Automated Pro-Trump Bots Overwhelmed Pro-Clinton Messages
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://politicalbots.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Data-Mem...
I really dislike the basis of their research which is:
Twitter provides free access to a sample of the public tweets posted on the platform. The platform’s precise sampling method is not known, but the company itself reports that the data available through the Streaming API is at most one percent of the overall global public communication on Twitter any given time. [6]
So...we aren't going to mention a selection issue at all? Is that 1% of global Tweets a truly random sample? Can you confirm Twitter isn't manipulating the output? We have examples of them censoring stuff this cycle...
In order to get the most complete and relevant data set, the tweets were collected by following particular hashtags identified by the team as being actively used during the debate.
What's the methodology for selection? I'd hope research out of Oxford would be a little better argued. But of course since it's Oxford this research will get quoted in the New York Times by people who probably don't understand the paper they are reporting on and we'll have talking heads endlessly parroting why this justifies censorship.
All this research is showing evidence of is that the stream Twitter provides is pro-Trump. It's a massive leap of faith to assume this data truly is representative and non-biased.
And maybe the platforms - Twitter, etc - have a responsibility to not publish those posts?
I've grown up and spent my entire life in the south. I've never had a parent, relative or friend even hint that I should view/treat any race differently than any other. You'd hear the occasional bad joke at school...but that was about it.
From the news cycle at this point, I feel like I'm supposed to have been mailed my own KKK gear as an expected housewarming gift.
That tends to help me more in my job and having an informed perspective as a citizen.
I also live in the South and had different childhood experiences, but I'm older.
Just as an example, it looks like they have a store that sell confederate flags in Abbeville listed as a hate group...which seems like more than a little bit of a stretch. Looks like there's a flag store in Charleston also listed as a white nationalist group?
Some bots might say useful things on Twitter. Asking Twitter to decide what's acceptable for a bot to say is asking for trouble.
In a way, I'm terrified that fascism can now just "chatterbot" its way into the popular consensus. In another way, I'm incredibly relieved that a significant portion of the fascist speech I see on the web isn't real.
http://i.imgur.com/fItaEy9.png
If you were a regular user at /r/politics, you would have noticed that there were tons of new users with no history coming in and throwing ad hominem attacks at everyone who said anything about clinton. You would also notice that bots were doing keyword searches on certain negtive titles and automatically downvoting them the instant they were posted. The day after the election was over, this all ended.
The Correct the Record PAC had 6 million dollars in funding specifically for spreading opinion on social media sites, of which Reddit is one of the most influential, being a source of long-form discussion. In fact, I believe CTR even directly mentioned that they target Reddit. Why wouldn't they, considering it was their stated mission?
What on earth do you think politicians do with their media budgets? Only buy newspaper and TV ads? Do you think they just ignore the internet, which is the number one form of media now? That's just plain absurd.
Then there was the narrative that the politics sub suddenly became more neutral after the election was over since CTR was no longer spending money, but if you check the sub now, it's still very anti-Trump, showing that the Sanders and Clinton support were organic.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
And we know their mission:
Correct The Record will invest more than $1 million into Barrier Breakers 2016 activities, including the more than tripling of its digital operation to engage in online messaging both for Secretary Clinton and to push back against attackers on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram. Barrier Breakers 2016 is a project of Correct The Record and the brainchild of David Brock, and the task force will be overseen by President of Correct The Record Brad Woodhouse and Digital Director Benjamin Fischbein. The task force staff’s backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize.
http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project-of-...
It it just a conspiracy?
A PAC that does "online messaging" on certain platforms isn't evidence of this grand conspiracy. Everyone does online messaging. You're claiming something far wackier is being done by one specific group of people that you singled out.
https://www.reddit.com/user/wardsalud/submitted/
There's a reason that account has been flagged for bot removal consistently. Their account consists of pro-Clinton articles every single day for months, lots of them upvoted and heavily-commented on. Yeah, there are some people who just don't have a life, but at some point you have to just start looking at evidence.
You just had to be on some of the reddits during the election season and you could literally see the tone change when the weekend would end.
We know the Clinton campaign did engage in a strategy of manipulating media attention (see Wikileaks). We don't know CTR is manipulating social media but we have a lot of reasons to suspect so.
At some point the burden of proof is on you.
2) People on Reddit and elsewhere noted pro-Trump videos with thousands of shares and a couple hundred views repeatedly. The only way that would happen is with bots since to trigger the share link on YouTube would be by viewing the video.
2) Yeah. Trump and Russia are doing it, too. It's just as nefarious there. Why is the standard defense of Clinton whataboutism?
I think the only way to combat accusations of whataboutism is to rigorously apply the same standards whenever these things are brought up and do one's best to remove even the appearance of partisanship when making them. That can be tough to do.
You know, stuff like this is actually where people can cross party lines and work together. Find an issue that should be non-partisan, set aside the other issues they may disagree on, and get something positive done.
Edit to add: I didn't think this was controversial. If you down vote, I'd appreciate it if you would take the time to comment in the interest of communication.
If I stab you and you try to defend yourself, it is whataboutism now?
Politics is about offense and defense. You can't fight a guy with bot networks pushing a false narrative without one of your own.
You honestly think unilateral disarmament is the way to go?
Having said, I think the above poster is correct that the idea of CTR taking over reddit as some settled reality is a sort of mass hysteria.
It is something that is simply repeated over and over again until people accept it.
Accepting anything without proof is strange and foolish.
This is interesting. Can you expand on this? Is it that CTR was involved? It sounds like the source(s) of the Twitter bots won't likely be found. What's the reach of reddit's /r/politics in comparison to Twitter?
"It's hard to know anymore who is genuine and who is a paid sock puppet in certain forums."
Isn't that the truth! Same goes increasingly for sources in general.
Also, evidence needed for "take over" as CTR messages would be labeled as such.
I swear, every time someone brings up twitter's political censorship, there's at least one comment to the effect of "they're allowed to!" or "if you don't like it, you can leave!". Yes, everyone knows! We're talking about the morality, outcome, or effectiveness of twitter doing such a thing, not whether or not they're entitled to do it.
There isn't a law that forbids people from gossiping about others behind their backs but most of us can generally agree that it's simply something that decent people should not do.
[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
That works out to about 1 tweet/minute per day... how is this not spam? Why can't Twitter do the most basic of spam filtering? And you know why I don't use Twitter anymore? It's because of this. They optimized for the wrong metric: the number of accounts, or the number of tweets/day.
Who optimized for this, Twitter or the SV VCs?
It was pretty terrifying how many fake people were used from both major candidates this election. This bot/shill divide between the campaigns looks like another way in which Trump went frugal and still managed to be effective. I think that in the end, Brock's people ended up repulsing voters rather than helping their candidate.
The general approach to propaganda is to analyze the target audience and look for vulnerabilities (messages that might work) and susceptibilities (the effectiveness of a given message.)
The research link from politicalbots.org looks like a first-order pass using hashtags as a proxy for actual content, which is usually harder to analyze in an automated fashion. Understandable, but prone to errors, such as using pro-candidate hashtags with anti-candidate content.
But getting to the heart of the matter, it's hard to say how effective computational propaganda was in this election without more detailed testing and analysis.
Generally, a political campaign aims to do three things -- 1) motivate their followers to vote; 2) convert undecideds; 3) demoralize opponents. I could see bots doing 1) and 3) pretty well, but 2) not so much.
Of course, a well-designed experiment could prove me wrong.
These companies have all the tools to figure out orchestrated efforts.
You don't get to cancel property rights because you don't like the reporting there. You also don't get to cancel freedom of speech because you don't like what someone is saying.
It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship.
> I believe that the point being argued is that they have a responsibility to filter out automated messaging.
No, there is no responsibility whatsoever. Users are free to not use the service if they don't like it.
If you see this different then we have different views on what private property is.
I own private property. It's true that I'm free to paint my house an obnoxious color and let it fall into ruin. It doesn't mean that I don't have a responsibility to my neighbors and community to provide upkeep to my house and ensure it's aesthetically pleasing.
Similarly, I believe social media and the media has a larger responsibility to our civic discourse even if they are a private company. Is that a legal obligation? No, but it's a moral obligation.
Can your neighbours sue you if you paint your house in an obnoxious color? No? Then there is no responsibility.
Why is it that I, for whom English is only my 4th language has to explain to you what the English word responsibility means?
If for you responsibility is just a fuzzy term with some feelings attached then we don't need to discuss this matter as FB can't be held accountable to that kind of responsibility anyways.
> Similarly, I believe social media and the media has a larger responsibility to our civic discourse even if they are a private company
I do not doubt that you believe many things, but first you have to show what responsibility actually exists and then show if and how that applies to Facebook if you are going to make such an argument.
Would you expand on this? I don't follow how a third party other than the state could force Facebook to censor?
You are incapable of seeing how it poses a threat to freedom of speech when all major media combined call for censorship? There's no point for me to engage in a discussion with you.
I'm not asking about whether Facebook can engage in censorship. That was addressed by you here:
> A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech
It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship.
I'm asking how a third party (someone other than Facebook or the government) can force Facebook to censor.
I think figuring out how to create a constructive online community is an important and complex issue. It's not as simple as letting everybody do whatever they want. And limiting what can be done includes limiting speech in some way. How you do that in a way that's not censorship is a legitimate question.
No, you can have one voice broadcasting, and as long as it's still one very loud voice, it's only one voice. This is part of the psychology of how people measure veracity of information: through apparent public consensus. So you can have CBS broadcast something, and that's fine, but it becomes problematic when CBS buy themselves a thousand Twitter bots with names like "Joe Smith" or "DankMemes88", thus giving the false impression that thousands of people are all in consensus.
I don't agree that a broadcaster has a responsibility to their audience. If a broadcaster starts screwing up consistently -- for example, by relaying false or unsubstantiated information -- the audience has the choice to move on to the next guy.
I also don't agree that it's necessarily the platform's responsibility to control what's on it, although it has that option.
Wikileaks does zero curation. No human-being has the time to read everything they post, and there is still a problem of verifying the authenticity of sources.
At what point does it become willful ignorance on your part? Seriously, spend 20 minutes today, do a bing search, find an article or reddit thread that links to the relevant emails, and do some reading and decide for yourself.
But they could just have 25 bots post twice a day..
http://wavy.com/2016/11/08/police-no-reports-of-voter-intimi...
And right below that, an IBT page repeating it verbatim without investigation:
http://www.ibtimes.com/voter-fraud-2016-where-election-day-r...
It's not uncommon these days for news organisations to lazily use Twitter as a source in this way. Actually contacting the police force which had supposedly escorted voters would involve actual reporting.
Given no one has commented on why they down voted, this is just speculation on my part based on what I've seen elsewhere on HN.
The tech hackers are not on the conservative scene, but on the liberal front. This is why Obama had such a great campaign in both terms, and the conservative I-want-it-too failed outright.
Edit: LOL! I get downvoted for being demeaning, but my points stands. No apologies.