Update: Russian Interference in 2016 US Election, Bots, and Misinformation | Hacker News Reader

Update: Russian Interference in 2016 US Election, Bots, and Misinformation

blog.twitter.com

55 pointscoloneltcb21 comments

> On average, our automated systems catch more than 3.2 million suspicious accounts globally per week — more than double the amount we detected this time last year.

Holy crap that is a lot of suspicious accounts!

It's impossible to find political conversation on twitter without multiple accounts named like `HouseWifeXX937` (always something with weird characters then numbers at the end) in the middle of the conversations and rarely reply like you would expect a real person to do. Sometimes I wonder if I'm in a conversation entirely with bots and it gets depressing; why would I even want to bother using Twitter beyond talking with people I know are people?

Nowadays I mostly ignore any strangers.

Maybe there should be a stronger proof-of-work for creating an account on twitter

They managed to set the bar too low for the common spammer while keeping it too high for a common potential user.

> Nowadays I mostly ignore any strangers.

Isn't that one of the political goals? To undermine your trust of society (i.e. strangers)?

You're exactly right and yet I don't really know how to fix it. Perhaps if Twitter opened up the verification process to anyone (free or paid) then I could limit to only those who are verified so I know I'm most likely talking with a real person.

Still, bots will get through the cracks but that has to be better than what is there, today. Right?

It seems to have taken about a year for basic information about last year's misinformation campaign to come out. 3 years from now there'll be another election and presumably another misinformation campaign. Should we be optimistic that someone will be on top of it before the election?

Since it's more widely accepted to be a significant part of the threat model, there should be more attention and effort focussed on identifying and revealing information about it.

OTOH, there will be misinformation directed to confuse the public about that, too, and that may be challenging to sort out.

It's also possible to talk about it without sounding crazy.

Of course, some people will still try and make it seem like it's a crazy idea, but they do the same with AGW.

Having media sources most people respect on board with the basic notion should help.

>a significant part of the threat model

Right, but for who?

> OTOH, there will be misinformation directed to confuse the public about that, too, and that may be challenging to sort out.

This is what scares me. We saw in the last few days that a prominent 'antifa' Twitter account pretending to based out of Boston tweeted from Vladivostok, presumably in error.

Accounts like these provide the fuel that empowers elements of the alt right, and they're still active in these efforts.

If Twitter and Facebook fail to become more proactive on countering these baiters, what does that mean for our future? This doesn't seem like a problem we can easily retroactively assess our way out of.

> basic information about last year's misinformation campaign

You mean when all of the U.S. press spent the year beating up on Trump?

It was pretty obvious, just from looking at the front pages. That was the Russians? Wily buggers.

'beating on Trump' is their prerogative as media. stay on topic. this is about hacking and twitter and russia

How about US involvement in elections all over the world? You don't see outcry for that, in fact you see it on the cover of Time magazine as a boast.

What about my Aunt Sue? What does one have to do with the other?

Yes, accepting bets for how much money Thiel will be paying. He's already on "5 times russian bogeyman":

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-do...

I guess he gets a sweet rate at Facebook, too.

>3 years from now there'll be another election and presumably another misinformation campaign. Should we be optimistic that someone will be on top of it before the election?

I'd hope for a mildly more competent, less compromised candidate who can't be "defeated" by Russians with an $80k ad budget.

Of course, if the Russians are really serious about fixing the election they'll arrange for Hillary to run again.

100 K on Facebook and 274 K on Twitter: I remember a lot of detractors saying that both campaigns spent way more (in the tens of millions or higher AFAIK). What about ads on Google Ads and other ad networks? What does the total dollar value of Russian ad spend in the November 2016 US election have to be for those detractors to think again?

Naturally these figures are related to specific accounts, too. I wonder if they can aggregate spending based on origin location and how much higher the amount would be.

For example if you're doing something fishy with moving money around you wouldn't move, say, $100k from a single place. No, you'd move $5k 20 times from likely multiple places. It's trivial to setup new accounts to then use for ad buying.

Twitter, et al, 'fixing' this issue would make it difficult for American companies and teams to fulfill their mission. It might be easier just to control the narrative and deflect.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

"Persona management by the US military would face legal challenges if it were turned against citizens of the US, where a number of people engaged in sock puppetry have faced prosecution."

Why doesn't Twitter ask to solve a captcha every time before one can send a message?

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