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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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