of which are why he hides out in TV commercials. When he deigns to appear in public we see him get a critical beatdown like we did in last week's debates, effortlessly.
Frankly I see him as a stalking horse for Trump, a research project to see how Dems are strategizing against rich, ego-bound, New York jackasses. Rich people are bound to each other before they are bound to politics, choosing a party is just a matter of personal quirks. They got theirs, the rest is just scorekeeping and princely follies. You can bet Mark Zuckerberg is paying attention, though. He's definitely going to be bored enough to stick a plank out in 5-10 years or so.
I would say sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses. You're not making a strong argument just by pointing to Hillary Clinton. She was already a known entity, how much marketing can really redefine 2 decades in the public eye?
For this comment to make sense you need to specify the following:
1) By ‘always’ you mean since Twitter was founded
2) By ‘is used by everybody’ you mean it was done using backroom deals and that bought support was quietly and as organically appearing as possible put on the platform
Bloomberg broke the first rule of SV politics, i.e. don’t get us caught in the middle, or exposed to liability, (otherwise known as plausible deniability). If Bloomberg had done this quietly and it was just a rumor Twitter would have given him a pass. But his team seems to have decided the bill in a china shop approach was their best bet.
But it is getting him press coverage so maybe a win anyway.
It's a massive win for Bloomberg. The discussion about paid advertising has now shifted from "Bloomberg is a bad actor" to "Twitter/Facebook are bad actors"
I don't think so. If the ads ended with "Paid for by Bloomberg for President", it may have been ok under Twitter's rules, which seems entirely reasonable.
You're missing the point. The discussion around the paid ads shifted from "Bloomberg is trying to buy the election" to "Twitter/Facebook are only ok with political ads as long as they are seeing some of the action". The former is awful for Bloomberg, the latter is awful for the companies.
This is an novel attempt to hack the laws around required disclosures associated with first-party poltiical campaign ads. It may not violate the campaign laws it is designed to hack around and it may not violate the deceptive advertising laws underlying the FTC guides on disclosure of paid social media advertising and endorsements, but it certainly is not normal for political campaigns.
That permanent left turn just results in the burning of a lot of energy to end up in the same place you started. Oddly enough, going back to how things were 50 years ago is what many conservatives are asking for.
Economically (e.g. tax policy-wise), that sounds like a good start. Socially, no thanks.
Why does it seem like most "conservative" foot soldiers these days are diametrically opposed wrt. those two sides of "conservatism", favoring the aspect that doesn't actually have anything to do with the economic health of our nation?
Do these make it clear that they are being paid for this campaign?
This is fraud in the sense that it creates fake wave. Being a genuine supporter is one thing and being a supporter because you are paid to be so is another.
The tweets in their example look like people clicking a share button, which commonly use a link shortener and are often formatted like “article - link,” you can see this by searching for headlines of nearly any publisher on Twitter. Here is an example for an article currently on the NYT homepage: https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=Bernie%20Sanders%2C%20th...
The OP’s hero image caption states:
> Twitter says duplicative messages violate its policy against platform manipulation and spam
Does this mean people should start to worry about clicking share buttons now? It is hardly bot activity to use a feature of the platform. Everyone who clicks a share button by default is tweeting the same message.
no link, and replies to another tweet. definitely not clicking a share button, just a bunch of people posting the exact same thing.
and even if it was the share button, twitter isn't banning based on single posts, they're banning on patterns. if 70+ accounts all clicked the same share button on the same 15 articles in a day, that'd probably trigger their bot-like behaviour detectors too, even though it's a "platform feature"
The execution of this is so stupid. For $2500 they should have been getting more than copy paste content. Are there no under-employeed recent college grads who can write a few original, pro-Bloomberg tweets a day for $2500 a month?
Perhaps there's a sampling bias? After all, copy-paste content is the easiest to find and moderate in an automated way, whereas high-quality manipulation is more likely to go unseen.
I donno, I think this shows that Bloomberg has a knack for government work. Pay people an extraordinarily inflated price for something that sounds straightforward on the surface, only to have them execute on the letter of the contract in cheapest and most amateurish way imaginable. The man clearly belongs.
This guy has clearly worked for the government. And by work I mean attended meetings, then status meetings about the previous meetings and so on for a couple of years until the project finally starts(already over budget) at which point enough money has been sunk into it to scrap it.
I have seen this happening in other forums, particularly the comments section of the New York Times. I can't be sure that astroturfing is what's happening, but it seems pretty likely given this new information.
Conspiracy theory: Bloomberg is doing this cash-pump campaign so that folk are forced to talk about (and become aware of) the shady techniques that campaigns use normally anyway.
To prime the populous for when other types of media manipulation occur - folk aren't going to dig into media manipulation if it's done by someone they like and never realize the sheer mass of it. But if it's by someone they don't...
If nothing else, Bloomberg's ad budget is a solid experiment for the impact of ad budgets on elections. I don't know how much of the transparency that seems to exist around what Bloomberg is doing is normal for campaigns, but that is also a plus.
Sure, that's what Trump is doing too. Showing that that the executive branch has grown to have too much power and giving us an example of what an evil president might be able to accomplish. It's all just a conspiracy to make the world a better place!
267 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadIf I go to an empty lot and I put up 50 Mike yard signs, what’s the difference between that and a bot that makes 50 Mike tweets?
On the other hand, if every second house in a large area suddenly sprouted a sign for a candidate, you might rightly interpret that as strong support. Having 10,000 likes on a post is akin to this latter scenario - showing that there’s a whole lot of “actual people” who are on the bandwagon.
This is normal in politics.
Signs don't just grow naturally out of the ground. Someone had to make them and put them there. And those signs aren't there to decarate yards. They're there to convince passerbys that a lot of people support a particular candidate.
That’s no more “proof of work” than a day of Twitter posts, and is exactly the same false signaling of broad support.
I suspect that targeting Bloomberg and not the paid shills of other campaigns is itself a form of false signaling from a Twitter employee with a political bias.
If 100 different Twitter accounts all weigh in on a thread, arguing for one side, but they are all secretly controlled by one person, that creates a false picture of widespread support for that person’s stance.
It’s true that traditional advertising has always been used to create artificial buzz around candidates, and this is often a bit manipulative. But creating a crowd of fake supporters, with fake photos and bios, and deploying them in conversations with unsuspecting real humans, is a whole different level of manipulation.
Paid celebrity endorsements on TV like we see for products are the same. I don’t know if you can legally do that for campaigns, but you could definitely hire them to the staff as a surrogate (any rules against doing so at an inflated rate)?
If this is true (and I'm not saying it isn't), the entire premise of Democracy is incompatible with modern technology. We could keep trying to bandage it with "fake news filters", but at some point we will need to admit defeat on that front and start fiddling with suffrage rather than fiddling with free speech.
If you disagree with Twitter's policy here, then that's a separate question, but here's my (I think, uncontroversial) opinion on that: Banning the automatic creation and puppeteering of masses of fake people seems like a pretty good policy along a number of dimensions - especially just for keeping authentic users from leaving your platform.
We have laws to protect consumers against the latter. Why should advertising in politics be held to different standards?
Because you're viewing it as solely advertising, you're missing it.
If you go out and buy a newspaper, and direct them to publish only favourable articles about certain people, you begin to run into problems. Like laws that govern bias and fairness.
Because this isn't advertisement - this is where people, rightly or wrongly, are going to get their information.
>This is someone trying to buy an election and circumvent democracy
The only differences between Bloomberg's behavior and that of a typical candidate are that Bloomberg is a late comer and he isn't beholden to donor interests - that doesn't mean he can't represent the people (not saying he can either).
If anything this is dangerous on the part of Twitter because now it's approaching publisher territory where it chooses which bots are allowable and which campaign bots are not. Twitter deciding the outcome of an election is far less democratic than a bunch of people possibly being swayed to vote for a candidate because of advertising. You can't apply different standards to a campaign you don't like - that's partisan and undemocratic. Buying ads is not.
Then it is absolutely unclear what Twitter and other web companies are, or should be. There is a lot of moderating, banning and rule setting going on and these platforms are currently absolutely not "infrastructure". I hope that in the end we'll have something that brings people together and makes everyone better informed.
Semantically accurate
>Sensationalized because it's connected to someone special
It can be spam and it can be spam from 70 pro-Bloomberg accounts at the same time. I don't understand what's sensationalized about that.
I am honestly curious because there are countries with more impactful and tangible geopolitical interests (e.g. Saudi Arabia - who owns a substantial portion of Twitter), and yet it's only the comic-book villain, Putin's Russia who apparently does this.
The other alternative is that Russia does this, but so ineffectively that they stand out, but that seems unlikely because it would also imply that other countries do it so effectively that no one notices.
The third alternative I can think of is that interested parties are okay with the direction in which some foreign powers want to sway American public opinion. Those interested parties control the mainstream media - or enough of it - to be able to decide which countries' bots get reported on and which get ignored. Honestly it's this option that I find exponentially more likely.
Also, I'm fairly certain that "let's influence the US public" is such a large undertaking that most small countries won't even attempt it. And you need to be strong enough to not get bombed if it becomes public, that narrows down the pool of countries a lot, so it's basically only Russia and China, possibly India (but they are allies), everyone else is either too small or too weak (ignoring Europe, they are much too close to the US).
Smaller / weaker countries might try to just buy influence, like Saudi Arabia, by hiring a PC agency and printing fancy brochures, or using lobbyists.
And, yes, of course all other countries do that. And of course it would be silly to say that "nobody notices".
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-germa...
Anyway, it's a fallacy to think that Russia would be fine without the Revolution. Peaceful transitions to liberal democracy are an exception that only happen on very particular cases.
Albeit it took longer and it was "gradual" but few of them had the hyper-violent post "vanguard" revolutions events that resulted in some of the worst tragedies in history?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge (note famous french liberal Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to cover up news of this event in the west because he thought it would hurt the spread the revolution to the global "politeriat")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
Almost all violent revolutions have resulted in a stain on world history. Yet the (less news worthy) numbers who gradually adopted independent courts and shifted from monarchy to republican/parliamentary power are much higher, and none of them had awful mass murders of people whose ideas weren't "in line" with the revolutionary ideology, not long after the revolutions.
These activities aren't what makes Putin's Russia a villain. They're just cited as more evidence in a book that was written long ago. How many dissidents have been murdered by the Kremlin?
Also, there's that whole thing about how Russian intelligence phished and leaked the email of a US presidential campaign manager. But that's only bad if you didn't win, apparently.
I’m with you, if it’s as comically easy to undermine American elections as has been reported (just takes a few hundred thousand bucks worth of Facebook ads), it’s only logical to assume that China or literally any other country with an axe to grind is doing the same thing as Russia.
But to answer the question, Russia is a great scapegoat (as apparently the only country in the world engaging in disinformation campaigns) because the villains are white. If you were to accuse, say, China of doing what Russia is doing (which let’s face it, they probably are), the argument could instantly be shot down with “that’s racist.”
Also holding Russia responsible doesn't mean singling it out. Pretending that holding it responsible at all would be singling it out is, in practice, like asking for special and unique treatment it doesn't deserve, neither being special nor unique.
The West did this type of thing, but sucked at it — western powers usually backed traditional or incumbent people in power, and usually for a more specific purpose.
What these guys do now is just push narratives of fringe or divisive people, with or without cooperation or knowledge of the principals. The goal is chaos. Normal, more effective political figures Having oddballs like Trump, Jill Stein, Sanders, etc in positions of fleeting or lasting prominence happens when messages get magnified and legitimized.
The Israelis, Chinese and Saudis have vastly more influence over the US than any twitter operation that mentally ill "reporters" blame the woes of the country on. Those countries bribe our politicians the old fashioned way, and don't show up in the fevered imaginations of these dimwits when they get owned in twitter mentions.
Accusations of paid shills have been thrown around so freely on the Internet, it's refreshing to have actual textbook examples for once!
All government employees should be banned from participating in elections related discourse because they are paid shills for big government and never support small government and balanced budget.
If private sector employees shill for their boss, that's none of my business and likewise Twitter should leave them alone.
This is really scary because it means that if somehow billionaires and companies that received assistance from Quantitative Easing decided to spend their wealth, it would cause considerable inflation.
Quantitative easing has literally zero to do with what you're proposing, the amount of money infused was pretty small compared to the size of our economy (arguably way too little), and the rest of us would've been even more fucked had it not happened.
Correlating QE to billionaire spending and inflation is like correlating how much change you find in your couch to your maximum potential earnings. It doesn't make sense.
And don't get me wrong, I totally hate Bloomberg and I know he has literally zero business being president. I'm not shilling for him, he's a piece of crap, don't vote for him...
I just really fucking hate it when people say things that sound "right" or even "informed" about economics that aren't because the whole science gets shit on daily by people who have no business talking about it without stating "I know nothing" before posting. If you don't make posts on physics theories don't make them about economics; it's actually even more hurtful because getting through the misinformation is harder and more prone to error.
Edit: to be clear, we essentially bailed out the banks with absolutely no repercussions except to the working class through deflated bonds and interest rates.
Here's the Gini coefficient from 2000 until now for the USA; which, measures income inequality:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/219643/gini-coefficient-...
It was anything but a disastrous policy, it was a disaster mitigating policy... it was one completely underfunded by any sane measure, but did mitigate disaster.
Yeah, the banks got bailed out and no one got tried. Those two things are completely independent of each other. One has to do with economic policy and the other one is with governmental policy.
Don't blame the bailout because the motherfuckers didn't go to jail.
Look at capital gains vs savings rates over the last 12 and cry. Then look at pension funds debts.
Finally, the Gini coefficient did go up from the highest of all first world countries to the highest by a significant amount.
The bailout wasn’t the problem. There was no punishment, yes, and QE was a hands down unmitigated robbery and the major factor in the populist upswings around the world.
Here’s a good one:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...
Of course you have to correlate it. Do you know what QE was? Without QE fixing the balance sheets of the banking system and low interest rates, we'd most likely be facing major deflation. Without QE and low interest, bloomberg's net worth would be much smaller and that most definitely would affect his spending.
> it's actually even more hurtful because getting through the misinformation is harder and more prone to error.
The fact that you correlated economics to physics/science makes it difficult to take your argument seriously.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/10/17/eid-economics-...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/11/nobel-...
At best you can argue that economics is a pseudo/soft science like political science than a real/hard science like physics.
You linked to absolute bullshit.
Dody T. Eid is a fucking nobdoy. Straight up just some jackass who has no background in economics writing very conservative op-eds. Next up is Joris, who let me quote the wikipedia block from google: "[..] is a Dutch non-fiction author, anthropologist, news correspondent, and TV interviewer. Wikipedia"
You can credit my Economics background for my astute bullshit detector.
> Of course you have to correlate it. Do you know what QE was? Without QE fixing the balance sheets of the banking system and low interest rates, we'd most likely be facing major deflation. Without QE and low interest, bloomberg's net worth would be much smaller and that most definitely would affect his spending.
Yeah, great idea deflation, that's how the great depression happened because the government at the time and federal bank said "piss off wankers." It triggers a deflationary spiral, which stops spending, and causes economic collapse, here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Deflationary_spiral
It's safe to say it's you, friend, who does not know anything about QE, economic history, theory, or its application.
FWIW, I hate Milton Friedman and think he was an asshole who had an enormous amount of bullshit ideological driven policies that strayed far from the science, but god damn he hit the nail on the monetary policy preventing the great depression... which is exactly what happened in 2008/9 by the FED holding interest rates low or negative.
I do like Keynes mostly, but unfortunately, because a lot of America has no idea about how economics works, especially on a macro scale, we didn't get the "new deal." We should have we got "the shitty deal," which was no investment infrastructure.
Is that because of all the bullshit in economics gave you ample practice in detecting bullshit? Well be patient with me because my limited economics background most likely pales in comparison to yours.
> Yeah, great idea deflation
I didn't say deflation is great. You are reading into things too much. I just said QE and low interest rates had an impact on inflation. Something which you cavalierly dismissed. I said QE and low interest rates prevented deflation.
> It's safe to say it's you, friend, who does not know anything about QE, economic history, theory, or its application.
All you've provided are just ad hominems and just cnbc talking points with nonpertinent rants on the side. Everything you disagree with is "bullshit" and everything you say is "gospel". Typical economics background behavior.
For someone "with an economics background", you would know how it has so many "gurus" and so much unsettled "science" in it. How one nobel prize winning economist could say the world economy is going to collapse after the previous election and another can say it will be great and economics couldn't settle the issue either way.
But then again, this comment thread is precisely why I view economics as a religion rather than a science. Where people make up shit that aligns with their agenda and worship their prophets ( Keynes, Marx, etc ). Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between a religious zealot and someone with "an economics background".
In reply to this:
>> I rely on Matt Levine to explain, more clearly than I could, how brokerages make money
You wrote:
> You rely on someone who never worked for a brokerage to teach you how brokerages worked?
Maybe you should really think that through in the context of economics.
You are invested in this. That's the type of religious zeal I'm talking about.
> Maybe you should really think that through in the context of economics.
Only if economics worked like brokerages work.
The fact that you have to go "3 days back into comment history" rather than using the "science" in economics to support your argument should tell you something. That's the difference between religion, economics, political science, etc and physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. One responds with straw man and red herrings, the other responds with actual science and facts.
Or maybe people should just stop relying on Tw/Fb/etc for their news.
That is assuming they appear to not be organized and paid...
Are these volunteers or are they being paid?
"We ask that all of our deputy field organizers identify themselves as working on behalf of the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign on their social media accounts."
Basically it's marketing. Every other campaign does run marketing and there are going to be some employees devoted to that, but I don't think we have any reports of hundreds of paid employees. Even Russian troll farms are opaque in their hiring practices.
edits: Shareblue has changed to https://americanindependent.com/ it appears. Mainly anti-trump. Can't see any specific pro-bernie content.
Nor will you - Clinton camp (and most of the establishment) is very anti-Bernie.
Despite the fact that Dang explicitly tells users that this user is involved in some kind of multi-year pro Google campaign, there are dozens of posts protesting that the very concept of a thing could ever exist.
Unfortunately the Chinese government can and will censor posts on these feeds, which is made super easy by how slow things usually spread on that platform - but that’s a different issue entirely. I’m not advocating literally switching to WeChat - just that the concept feels at once far more “social” and rather less prone to certain kinds of manipulation.
I only see:
- Things posted by who I follow
- Things retweeted by who I follow
- Things liked by who I follow (I think I don't actually see this in TweetDeck)
The other part of campaigns like this is replying to major accounts to push something, so you'd have to have your "anti-viral" timeline hide replies that weren't endorsed by people you don't follow. That is, if friend A retweeted something by a famous politician, and a thousand people replied including none of your friends, and friend B liked one of those replies, only that one reply would show up for you if you looked at the tweet. Again, I suspect this is bad for engagement (so I'm wondering if WeChat actually does this?).
The closest thing to trending is that you notice that a bunch of your friends are all posting about similar stuff. Like when Li Wenliang, the whistleblower-doctor in Wuhan, died, or when everyone bored at home in quarantine was posting photos of brooms balanced to stand on end.
I personally prefer a model that makes it impossible for me to see Nazis arguing about an article posted by my grandma.
> this model tends to separate social from news.
i hadn't realised how much the two had become intertwined. FB, twitter etc all started off as interacting with your friends then drifted very far from that.
They should be separate.
That’s probably possible for two reasons. First, the app’s principal designer maintains Steve Jobs-level creative control on the product. Second, as a sibling pointed out, Wechat primarily makes money from other stuff besides posts going viral﹡.
There’s not even a “repost” feature. You literally have to open the article, copy the URL, and create an entirely new post on your timeline. It cuts down on low effort sharing (of course, if you’re the government, you like this because it also slows the spread of so-called “improper information”)
Facebook died for me when it became possible for me to see Nazis arguing in the comments of an article my grandma posted. I mean what the fuck, how did we ever get there.
﹡ which unfortunately involves vacuuming up as much data about every aspect of everyone’s life as possible. It’s impossible to understate how pervasive Wechat is: if you only have this app and no other, you can still live very comfortably here.
Give it another 10 years and, at least here in Europe, we will have the first countries copying the "social points" system China is currently rolling out.
Not sure what to do about it.
> Today, in the West, we call that "fake news", and limit its spread too.
We say/use "civility" or "western values" to censor, attack, etc. The chinese use "harmony", "chinese characteristics", etc to censor, attack, etc.
We shame the chinese and demand they treat muslims better while killing millions of muslims and destroying a few muslim countries. The chinese shame the west and demand we treat muslims better while interning millions of muslims.
Too bad hypocrisy isn't a currency or we'd all be rich and living large.
The highly decentralized, mostly non-computerized western social shaming that existed for decades for certain social beliefs and practices, which to some extent still exists in certain limited contexts was in no meaningful way comparable to a systematic, almost entirely centralized government-directed formal social credit scoring system that dictates one's "worthiness" and so many aspects of their social life, economic life and literal freedom to move around based on what political opinions they publish, who they're friends with, what things they read, share on social media or even what things they buy. Comparing the two is ridiculous. It's either blatantly blind or you're trolling for some other reason. No western state has anything like this. No notable number of people in the west are literally ruined economically or banned from travel, or the victims of their friends being nudged by the government into abandoning them because they posted something against Trump, or against Obama or in any other context. Very public, very open debate and protest against numerous government policies is still very much alive and well in the west. In China this is blatantly not the case.
Ah "false equivalence". It gets me every time because at this point it's so obvious. A talking point by people who don't know what it means.
> The highly decentralized, mostly non-computerized western social shaming that existed for decades for certain social beliefs and practices
Highly decentralized? FBI background checks are decentralized? Credit checks are highly decentralized? If you think "the west" is decentralized, you really have bought into the propaganda hard. Let me guess you think "the west" is individualistic while the east is "collectivist".
> No notable number of people in the west are literally ruined economically or banned from travel, or the victims of their friends being nudged by the government into abandoning them because they posted something against Trump, or against Obama or in any other context.
And notable number of people in china have been? Or is it just parroting propaganda you just choose to believe in.
> Comparing the two is ridiculous.
Only to people with an agenda.
> It's either blatantly blind or you're trolling for some other reason.
This is called a false dichotomy with a dash of ad hominem.
> In China this is blatantly not the case.
The hong kong protests don't happen? How come there are so many protests in china?
https://www.economist.com/china/2018/10/04/why-protests-are-...
Just because they aren't identical doesn't mean they aren't comparable. Just because one is bad doesn't mean the other is good. You can cherrypick nonsense to fit an agenda or just look at the obvious objectively.
Sounds like retweeting should also be banned under this policy. But that would require some semblance of continuity and fairness in policy enforcement.
The closest is: Twitter said the campaign violated its rules against “creating multiple accounts to post duplicative content,”
I couldn't use normal view to read the page without agreeing to the ToS so I switched to Firefox's reader view. That doesn't include the image.
My reading is that the caption (which I can read by view-source) is a second-hand interpretation of Twitter's statements. I think the direct Twitter quote, which I copied earlier, is more relevant, and addresses vinniejames's concerns about retweets.
I don't believe that caption text correctly reflect Twitter's quoted response, which I quoted, and which I believe clarifies your question.
At this point I think anyone telling me to vote for Bloomberg received a check from him. It’s not true always of course, but it’s the first thing that pops into my head.
There's likely a bit of both. Would Bloomberg pay $2500 per month for simple copy & paste jobs? Doubtful, I'm sure he has better media people that know they could get that for tiny fraction of the price. There may be pro-Bloomberg paid posting while somebody also pays for dumb multiplication bots to spread a message (or false flag it).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jon...
"Russia" has absolutely no power compared to the implications of this
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary...
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-primary-forecast/
Money doesn't mean automatic votes unless people agree with your message at least some.
Also, Russia had very little impact in 2016 election (if you have proof otherwise, I'd love to see it). It did make much of the media and Washington go crazy for a couple years, but that seemed just an amplification of Russia's attempt to mess with things.
The 2016 election margin was very slim. A great number of factors could plausibly have made the difference. Russian social media manipulation is likely within that margin. Russia's hack of the DNC is definitely within that margin.
I don't think the contents of the hack had much impact, but the act of it and the investigation had one.
Clinton spent twice as much on her campaign, and adding in pro-Clinton PACs spending on her behalf was three times as much. If money was as important as people say, it should never have been close enough for Russian media manipulation to matter.
But if you really believe money isn't very important, you'll have to explain why successful candidates all spend a great deal of time raising money. And then keep on doing so despite the clear advantages of incumbency.
So that's the new first step for the next billionaire (or fake one) who wants to be president: buy a significant share of Twitter.
Chilling, huh?
Sadly, it is indeed definitely a good move to make friends with whoever decides what goes on social networks.
[1] does anyone know if he manages the account?
Paying people to publish your message is part of normal political campaigning.
You are ultimately correct, even if downvoted.
paying people to tweet nice things about you as if it's just because they like you is dishonest.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/instagra...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/mike-bloo...
The entire message is often ironic, so other nonsponsored people are also using (yes this was really sponsored by @mikebloomberg) in their posts to make fun of Bloomberg, so although everyone is disclosing they're being paid, you don't actually know if someone is being paid or not.
so it's pretty easy to distinguish who's using that disclosure honestly.
As, in fact, we already do, this is just a hack around the way those laws are applied.
I for one am glad this talking point is being finally put to rest.
You’re analogy to Hillary also doesn’t hold much water because his intent is not to become president, but to prevent Sanders from getting the nomination, or, if he does keep Trump in power by poisoning the well in the primaries.
That’s not surprising. The Democratic Party as currently constructed is a third-way coalition including traditional progressives, labor, neo-liberals, and minorities. Sanders might have a plurality of the support in the party, but he threatens to blow up that coalition.
A successful Presidential candidate has to win 95% of their own party. But only 76% of Democrats say that they would vote for a socialist: https://news.gallup.com/poll/285563/socialism-atheism-politi.... A successful Presidential candidate has to evenly split independents—who comprise 30% of the electorate—with the other party’s candidate. But independents’ views of socialism are much closer to those of Republicans than to those of Democrats: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/807047941/poll-sanders-rises-.... Any successful democratic candidate must win super-majorities of non-white people (90% of African Americans, and 75% of Hispanics and Asians.) But just 33% of non whites have a favorable view of socialism.
Bloomberg isn’t “buying” the support of “media outlets, think tanks, and state party leaders.” These are the people who established the third way coalition after devastating losses in the 1980s. These people are already looking for an alternative to Sanders. Bloomberg’s money is just getting his candidacy out there to help coalesce the “not Sanders” majority of the party.
"Never Trump" seemed to be a bipartisan certainty and we all know how that went.
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/13/1950/1919/Topli...
Leads with Latino voters, is first or second with African American voters, depending on the polling, and is literally the most popular senator in the country:
https://morningconsult.com/senator-rankings/
You’re supposition that there’s going to be some outbreak of pearl clutching about “socialism” is about as plausible that Bloomberg isn’t buying the election.
That’s why I’m pointing to the polling for socialism. My projection is that Trump will be very effective at making the election a referendum on socialism. It’s going to be wall to wall ads of Sanders’ praise of the USSR, Venezuela, etc. When that starts, I think Sanders’ poll numbers are going to collapse.
I think Sanders will have an uphill battle against Trump (as would any of the primary candidates), but the Democrats are guaranteed to lose if he wins a plurality, they broker the convention, pick someone else, and disenfranchise Sanders’ massive base of support. And that is the documented outcome Bloomberg is pursuing:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/bloomberg-brokered-...
I think pg has talked about this before too, one of great tests has been "is this person charismatic?" And further, that charismatic, assertive personalities can do wonders in changing and winning people's minds. No doubt Hillary would have won had she been more likable (or a man, America is still lagging behind when it comes to having a woman in charge). Sanders is more charismatic than Trump so he'll probably win, whatever the labels.
But what would the charisma test say about Trump vs. Sanders? I hadn't thought about that one. If it's Trump vs. Bloomberg, that's as much a no-brainer as last time. But Trump vs. Sanders? Not so clear. You say Sanders is more charismatic than Trump, but many people would disagree. In an all-American context, I think Trump is probably more charismatic than Sanders, though by a smaller margin than with Hillary or Bloomberg. To really decide that, though, we'd have to get into definitions of charisma.
Lichtman's system is interesting since, like pg's theory, it depends on fundamentals and ignores polls. Lichtman also includes charisma as one of his keys. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/12/th.... A quick look at his "13 keys" list suggests to me that Lichtman will probably predict a Trump win this year (even though he despises Trump), whether or not the challenger is charismatic. That's mostly because of economic indicators. If those change, the prediction probably changes. It will be interesting to see how Lichtman interprets his list this year.
You're also referencing polls on who would vote for a Democratic socialist, while ignoring polls of who would vote for Sanders specifically, overall approval ratings of Sanders (consistently near the top for any politician in the country), and head-to-head polls of Sanders vs. Trump.
It's pretty clear that you're just cherrypicking to fit a narrative. You're entitled to your opinion, but don't pretend it's supported by data in any sort of definitive way when that's plainly not the case.
Matchups against Trump this far out are not helpful. In the months before the nomination, Clinton had up to a 10 point lead on Trump. That closed significantly once the campaigning started. The nomination is when the rubber hits the road. That’s when the attack ads will start, going into Sanders’ lengthy record of anti-Amrrican, communist sympathizing statements. That’s not baked into the poll numbers for Sanders yet. (Meanwhile, all of Trump’s bad statements are already baked into his poll numbers.)
He's also winning handily in national head-to-head polls vs. others in the primary, which seem a lot more relevant to me than Iowa caucus realignment numbers: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
"Matchups against Trump this far out are not helpful."
Ah, so we can base all kinds of conclusions on a poll asking "would you vote for a Democratic socialist?", but one taken at the same time asking "would you vote for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump?" is not helpful? :-/
* https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-69-the-rise-of-t...
For the majority of the party, Sanders is neither their first or second choice: https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-passes-joe-biden-top... (22% support him as the first choice, another 10% say he’s their second choice).
This isn’t rocket science. It’s literally why ranked choice voting was invented.
The poster I'm replying to often sneaks lies into his wall-of-text posts when he thinks no one will notice or call him on it.
Apart from that, the movement in vote total between the first and second rounds combines two effects, but we’re interested in just one of those. Your analysis of the second round data marks a positive count for a candidate where someone moves to that candidate in the second round from a candidate that didn’t hit the 15% threshold in the first round. (That’s the only way for someone to switch.) But it also marks a negative count where a candidate doesn’t meet the 15% threshold in a precinct and his or her supporters have to move to another candidate. We don’t really care about that second effect, because that just measures whether a candidate is able to consistently get above 15%.
What we want to predict is, as you knock out Biden, Warren, etc., where do their supporters go? You can find that out directly from the released caucus data, by looking at where supporters of those candidates go in precincts where those candidates don’t hit the 15% threshold. Most of those supporters don’t go to Bernie, which means Bernie is not their first choice or their second choice.
Polling backs that up: https://civiqs.com/documents/Civiqs_ISU_banner_book_2020_01_.... Right before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders was the first or second choice of 37% of eligible Iowa primary voters. That means for 2/3 of the party, Sanders was neither the first nor the second choice.
https://twitter.com/UCLAlatino/status/1231622727808610304
People floated this theory about Trump, 4 years ago. But let's be honest: if bloomberg, or any other billionaire, has an opportunity to seize ever-unchecked control over the richest nation in the world, can you honestly expect them to flinch at taking power and using it to their direct enrichment?
Frankly I see him as a stalking horse for Trump, a research project to see how Dems are strategizing against rich, ego-bound, New York jackasses. Rich people are bound to each other before they are bound to politics, choosing a party is just a matter of personal quirks. They got theirs, the rest is just scorekeeping and princely follies. You can bet Mark Zuckerberg is paying attention, though. He's definitely going to be bored enough to stick a plank out in 5-10 years or so.
I would say sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses. You're not making a strong argument just by pointing to Hillary Clinton. She was already a known entity, how much marketing can really redefine 2 decades in the public eye?
"We have made this decision based on our belief that political message reach should be earned, not bought. "
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/prohibited...
This is complete bullshit: paid professional campaigning has always existed and is used by everybody.
1) By ‘always’ you mean since Twitter was founded
2) By ‘is used by everybody’ you mean it was done using backroom deals and that bought support was quietly and as organically appearing as possible put on the platform
Bloomberg broke the first rule of SV politics, i.e. don’t get us caught in the middle, or exposed to liability, (otherwise known as plausible deniability). If Bloomberg had done this quietly and it was just a rumor Twitter would have given him a pass. But his team seems to have decided the bill in a china shop approach was their best bet.
But it is getting him press coverage so maybe a win anyway.
Why does it seem like most "conservative" foot soldiers these days are diametrically opposed wrt. those two sides of "conservatism", favoring the aspect that doesn't actually have anything to do with the economic health of our nation?
This is fraud in the sense that it creates fake wave. Being a genuine supporter is one thing and being a supporter because you are paid to be so is another.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
The OP’s hero image caption states:
> Twitter says duplicative messages violate its policy against platform manipulation and spam
Does this mean people should start to worry about clicking share buttons now? It is hardly bot activity to use a feature of the platform. Everyone who clicks a share button by default is tweeting the same message.
no link, and replies to another tweet. definitely not clicking a share button, just a bunch of people posting the exact same thing.
and even if it was the share button, twitter isn't banning based on single posts, they're banning on patterns. if 70+ accounts all clicked the same share button on the same 15 articles in a day, that'd probably trigger their bot-like behaviour detectors too, even though it's a "platform feature"
If they're getting paid to, then I certainly hope so.
If nothing else, Bloomberg's ad budget is a solid experiment for the impact of ad budgets on elections. I don't know how much of the transparency that seems to exist around what Bloomberg is doing is normal for campaigns, but that is also a plus.