Forgive me, as I don't use twitter much, but what is the problem with twitter bots? If I don't follow them, aren't they essentially invisible to me?
I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?
I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?
Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to <address> and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"
Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in <1 hour, but it's still clearly lucrative.
This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots.
It's clear that Twitter has held a Laissez-faire or blind-eye philosophy towards bots, but it's hard to keep procrastinating once you can trivially verify that your platform is a lucrative tool for scammers.
Not to mention, the top N responses to every high profile tweet are now these scammers and it makes their platform look absolutely uncontrolled.
Just like the fake "Thanks!" replies, I'm sure there are fake actual transactions, meaning the scammer sends bitcoin to itself to make it look legit. The fact that they pay transactions fees doesn't really change much.
So it's very hard to know how much of those thousands of dollars were actually scammed.
I thought this is the whole reason to use the blue check mark, so you can immediately tell real Elon from bot Elon.
But there are weird celebrity bots too. Eg, I followed Adam Sandler, and within a few hours a couple Adam Sandler bots started following me. They just had retweets of Adam Sandler tweets, but also a few hundred followers. Makes me wonders who are the people that follow these back, maybe just other bots?
"n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida."
some of these bots, were not bots btw
States need to play the long game after all.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/10/darwin-day/
[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/13/republicans-...
That focus also overlooks the fact that much of the propaganda is emotionally-driven and appeals to certain instincts. For even the most rational of human beings, emotion can overwhelm critical thinking.
So, while we can definitely do better in teaching critical thinking skills, we're just going to have a percentage of the population that is susceptible. And, given the fact that we're split almost down the middle politically (the election came down to 85,000 votes across three states), the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country.
A more effective root cause mitigation might be to break the two-party monopoly so that a broader set of ideas can flourish. This binary for-or-against system is also unhelpful to say the least.
At risk of poking a hornet's nest, isn't this basically just an argument against democracy itself?
Sure, you can go around shutting down Twitter bots, but if the fundamental problem is "elections are swung by people who believe literally anything they read, and we can't change that" then we've basically lost already.
First, because it'll move to a new source, and playing media whack-a-mole to maintain a functioning government doesn't seem reliable. Second, because deciding what's a valid source suddenly becomes the defining feature of elections. Deciding which voices to promote and which to undermine obvious matters, but if Twitter bots are a vital issue in a national election then one starts to wonder if anything else matters.
And I mean, I know one argument is that this has always been the case, that the only new thing is the ability for unfiltered manipulation to come straight into people's homes. I suppose it's true that in ~1800 most people couldn't possibly get enough information to make informed voting decisions, so we were largely getting our decisions made by political officials and party machines.
But it's a bit scarier to think that the problem is people, not access - if that's true then expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy.
Because that's not the root problem. This is all a dog and pony show.
There is no transparent mechanism of control for internet publishing like there is for e.g. broadcast media via FCC licensure. The government very much wants to rein in this "Wild West" age of the internet and assert some control over the messaging.
Conditions are very favorable for such a project right now:
a) Centralization on walled gardens like Facebook, Google, et al provides a plausible choke point.
[Right now they're making everything else online "dirty", "bad", and/or "Russian", but don't be surprised when they ban it all together and anything non-Google-or-Facebook-approved becomes part of the "dark web", meaning the place that only dirty, bad Russians go, and which will effectively require special communication equipment to access. Wikileaks is a great case study in this.]
b) There's sufficient angst among the tech-savvy public to fly such controls in under the ironic pretext of "preserving the integrity of our democracy" without stirring up too much of a ruckus.
and c) The mainstream media is looking for any plausible cover story they can find after their disastrous and embarrassing coverage of the 2016 election and will go along with anything that will allow them to save a shred of face. That it paints their main competition (hyper-specialized online media) as dirty and unreliable is a bonus.
This is all very bad stuff, and that people are so easily tricked into following along because they're bitter about a political loss is as deeply disappointing as it is predictable.
I expect that the government will eventually move to establish a set of "identity verification standards" that have to be met or the site will be taken offline by court order. This will essentially end free speech on the web and allow the government to assert its control over what normal people are allowed to access, read, and/or share online.
Bottom line is that you don't have to be a Russian double-agent to be a Republican, and you don't have to be the victim of a pernicious foreign plot to lose an election against the other national political party. If you live in the Silicon Valley bubble, don't let your frustration delude you into believing otherwise.
Any critical thinking textbook should teach about false dichotomies, let's not fall into that fallacy here!
If there was a "long-read social media" platform, it would be ignored, because you wouldn't check it in the bus queue or on the toilet.
Even if just 10% of people are that dumb, 10% is more than enough to swing an election.
I am still somewhat shocked that Donald Trump is really President of the USA[1], but I am deeply convinced that denying arbitrary people their right to vote is an acceptable "solution".
[1] Really, it sounds like satire, doesn't it?
You realize how few that is right?
Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion?
If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans from countries around the world who comment on USA politics?
Demanding proof of effect is an oddly defensive response that seems aimed at exonerating bad behavior. The GP didn't even assert anything about influence; just stated a fact.
But what difference does it make? Are you saying we should just accept it if we can't definitively prove it had a certain influence?
Sounds an awful lot like a certain U.S. president.
>If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans
False equivalence. A concerted effort by one person to use technology in amplifying a specific narrative against an adversary is not the same as actual human beings rendering their frequently diverse opinions. Surely you see the difference.
It's trivial to boost the apparent "credibility" of a given account with followers, likes, and retweets.
There is essentially no barrier to exploiting these "commodities" with networks of bots artificially boosting these stats.
Soon, the synthesized noise from bot accounts drowns out the organic signal of genuine accounts.
Waves of content reverberate through the Twittersphere, into and from other channels like 4chan, Facebook and Instagram.