A BlockTogether list for election propaganda bots on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

A BlockTogether list for election propaganda bots on Twitter

americapossible.com

40 pointskitskid20 comments

I'm a bit skeptical of this. It could be used for some rather nefarious means. However, I found this comment from one of the authors of it troubling:

>Twitter users should be able to engage in healthy online discourse without foreign countries and organized groups manipulating the conversation.

This rhetoric makes it sound like only Americans should engage on Twitter.

I believe they mean foreign governments, from interfering with domestic elections. This would actually be useful outside of the U.S. as the U.S. is far from the only country this kind of manipulation has occurred in, in fact it is probably even more prevalent elsewhere.

While its true that this tool can be used for such purposes, the title of the linked article is explicitly targeted: "Cleanup Twitter for the 2020 Elections".

Ah, I read it as "foreign organized groups". I know it occurs elsewhere, but usually nobody bats an eye about that online.

That in mind, in the interest of specificity I wonder if the phrase '[foreign] state actors' would be better used?

Yes, if it were justified.

It isn't justified. There is zero reason to believe that these accounts are foreign or bots. I checked a bunch of them. Every account looked like a normal human American on one side of the political spectrum.

It would be nice if the list were clear on that, but "block foreign bots" is more marketable than "filter bubble me harder".

The rhetoric is saying that only media of certain political bent and their allies should engage on twitter. That much is obvious as is the fact that many of these "watchdogs" are politically motivated propaganda organizations themselves. They are trying to set a propaganda regime favorable to one side for the 2020 election ( aka interfering with our elections ).

What I'm puzzled about is whatever interference russia had in the election was dwarfed by interference from a bunch of european countries, canada, israel and the like. Why isn't that being investigated? Even more, why aren't these watchdogs themselves investigated. Who is funding them and why? Or maybe we all can stop using twitter.

Surely all countries should have elections that are free from foreign manipulation.

Well, yes, but elections in big countries affect the internet everywhere. This means that the results of those elections also affect others. Eg GDPR or article 11 & 13 or DMCA.

You can browse all the blocked accounts at BlockedTogether https://blocktogether.org/show-blocks/uK4u2vF9Q2qq4iKes9W3aI...

And, you can visit botsentinel.com and browse all of them there too.

I checked a bunch of them. No, they are not "election propaganda bots". They are real humans, all on one side of the political spectrum. If you are on the left and would like to strengthen your filter bubble, this list is for you. It's like blinders (horse eyewear to prevent fright) for Twitter users. With this list, you can enjoy the morning of the 2020 election with complete confidence that there is nobody who would possibly support Trump. Also, you yourself won't be tempted by crimethink, because you'll never even know it exists.

Yeah, having read your comment I checked the list too. It looks like another one of those lists where "Russian bots" is just code for Trump supporter. I viewed a random sample of 10 different users and they were tweeting about regular life stuff as well as supporting the president. One of them was just a crypto trader, they didn't even have any Trump stuff on their timeline.

I find the methods listed on https://botsentinel.com/faq a bit confusing:

"Q: How do you determine which accounts are classified as fake news?

Classifying fake news accounts is a manual process. We review hundreds of tweets and retweets during the review process. If an account has a large number of followers and a high percentage of misleading and/or factually incorrect tweets, that account could be classified as Fake News."

"Q: Why is my account rated problematic or alarming?

Our machine learning model was developed to identify accounts that exhibit irregular tweet activity related to politics. The more you exhibit irregular tweet activity, the higher your trollbot score will be."

So how much is manual and how much is their model? By what criteria do the manual reviews judge tweets?

It all seems way too opaque without more information.

Totally. Are they sure thd training data aren’t biased? Are they considering the full spectrum of politics? Are they neutral to results?

if you review the list of users on the list, it clearly is biased - I've only checked 10 random accounts but at least half of them appeared to be real, regular Republicans. I mean, the fact that botsentinel rate accounts as "problematic" is pretty amusing given that it's language associated with a particular political orientation.

This is interesting given that Twitter could be doing this on their own to promote a better platform.

But instead requires trusting a 3rd party. Which, from an open source standpoint could be better with verification and such that seems to be present.

I'm under the impression that the number of times an account is blocked _could_ provide some signal to twitter that, hey, maybe this person/bot/thing shouldn't be on here - so I went ahead and clicked the go button for this huge list.

I vigorously curate and purge my Twitter of anything (or anyone) remotely political, and it makes it a great place to see what people in the industry are up to. Otherwise it's a complete dumpster fire. I'm completely convinced that >90% of all accounts are not a human being.

Maybe a step in the right direction but I would much rather have the content from these entities still be visible, but flagged, so I could warn others.

Probably not possible without a custom twitter client, though.

If you follow @botsentinel, it does this.

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