I've long suspected there are vast bot networks like this all over social media.
YouTube comment sections on videos related to covid are an absolute cess pit of covid deniers, misinformation spreading and conspiracy theory peddling.
I would like to think these are bots and not a very vocal but significant section of society but given recent world events I am not sure at all.
You don't need some exclusive GPT-3 access for this. A simple Markov bot is enough to fool nearly everyone they perform fairly well when given specific domains, quite poorly in general online forums though.
Give that bot a foreign name and virtually every native English speaking person will assume it's simply bad grammar.
It's Twitter, you don't even need to generate original text: likes, comment-free retweets, reaction gifs and posting the same text as replies to everything are all actions that will boost whatever sentiment or link it is you want to boost.
I genuinely wonder what's the real number. It is easy to find accounts that look like they could be bots, but I wonder what portions of those are just very dedicated individuals.
I don't use social media a lot but I do regularly post on HN for instance. I don't know what my average message rate is but it's probably around 1 message/day. Now if I just wanted to spam my political agenda on the site (and the site let me do it) I could very easily copy/paste the same bullshit a hundred times a day on every story on the frontpage. If like 20 other people did the same thing the amount of noise we'd generate is pretty large
Look at random fan wikis to see the amount of free work some dedicated individuals can achieve. I'm certain that many of these super active troll accounts are just that, dedicated individuals who feel very strongly about something and just spend 10 hours every day spamming and harassing and copy-pasting. If your output is like 100x that of a normal user (and you know how to game the algorithms to amplify your message) you don't need a huge number of accounts or automation to become a real nuisance.
We research this stuff - a lot of nation-state and financed activity is farms of low-paid people assisted by software running multiple and shared accounts. Misinfo analysts (including ML tools) can suspect this bc the accounts clock in & clock out and follow a talking points script. Except bc a low paid person is adding a human touch, account abuse teams see it and do nothing due to uncertainty, despite being against TOS.
Sometimes it is more obvious. People had MAGA campaign apps that lets Trump's team remotely activate otherwise-legit social media accounts. So the account is real, but popular messages were bot behavior. Twitter is even less likely to want to take down such an account, despite the prohibited behavior.
100%. I find this incredibly interesting and I'd love to understand more about what topics they post about. I bet many hot topics, especially ones about politics, have a fair share of bots commenting.
I think their purpose is equally interesting. I'd guess a lot of them are there to polarise discussions and drive people apart, but there are probably ones that have an agenda to drive a specific opinion as well.
I think this isn't just on Twitter, but other platforms as well.
Not just YouTube comments, but videos as well have become automated or semi-automated to produce the most engaging content and maximize ad revenue. There are companies making millions by gaming the system. See the Elsagate scandal and TheSoul Publishing[1], the company behind those 5-minute craft videos and occasional Russian propaganda.
And of course similar things are happening on all social media platforms.
It's deeply ironic that the West built all these tools with the intention of "connecting" people, something that's still Facebook's main mission statement, yet its biggest effects have been exactly the opposite, causing division and distrust between people, and contributing to real world conflicts and toppling of governments.
Social media today is weaponized by political agents to spread misinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale and the platforms are paying them to do it. The current political climate in the US is no surprise. It was a coordinated psyops attack and its enemies are laughing at how easy and inexpensive it was to destabilize a nation compared to traditional warfare.
I fear that we still haven't seen the worst of it, and frankly I'm not sure what the solution is.
I have never had a Twitter account, so unfortunately I cannot do the same. I'm hoping more people here do the same as you so we can get a cross section of the accuracy for that specific bot detector.
I have problems with articles on both sides of the issue using all kinds of speculation and innuendo to try and discredit the opposite side. I would rather just read articles that cover studies explaining results (data) and methods used to support their position.
I ran my account through it and got a 0.0 rating, and ran it against my followers, and got similarly low scores for the accounts that I know to be real people (the highest score for a follower I know to be a person was 0.8). I saw higher scores for either accounts that followed me out of nowhere (I'm not interesting enough to draw real strangers), or for accounts that are run as public profiles (an artist with a public account for their comics). I'm inclined to assume that you likely have either atypical or impersonal twitter habits.
It's not buggy: it detects patterns like the majority of posts being retweets instead of new posts; any new post consisting of an image and accompanying text instead of a message or thread; replies being short comments on top responses to popular posts; and a high degree of connectivity to other accounts that are likely bots.
False positives are generally curated accounts, corporate accounts, and government accounts (which are really bots with their software in managerial documents); porn accounts; and people who reblog the news but don't really "use" twitter.
When I was in the spam blocking business we joked about the problem of the Russian urologist. Somewhere, there must be someone who really is trying to buy Viagra from a Russian e-commerce site. But the other 99.99999% of the time it's spam. Perhaps this person's Twitter suffers a similar fate: all the classification features align with robot traffic, but they aren't a robot.
That would nullify the study entirely since the criteria in the test directly overlaps the criteria of the results.
There are multiple people in this thread that have been incorrectly tagged as bots, I’d like to see proper tests done with the software identifying the level of accuracy. It shouldn’t be too much to ask since their entire study is hinged on the accuracy of this software.
And if it's anything like some other naïve bot detection algorithms I've seen, it might be viciously biased against non-English-speakers. To the extent of, say, labelling anyone primarily using Arabic or Cyrillic alphabets as a bot.
Just the other day a prominent dutch account got auto-blocked on twitter for saying 'Die Rutte toch.', where 'Die' (a pretty common dutch word, which in this case translates as 'That') was mistaken for a threat to our prime minister.
You may need to test for confirmation bias. I am sure you and people you know are well behaved and courteous on twitter and social media in general, and so would not trigger any alarms. Have you tried the bot-test on more contentious accounts that you know to be human?
I just checked a few of the more abrasive people I know, both of whom also do a lot of non-quote Retweets, and both also scored quite low (0.4 and 0.1).
If only this was 2 weeks ago, we would know a certain contentious presidents' account to bot tests... but as of now, why follow anyone who is not well behaved?
While walking along in desert sand, you suddenly look down and see a tortoise crawling toward you. You reach down and flip it over onto its back. The tortoise lies there, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help. You are not helping. Why?
The article is distinctly Orwellian. I am a climate skeptic and have participated in such discussions, and found that my bot-rating is very high. Other people whom I know by reputation and online presence elsewhere are also categorized as not being actual humans.
Along with this, there is the pre-emptive and dogmatic assertion without proof or serious argument that any disagreement with official dogma must necessary be deliberate 'disinformation' spread by those with an immoral vested interest in spreading falsehood.
So the correct conclusion is not necessarily that most climate change skeptics are bots, but rather that climate change skeptics are likely to be characterized by the software as bots. I wonder what else makes you more likely to be characterized as a bot?
>So the correct conclusion is not necessarily that most climate change skeptics are bots, but rather that climate change skeptics are likely to be characterized by the software as bots.
Yes, that is as much as we can deduce from the data presented in the paper, given that they apparently just took the 'Botometer' verdicts at face value without taking the extra steps to see if they were indeed accurate. It may, of course, be absolutely true that the 'denier' accounts are just scripts, but further investigation is necessary to establish this.
> I wonder what else makes you more likely to be characterized as a bot?
That would best be established by examining the bot-detector's algorithm. Another commenter on this thread noted that he received a high rating based on the fact that he rarely logged into his account.
I listened to the drilled podcast two weeks ago and season 3 was very eye opening to me because they did an in depth look at how corporate PR has evolved to influence public opinion in very subtle and powerful ways. We’re talking oil companies setting up contracts the size of $25 million to influence opinion on single issues and they work with psychologists to take advantage of the shortcomings inherent in our minds.
The result is that in 2021 people tell me things that influence their opinions that are either misleading, out of date or absolutely false. We’re talking things like climategate or that volcanoes give off more co2 than all of human civilization.
I’m just a regular person, I don’t believe in climate change, I’ve researched it, it’s something I’m concerned about. A million dollar PR campaign against me and my friends, family and coworkers is not something anyone can standup against.
The dogma that you perceive comes from people reacting to dissatisfaction from an important issue that isn’t being taken seriously. We are citizens, regular people, against what amounts to artificial intelligences that are maximizing the number of paper clips they produce. David and Goliath doesn’t come close to the situation we’re up against.
How on earth do you come to that conclusion? Personally the physics of climate change is kind of a basic back of the envelope calculation that should be obvious to most educated people.
So I genuinely wonder how people can look into it and not look at the absorption spectra of CO2 go ahh I see and then move on. I mean such a calculation isn’t enough for policy changes or anything, but it’s putting a high hurdle on the other side.
Is it some disagreement about the physics involved, or just a bunch of people you believe saying something different, or what?
The dispute is typically over the practical implications of it, not the pure physics of "the average global temperature will rise as long as this trend continues". And this is a topic where disinformation comes from both sides - I pretty regularly run into people who've been convinced that climate change means the planet will become uninhabitable.
There are 2 types of people. Those who think in statics and those who think in dynamics. Climate change is not basic back of the envelope calculation specifically because we're dealing with a dynamic system. The more complex the world, the less you can grasp it from academic studies.
In what way is that complexity meaningful? If I put a pot of water on the stove the specific way the water swirls around is a chaotic non linear system, but it’s not going to keep the water from warming up.
Similarly, if hypothetically increased global temperature results in increased cloud formation that reduces the impact of climate change that presupposes some increase in temperature otherwise the change in cloud formation doesn’t happen. As such it’s reasonable to argue about the magnitude of change but not the direction of change.
I can clearly see arguing about a specific location bucking global trends because there complexity actually plays a direct role, thus the term climate change. But, globally I can’t see how everywhere on average would buck these trends.
That complexity is meaningful as it precludes precise modelling. Now that does not mean we should not curb CO2 emissions, rather it is the degree of opacity and uncertainty in a system, as well as asymmetry in effect, rather than specific model predictions, that should drive the precautionary measures.
Push a complex system too far and it will not come back. The popular belief that uncertainty undermines the case for taking seriously the "climate crisis" that scientists tell us we face is the opposite of the truth. Properly understood, as driving the case for precaution, uncertainty radically underscores that case, and may even constitute it.
You may have great social circles with intelligent and curious people, but in my life the facts don’t work because the facts don’t matter. The number of people actually interested in the science and not just the science (tm) is dismally low, we’re talking less than 10% in my experience. This includes people who have degrees in physics and engineering and a university engineering professor I knew.
People are hungry, vulnerable, emotional, scared, and prideful creatures. That’s what we are; and we like stories. We like stories where we’re hero’s on an epic journey with villains to defeat.
If you tell someone a fact that breaks their story, makes them scared, and makes them less prideful, you’re not having a conversation for very long, doesn’t matter if you can support it with evidence and reasoning. What PR added on top of this human tendency is people think about climate way more than they otherwise would, they think about it in terms of a story, in us vs. them terms (PRs narrative), and if you say something counter to that narrative, now you’re the villain.
I’ve had people I respect flat out tell me that climate change is a hoax and if we reduced carbon emissions it would just be virtue signaling. They are not joking, they are serious and they’ve been told this by talking heads for over 20 years.
You’ll never get to the back of the envelope calculation.
I don't know what the Botometer does, but it labeled my clear as hell bot account (automatic posting of started games in a computer game) as human. Also I found no output of applications that were used to send a tweet. Most bots can easily detected by that. Mine also.
A ML model giving a single false positive is generally uninteresting and meaningless in evaluating its overall performance. Also, note that the details clearly state that, even for high bot scores, some non-trivial percentage of examples in their training data were still labeled as human.
As an aside, for those interested, the GitHub page for the tool's Python API (https://github.com/IUNetSci/botometer-python) lists relevant papers regarding the functioning/design of the tool.
I ran my account through both Botometer and Bot Sentinel. Got 0.4/5 on Botometer, and 0% on Bot Sentinel.
Kind of annoyed that Botometer requires me to authorize it to access my Twitter account, when all my tweets are public (and who cares about bots that make private tweets, if that's even a thing). Bot Sentinel didn't require this.
That was interesting: I tried https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/ , and got a score of 0.2. I then asked it to look at my followers and it spotted several obvious spam followers, and correctly identified some "quote of the day" accounts as bots.
I follow a (very) wide spectrum of accounts on Twitter and the following seemed true for the accounts I follow which scored highly likely to be bots:
- it's 50/50 accurate picking actual bots I know I follow
- the more simple the reading level, the higher it scored
- however, extremely heady accounts also score high
- the farther right/left the account goes seems to up the score a little
- accounts that quote authors frequently score very high, even if they're human behind them
- everything from Chinese state media scored higher than anything
- everything that was frequently highly critical of China scored extremely high
- most Trumpers and Antifa I follow had very low scores (but most are high-up/origin accounts)
- most news organizations from both sides scored middle range, including known propagandists and "reputable" organizations
- accounts from both sides of the COVID discussion were mostly low
Hard to say, but my best guess is "low effort" is the defining factor. Only exception is the pro/anti-Chinese stuff, which is definitely a mix of real people and bots.
I keep pretty good tabs on the accounts I follow and I think I'm pretty good at determining who is "a real person with real feelings saying real things they really think" and bots, and from this analysis, I have zero faith that this tool has any modicum of reliability in a research setting.
I think it's possibly accurate enough to say "yes, this is definitely a human", but totally fails to identify bots. Thus, any research that uses this tool as a measure of bot influence is way off, because there are way too many false positives. Which I guess is a good thing for anyone who wants to say, "look at all these people being suckered by all these bots!" which is pretty unscrupulous.
This just tips the discourse more in favor of those running the bots. Also, since most of the world is governed by democracy, a key requirement is to have informed citizens so they don't vote for policies based on misinformation. One may not wish to use twitter (myself included), but a significant amount of the world population does.
Yes, but imagine how brilliant it would be for twitter to be only full of bots spewing disinformation at each other (and the few human conspiracy theorist who would be lost for the cause anyway), while concerned citizens are... Getting their disinformation from somewhere else. Never mind.
Still, all this puts "prevent bit usage by design" on the feature list for the next generation of social media (that and "prevent sharing without human moderation beyond a certain virality point", "clever shadow banning" ,and an eliza mode for those times you juste want to yell at the clouds...
Yes. it's that Easy and the most obvious solution to getting out of that echo chamber.
I know it's hard for many to actually uninstall and 'delete their accounts' but perhaps this sounds like a great new years resolution plan to stick to.
Instructions unclear - I got a bunch of threatening letters from the alleged 'owners' of the twitter.com domain. Do you have some more details on how to uninstall someone else's website, please?
The bot detectors are not very sophisticated, and they definitely have categorised several individuals whom I know to be real humans as 'bots,' apparently based on their political persuasion. It is ironic that human beings can fail a Turing test carried out by scripts, and disturbing that those peoples voices should be silenced based on such shallow criteria.
The problem of addressing global warming is very much one about persuasion. That means getting beyond people's tribal defences, which are a big part of climate change denial. Disinformation campaigns play a significant role, but the reason the disinformation is so effective is it plays into people's confirmation bias which is driven by perceived threats to their status in society. They see this liberalism as threatening, of which anthropogenic global warming is a part, and reject it outright, willing to accept any information that confirms their prior emotional decision.
I believe that we need a Greta Thunberg-like figure who is conservative-leaning on literally every major topic of political contention, except believes that anthropogenic climate change is real and we should take significant action to mitigate it, and then we need the media and entertainment industries to prop them up as virtuous. People's instinctive defences will be lowered and we will be surprised at how easily people's minds can be changed.
No offense, but it’s clear you’ve never spent enough real time with people who are “deniers” to really understand anything, especially if you think what’s missing is a celebrity.
I would say the bulk of the resistance I see comes largely from distrust of institutions and people who are very pro climate change, and then secondary worry about the financial impact of decarbonization on them personally as well as losing competitiveness to countries like China who are huge polluters and honestly dgaf.
The deniers I know are conservatives who reject it outright simply because it's what the liberals believe (or perhaps, to find some common ground, it's what liberal institutions believe). They've read little about it and assume that it's hysteria.
Maybe my idea of a conservative celebrity is a silly idea and won't work, but I believe the root cause is one of tribal conflict (combined with cynical disinformation campaigns), and to change their mind requires getting around these tribal defenses in some way.
According to Pew, 84% of Liberal Democrats think that humans significantly contribute to global warming, whereas 14% of Conservative Republicans do. I think this helps to confirm that there's a pretty important tribal dimension at play here (although we also can't rule out that financially self-interested people have self-selected themselves into the latter category).
There are a number of claims being made which are inter-related, not all of which are claimed by all proponents
1. CO2 is the primary global warming gas, and other gases contribute also
2. CO2 precedes temperature change
3. The warming trend is unique to earth because of human activity
3. We understand the Climate science and carbon processes well enough to make accurate predictions
4. Climate modeling is accurate, and contributes to knowing what will happen
5. Our temperature measurement systems are accurate and scientifically valid
6. We understand all the interplay between albedo, cloud formation, and water vapor at different altitudes
7. We understand why the earth appears to be getting larger
8. The earth's warming is due to human activity and is not a natural process of warming and cooling driven by solar activity and events
9. Solar activity levels play no part in global warming; these changes are from human activity
10. Green biomass has decreased, not increased due to human activity
Alternative claims exist such as:
1. CO2 is primarily plant food
2. CO2 is a trailing indicator of temperature change
3. The warming trend exists among multiple planets not just earth
3. Climate science and carbon process knowledge are in their infancy
4. Climate modeling is inaccurate, and has been very inaccurate thus far
5. Our temperature measurement systems have been contaminated by the heat island effect, and are not accurate and scientifically valid
6. We do not yet understand all the interplay between albedo, cloud formation, and water vapor at different altitudes
7. We understand the earth appears to be getting larger but we do not know why
8. The earth's warming is to a natural process of warming and cooling driven primarily by solar activity and events
9. Solar activity levels play the most significant part in global warming; these changes are not only from human activity
10. Green biomass has increased due to human activity
Regardless of position, I don't believe name calling will convince people either way.
I have no personal interests in either idea though I have some investments in green energy & petroleum. As green energy is not self-sufficient, I expect that petroleum will continue to be around for many years as we transition to future energy sources.
The Botometer is a non-explainable ML model, not a scale or a photodetector, so I'm not convinced it's actually valid to use it for this kind of study. Did the researchers verify that "spreads climate disinformation" is not itself a factor in the Botometer classification?
Yes, people labeling real people as bots so that they can disregard their viewpoints. Mostly it's democrats / liberals who do this. Oh, you support republican policies? You must be a Russian bot! Oh, you are skeptical of climate change? You're a bot!
Nah you’re not a bot, you would know. It’s your friends who are bots! You are a member of a tiny cultish minority, living in a fantasy world, foolishly believing a con while the woke right-thinkers (who have a lot of real friends) laugh at you.
Why do we trust twitter etc? We seem to have forgot how newsgroups died. The problem is not solved yet, probably never will be solved with machine learning. ML just moves the goalposts for trusting the algorithm to trusting the employees of each company.
With articles like these, I wish they would provide examples of what they they are talking about. As in, examples of likely bots, and examples of the problematic tweets. It's not too hard to provide the evidence to really make their case.
They won't and they don't have to because for the most part articles like this just appeal to people who believe it to be true anyway. They don't need to read further than the headline to have their beliefs verified.
Hell, you want climate denial, just go publish old stories about lack of ice in certain port cities in the early 1900s and lack of snow or increasing strong storms. What is fun about perusing old news is how that much of the same claims made then are no different than today.
Make your own decision but never blindly trust even stories you agree with.
“Bot” is the new “square” — just a generic insult for people you don’t like. I, a meatspace human, have been called a “Russian bot” when I disagreed with liberals and “Leftist bot” or similar when I disagreed with Trumpists.
If these findings are true, this should be no surprise. If I had to guess, it's big oil that is backing the bot propaganda efforts.
I assume if there is large amounts of money or power to be made, then there are most likely some type of digital propaganda efforts ongoing. This includes oil, big tech, and political parties just to name a few.
If a semi competent programmer can make a simple twitter bot in 4 hours, imagine what a well funded organization like a multi-billion dollar company can accomplish.
People are very easy to manipulate with propaganda, especially when most of the public are not aware that their social news feeds are likely filled with disingenuous information likely from, or influenced by, carefully crafted digital propaganda campaigns
"Big oil" is not a person. These companies are made up of people, who are motivated differently than the entity (entities) as a whole would be.
Specifically, any change in public sentiment would be rather small and only accrue over the long term. It would therefore be of little use to, say, some PR executive at Shell.
"Big oil" is also made up of a number of companies. Any benefits would be spread out among all of them, while any costs would fall to just the one doing it.
As for costs: the big one would be the damage to your reputation, as an individual, company, and industry, that would follow if the public found out. I'm having trouble imaging a scenario where you run such an operation, certainly involving a dozen people or so, without ever pissing one of them off sufficiently to see them calling a reporter.
I don't know what's going on here. The tobacco industry comes to mind as one that engaged in such tactics even though a lot of the above was true for them as well. But "big oil" seems more diverse, including foreign firms and governments, companies that embrace the future such as Shell as well as more "conservative" donate-to-republicans-and-hope-this-will-blow-over kingdoms of darkness such as Exxon. Tobacco was a far more like-minded, sometimes family-owned community that would have been easier to co-ordinate in such conspiracies.
> Specifically, any change in public sentiment would be rather small and only accrue over the long term. It would therefore be of little use to, say, some PR executive at Shell.
I'd argue that's pretty easy to refute. Just look how quickly the Q-Anon nonsense has spread. And they weren't even trying to pretend to be legitimate, they just kept making up crazier and crazier statements "for the lulz".
> As for costs: the big one would be the damage to your reputation, as an individual, company, and industry, that would follow if the public found out. I'm having trouble imaging a scenario where you run such an operation, certainly involving a dozen people or so, without ever pissing one of them off sufficiently to see them calling a reporter.
They were already caught funding the climate science denial reports despite knowing what was really going on. There was almost no backlash, why do you presume it would be any different this time?
I am sure you meant it in good faith, but your link provides an appalling slander on the reputation of Dr. Wei Hock Soon, a solar physicist of good standing. The lurid claims that a coal company bribed him to produce results that were false and favourable to them is demonstrably untrue. In the interests of collegiality and civilised conversation, please retract it immediately.
Appalling slander? He was caught taking proverbial blood money thanks to the FOIA from companies like the Charles Koch foundation. I will absolutely not retract the statement, and unless you have a better explanation for his funding than he did, I'd suggest you retract your claim that he's been acting honorably or honestly.
The bias you try to point out is not present within me. I also have no proof that big oil is behind this. It's only a guess.
I also agree with your thinking. I'm guessing green energy companies are likely running digital propaganda campaigns trying to sway people away from oil.
Propaganda as defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica is the "dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion." While organizations commonly characterized as "Big Green" or "Big Oil" may both have used propaganda-like strategies, that doesn't take away from the fact that an organized Twitter disinformation network definitely falls under this definition, whether "Big Oil" runs it or not.
You exactly described Big Green and Big Oil propaganda - to influence public opinion. Your definition explicitly mentions "facts" so therefore Big Green fits too.
Not to be snarky - but remove the words Bot and Climate from the title - it's cleaner.
Twitter as a platform promotes toxic social interaction, tribalism, hot takes, low effort & low impact feel good activism and rage driven mobs.
It is literally a hack on human neurochemistry that hurts individuals and society as a whole. People should be connecting with others in a rich, high context, cooperative and supportive environment - like we often have in our physical communities. That is by definition healthy and productive. I wish social platforms were the virtual version of what we have in the real world - not this twisted and broken imitation. Twitter is the worst but that doesn't mean any of the other forums are much better. HN is often ok - but has its flaws too.
Tldr everyone thinks everyone is a bot AND there actually are bots too. That's because twitter is virtual heroin and it is hurting us by design. :(
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadYouTube comment sections on videos related to covid are an absolute cess pit of covid deniers, misinformation spreading and conspiracy theory peddling.
I would like to think these are bots and not a very vocal but significant section of society but given recent world events I am not sure at all.
Have recent events involved significant sections of society?
Give that bot a foreign name and virtually every native English speaking person will assume it's simply bad grammar.
I don't use social media a lot but I do regularly post on HN for instance. I don't know what my average message rate is but it's probably around 1 message/day. Now if I just wanted to spam my political agenda on the site (and the site let me do it) I could very easily copy/paste the same bullshit a hundred times a day on every story on the frontpage. If like 20 other people did the same thing the amount of noise we'd generate is pretty large
Look at random fan wikis to see the amount of free work some dedicated individuals can achieve. I'm certain that many of these super active troll accounts are just that, dedicated individuals who feel very strongly about something and just spend 10 hours every day spamming and harassing and copy-pasting. If your output is like 100x that of a normal user (and you know how to game the algorithms to amplify your message) you don't need a huge number of accounts or automation to become a real nuisance.
Sometimes it is more obvious. People had MAGA campaign apps that lets Trump's team remotely activate otherwise-legit social media accounts. So the account is real, but popular messages were bot behavior. Twitter is even less likely to want to take down such an account, despite the prohibited behavior.
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists"
- Ascribed to an unnamed Yosemite Park Ranger. The quote may never really have happened, but I think it fits here.
If the people are intentionally acting as bots per the direction of other people, then what does that make the people acting as bots?
Then my tweets would get liked and followed. 95% of that was just bots.
Every now and then I would unfollow a real person and my account, which was clearly a bot, would get some hate mail telling me to re-follow them.
It was pretty surreal.
I think their purpose is equally interesting. I'd guess a lot of them are there to polarise discussions and drive people apart, but there are probably ones that have an agenda to drive a specific opinion as well.
I think this isn't just on Twitter, but other platforms as well.
And of course similar things are happening on all social media platforms.
It's deeply ironic that the West built all these tools with the intention of "connecting" people, something that's still Facebook's main mission statement, yet its biggest effects have been exactly the opposite, causing division and distrust between people, and contributing to real world conflicts and toppling of governments.
Social media today is weaponized by political agents to spread misinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale and the platforms are paying them to do it. The current political climate in the US is no surprise. It was a coordinated psyops attack and its enemies are laughing at how easy and inexpensive it was to destabilize a nation compared to traditional warfare.
I fear that we still haven't seen the worst of it, and frankly I'm not sure what the solution is.
[1]: https://www.lawfareblog.com/biggest-social-media-operation-y...
Needless to say I didn't finish reading the article.
I have problems with articles on both sides of the issue using all kinds of speculation and innuendo to try and discredit the opposite side. I would rather just read articles that cover studies explaining results (data) and methods used to support their position.
NB: not affiliated with Bot Sentinel
Interestingly it identified my sister in law as a bot, but looking at her account, I'd assume the same. Anyone else I checked seemed accurate as well.
False positives are generally curated accounts, corporate accounts, and government accounts (which are really bots with their software in managerial documents); porn accounts; and people who reblog the news but don't really "use" twitter.
There are multiple people in this thread that have been incorrectly tagged as bots, I’d like to see proper tests done with the software identifying the level of accuracy. It shouldn’t be too much to ask since their entire study is hinged on the accuracy of this software.
Just the other day a prominent dutch account got auto-blocked on twitter for saying 'Die Rutte toch.', where 'Die' (a pretty common dutch word, which in this case translates as 'That') was mistaken for a threat to our prime minister.
Same things with BotSentinel - it's just garbage.
Along with this, there is the pre-emptive and dogmatic assertion without proof or serious argument that any disagreement with official dogma must necessary be deliberate 'disinformation' spread by those with an immoral vested interest in spreading falsehood.
Yes, that is as much as we can deduce from the data presented in the paper, given that they apparently just took the 'Botometer' verdicts at face value without taking the extra steps to see if they were indeed accurate. It may, of course, be absolutely true that the 'denier' accounts are just scripts, but further investigation is necessary to establish this.
> I wonder what else makes you more likely to be characterized as a bot?
That would best be established by examining the bot-detector's algorithm. Another commenter on this thread noted that he received a high rating based on the fact that he rarely logged into his account.
The result is that in 2021 people tell me things that influence their opinions that are either misleading, out of date or absolutely false. We’re talking things like climategate or that volcanoes give off more co2 than all of human civilization.
I’m just a regular person, I don’t believe in climate change, I’ve researched it, it’s something I’m concerned about. A million dollar PR campaign against me and my friends, family and coworkers is not something anyone can standup against.
The dogma that you perceive comes from people reacting to dissatisfaction from an important issue that isn’t being taken seriously. We are citizens, regular people, against what amounts to artificial intelligences that are maximizing the number of paper clips they produce. David and Goliath doesn’t come close to the situation we’re up against.
So I genuinely wonder how people can look into it and not look at the absorption spectra of CO2 go ahh I see and then move on. I mean such a calculation isn’t enough for policy changes or anything, but it’s putting a high hurdle on the other side.
Is it some disagreement about the physics involved, or just a bunch of people you believe saying something different, or what?
Similarly, if hypothetically increased global temperature results in increased cloud formation that reduces the impact of climate change that presupposes some increase in temperature otherwise the change in cloud formation doesn’t happen. As such it’s reasonable to argue about the magnitude of change but not the direction of change.
I can clearly see arguing about a specific location bucking global trends because there complexity actually plays a direct role, thus the term climate change. But, globally I can’t see how everywhere on average would buck these trends.
Push a complex system too far and it will not come back. The popular belief that uncertainty undermines the case for taking seriously the "climate crisis" that scientists tell us we face is the opposite of the truth. Properly understood, as driving the case for precaution, uncertainty radically underscores that case, and may even constitute it.
You may have great social circles with intelligent and curious people, but in my life the facts don’t work because the facts don’t matter. The number of people actually interested in the science and not just the science (tm) is dismally low, we’re talking less than 10% in my experience. This includes people who have degrees in physics and engineering and a university engineering professor I knew.
People are hungry, vulnerable, emotional, scared, and prideful creatures. That’s what we are; and we like stories. We like stories where we’re hero’s on an epic journey with villains to defeat.
If you tell someone a fact that breaks their story, makes them scared, and makes them less prideful, you’re not having a conversation for very long, doesn’t matter if you can support it with evidence and reasoning. What PR added on top of this human tendency is people think about climate way more than they otherwise would, they think about it in terms of a story, in us vs. them terms (PRs narrative), and if you say something counter to that narrative, now you’re the villain.
I’ve had people I respect flat out tell me that climate change is a hoax and if we reduced carbon emissions it would just be virtue signaling. They are not joking, they are serious and they’ve been told this by talking heads for over 20 years.
You’ll never get to the back of the envelope calculation.
As an aside, for those interested, the GitHub page for the tool's Python API (https://github.com/IUNetSci/botometer-python) lists relevant papers regarding the functioning/design of the tool.
Kind of annoyed that Botometer requires me to authorize it to access my Twitter account, when all my tweets are public (and who cares about bots that make private tweets, if that's even a thing). Bot Sentinel didn't require this.
https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/
https://botsentinel.com/
- it's 50/50 accurate picking actual bots I know I follow
- the more simple the reading level, the higher it scored
- however, extremely heady accounts also score high
- the farther right/left the account goes seems to up the score a little
- accounts that quote authors frequently score very high, even if they're human behind them
- everything from Chinese state media scored higher than anything
- everything that was frequently highly critical of China scored extremely high
- most Trumpers and Antifa I follow had very low scores (but most are high-up/origin accounts)
- most news organizations from both sides scored middle range, including known propagandists and "reputable" organizations
- accounts from both sides of the COVID discussion were mostly low
Hard to say, but my best guess is "low effort" is the defining factor. Only exception is the pro/anti-Chinese stuff, which is definitely a mix of real people and bots.
I keep pretty good tabs on the accounts I follow and I think I'm pretty good at determining who is "a real person with real feelings saying real things they really think" and bots, and from this analysis, I have zero faith that this tool has any modicum of reliability in a research setting.
I think it's possibly accurate enough to say "yes, this is definitely a human", but totally fails to identify bots. Thus, any research that uses this tool as a measure of bot influence is way off, because there are way too many false positives. Which I guess is a good thing for anyone who wants to say, "look at all these people being suckered by all these bots!" which is pretty unscrupulous.
YMMV
Still, all this puts "prevent bit usage by design" on the feature list for the next generation of social media (that and "prevent sharing without human moderation beyond a certain virality point", "clever shadow banning" ,and an eliza mode for those times you juste want to yell at the clouds...
Yes. it's that Easy and the most obvious solution to getting out of that echo chamber.
I know it's hard for many to actually uninstall and 'delete their accounts' but perhaps this sounds like a great new years resolution plan to stick to.
This time, you can do it.
Until then, Twitter has an outsized influence on the world.
Also, afaik all the botometers are crap, so studies based on them are also crap.
I believe that we need a Greta Thunberg-like figure who is conservative-leaning on literally every major topic of political contention, except believes that anthropogenic climate change is real and we should take significant action to mitigate it, and then we need the media and entertainment industries to prop them up as virtuous. People's instinctive defences will be lowered and we will be surprised at how easily people's minds can be changed.
I would say the bulk of the resistance I see comes largely from distrust of institutions and people who are very pro climate change, and then secondary worry about the financial impact of decarbonization on them personally as well as losing competitiveness to countries like China who are huge polluters and honestly dgaf.
Maybe my idea of a conservative celebrity is a silly idea and won't work, but I believe the root cause is one of tribal conflict (combined with cynical disinformation campaigns), and to change their mind requires getting around these tribal defenses in some way.
According to Pew, 84% of Liberal Democrats think that humans significantly contribute to global warming, whereas 14% of Conservative Republicans do. I think this helps to confirm that there's a pretty important tribal dimension at play here (although we also can't rule out that financially self-interested people have self-selected themselves into the latter category).
1. CO2 is the primary global warming gas, and other gases contribute also 2. CO2 precedes temperature change 3. The warming trend is unique to earth because of human activity 3. We understand the Climate science and carbon processes well enough to make accurate predictions 4. Climate modeling is accurate, and contributes to knowing what will happen 5. Our temperature measurement systems are accurate and scientifically valid 6. We understand all the interplay between albedo, cloud formation, and water vapor at different altitudes 7. We understand why the earth appears to be getting larger 8. The earth's warming is due to human activity and is not a natural process of warming and cooling driven by solar activity and events 9. Solar activity levels play no part in global warming; these changes are from human activity 10. Green biomass has decreased, not increased due to human activity
Alternative claims exist such as:
1. CO2 is primarily plant food 2. CO2 is a trailing indicator of temperature change 3. The warming trend exists among multiple planets not just earth 3. Climate science and carbon process knowledge are in their infancy 4. Climate modeling is inaccurate, and has been very inaccurate thus far 5. Our temperature measurement systems have been contaminated by the heat island effect, and are not accurate and scientifically valid 6. We do not yet understand all the interplay between albedo, cloud formation, and water vapor at different altitudes 7. We understand the earth appears to be getting larger but we do not know why 8. The earth's warming is to a natural process of warming and cooling driven primarily by solar activity and events 9. Solar activity levels play the most significant part in global warming; these changes are not only from human activity 10. Green biomass has increased due to human activity
Regardless of position, I don't believe name calling will convince people either way.
I have no personal interests in either idea though I have some investments in green energy & petroleum. As green energy is not self-sufficient, I expect that petroleum will continue to be around for many years as we transition to future energy sources.
That aside, you can find open positions at Density listed here: density.io/jobs
When Digg, MySpace, and Slashdot became more convenient sources of disinformation?
But there were plenty of newsgroup users who preferred the tightly moderated newsgroups.
Hell, you want climate denial, just go publish old stories about lack of ice in certain port cities in the early 1900s and lack of snow or increasing strong storms. What is fun about perusing old news is how that much of the same claims made then are no different than today.
Make your own decision but never blindly trust even stories you agree with.
speaking of people whose mind is made up...
Maybe people I disagree they have same arguments and are considered bots?
Or they just parrot same things?
I assume if there is large amounts of money or power to be made, then there are most likely some type of digital propaganda efforts ongoing. This includes oil, big tech, and political parties just to name a few.
If a semi competent programmer can make a simple twitter bot in 4 hours, imagine what a well funded organization like a multi-billion dollar company can accomplish.
People are very easy to manipulate with propaganda, especially when most of the public are not aware that their social news feeds are likely filled with disingenuous information likely from, or influenced by, carefully crafted digital propaganda campaigns
Specifically, any change in public sentiment would be rather small and only accrue over the long term. It would therefore be of little use to, say, some PR executive at Shell.
"Big oil" is also made up of a number of companies. Any benefits would be spread out among all of them, while any costs would fall to just the one doing it.
As for costs: the big one would be the damage to your reputation, as an individual, company, and industry, that would follow if the public found out. I'm having trouble imaging a scenario where you run such an operation, certainly involving a dozen people or so, without ever pissing one of them off sufficiently to see them calling a reporter.
I don't know what's going on here. The tobacco industry comes to mind as one that engaged in such tactics even though a lot of the above was true for them as well. But "big oil" seems more diverse, including foreign firms and governments, companies that embrace the future such as Shell as well as more "conservative" donate-to-republicans-and-hope-this-will-blow-over kingdoms of darkness such as Exxon. Tobacco was a far more like-minded, sometimes family-owned community that would have been easier to co-ordinate in such conspiracies.
I'd argue that's pretty easy to refute. Just look how quickly the Q-Anon nonsense has spread. And they weren't even trying to pretend to be legitimate, they just kept making up crazier and crazier statements "for the lulz".
> As for costs: the big one would be the damage to your reputation, as an individual, company, and industry, that would follow if the public found out. I'm having trouble imaging a scenario where you run such an operation, certainly involving a dozen people or so, without ever pissing one of them off sufficiently to see them calling a reporter.
They were already caught funding the climate science denial reports despite knowing what was really going on. There was almost no backlash, why do you presume it would be any different this time?
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate-scientist-oil-com...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash...
I also agree with your thinking. I'm guessing green energy companies are likely running digital propaganda campaigns trying to sway people away from oil.
Also Big Green likes to half-truth about how ethical or clean green is. Here's for cobalt, but not the only problem: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...
There are climate-change policies that are not deeply unpopular but it seems the powers that be are not interested in them.
Twitter as a platform promotes toxic social interaction, tribalism, hot takes, low effort & low impact feel good activism and rage driven mobs.
It is literally a hack on human neurochemistry that hurts individuals and society as a whole. People should be connecting with others in a rich, high context, cooperative and supportive environment - like we often have in our physical communities. That is by definition healthy and productive. I wish social platforms were the virtual version of what we have in the real world - not this twisted and broken imitation. Twitter is the worst but that doesn't mean any of the other forums are much better. HN is often ok - but has its flaws too.
Tldr everyone thinks everyone is a bot AND there actually are bots too. That's because twitter is virtual heroin and it is hurting us by design. :(
Seems like the training data was selected to aid the answer they were looking for.
You have to remember people that believe their point if view is correct tend to share more and comment more so other people know they are misinformed.