Twitter analysis: identifying a propaganda bot network
bellingcat.com
bellingcat.com
It also involves a lot of "eyeballing", particularly the part where the author looks at the graph and notices a weird pattern. That's very hard to do automatically.
When you run a worldwide network that has significant potential for abuse and spreading misinformation I would consider it to be your duty to monitor it and guard against these kinds of things. If it costs too much then maybe you shouldn't be in business or should change your business model so that you can afford to clean up the damage your business is doing to society.
So you do need people somewhere in the loop to handle these things.
What would be nice though would be if social media offered rewards for identifying such abuse, after all - they happily pay bug bounties, why not abuse bounties! That would get them lots of zero-hour/non-contract workers doing their job for them and big companies love that it seems and to be able to do that in a PR way that has positives. Well, it works for BUG bounties, why not incentivise the populus to police the populus against abuse as well.
...
> if social media offered rewards for identifying such abuse
couldn't this also be gamed for false positives, and create an incentive for groups to form smear-for-profit entities which try to spin small communities as 'bad' to the benefit of others?
But let us not forget, things like posting IP and client and other such details that may prove useful in identifying such abuse, may well elude public investigation. So it would be these niche area's in which Twitter could then focus upon.
However, as an example of a slightly comparable problem - wiki editing and the weighted credibility of editors over time, we may well end up creating a hidden social media based upon a small subset of society and perhaps yielding a bias in some direction or another in judgment of what is abuse.
But with the ways social media churns upon spam/botnets, it would place a huge load upon people self filtering.
It is not unreasonable to take the top 5k accounts/hash tags and manually evaluate the top replies and retweets. Human evaluation can be very streamlined with clean evaluation rules, and these human evaluations get fed back to machine learning models.
And after all that, Apple's recent products have been somewhat lackluster. Catalina is currently a dumpster-fire; a friend installed it and had his machine just sit frozen for a while along with a huge number of other problems. Keyboard design, too. Doesn't sound to perfect to me.
Twitter’s failures on the other hand affect everyone - misinformation spread through their platform can and does affect society at large regardless of whether you’re using Twitter yourself.
This happens much more often than you might think, there are a quite a few examples of this effect.
The author's analysis that this is more sinister than simply a promotional campaign is, of course, correct: the coopting of the genocide hashtag to promote the government and the use of fake, international-sounding accounts are both skeezy as all hell. But to get to that conclusion, you have a professional journalist doing a level of post-automation analysis that's too complex to operationalize at scale. It requires too much critical thinking and discretion, and throwing a million human reviewers at it will just result in the kind of capricious false positives that are also railed against on HN and elsewhere (perhaps rightfully), with an undoubtedly high amount of false negatives too.
There are constant ignorant-layman calls for magical tech moderation that only touches bad targets and never steps on the good little guy, but none of the people making these blithe demands ever stop and think about whether this is possible, beyond "they're rich and smart, they definitely know how to do it".
https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jack_dor... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmD9bmVMAA9M19.jpg https://static.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
My theory: botnets that fly under the public's radar allow them to sandbag their engagement stats. Once said botnets become public knowledge, it becomes a liability to advertisers and users who now are going to be worried about spam, so the fear of net loss of engagement spurns them to take action.
For a recent (last week!) review checkout https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01720 (by a former colleague)
It's money. It's always money.
Something besides the Warren allegations; MSNBC, NBC, ABC, Twitter, YouTube, and many others also ran the ad.
In a letter responding to the Biden campaign, Facebook said that politicians are not allowed to share a previously debunked viral hoax in ads, but their direct speech was ineligible for fact-checking.
“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” Facebook’s head of global elections policy Katie Harbath wrote in the letter.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-facebook/bid...
facebook/twitter, even mainstream medeia/media in general love characters like trump. runs their numbers up and in addiction to reporters incentived to post fake news/clickbait as much as they can
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/elections-and-political...
Also yes, I know they have had this in place since October 2016 with the whole "newsworthiness" thing.
To me that panders to any politician who wants to lie to manipulate the public through the surgical approach which is demographics marketing that exists on the FB platform (I'm a marketer - it's an outstanding platform). This is what I mean by "bends over backwards to make major figures in politics happy" - LOTS of politicians have taken advantage of this in their advertising. Anecdotally, I believe I have seen it first hand, and I see it as "kissing politician's butts for more engagement".
I think it's wrong - I think they should hold every advertiser to the same standards regardless if it's political or not. I see "newsworthiness" as a cop-out to say "we'll keep it up if we decide to keep it up". It puts FB in a scary position of being the thought police, and I just don't like that.
I'm not taking a side - please don't get my HN account deleted.
That would be utterly terrifying if Facebook said their policy was to take down political/campaign ads which contain "misinformation". Ripe for abuse.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/9/20906612/t...
I think it was my VPN. I just wanted to thank somebody for a helpful tweet
A clickbaity video "what the government is trying to hide" that contains pro-gov messages ("they've developed an app for personal finance management and are giving villages more opportunities", "they are helping the food industry") posted under those hashtags. Is that attempting to influence people that are looking up those hashtags (presumably expecting to find info on "the genocide"), or is that just to add noise to the hashtag?
It looks too high quality for just noise (so it's probably too expensive to produce a lot of that content), but on the other hand, I can't imagine someone saying "woah, there's a genocide going on in west papua? I better check twitter. Ah, here's a video ... mhh, they are deploying an app to help people with finances and there's something about the food industry? I'm now convinced there is no genocide". Like, is that some "if only people knew about our app, they wouldn't mind the crimes" thinking? Does that work?
Go on. They’ve refused your removal request with appropriate ID sent to their office, or?
I have sent my email address to their support system while being logged in and they did confirm it. So yes. And they have not even responded so clearly in contravention with GDPR.
> Go on.
With?
sudo twint -u bellanow1 –media -o papuabots1 –csv
> If you used sudo because you installed the package "system wide", try with "pip3 install --user twint" which will install twint in your home directory, and so you'll not be asked to use sudo
BTW the propaganda team behind this bot network has also been very active on reddit.
That is not the case. It sounds like the consensus is that pro-Russian troops brought a missile over from Russia, and shot down MH17.
What the Dutch parliament is proposing an investigation into, is whether Ukraine should have officially shut down its airspace.
Implying that Ukraine is at fault for shooting down an airliner because they did not shut down the airspace seems like blaming someone for being raped and shot because they didn't lock their front door, which is patently absurd.