The Yang Gang and Its Bots
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I have been following this campaign since a few months, and I can attest that it has pulled in a large number of voters who were not politically inclined, the members are very passionate, and also that Yang Gang is quite cliquey and live in an echo chamber. Given those facts, I won't be surprised if those accounts were mostly real people.
Full disclosure: I like Yang.
If that sentence is correct, you’re unlikely going to get flagged by the bot.
The sad truth is that the vast majority of bots are extremely unsophisticated, they don't even try to hide their IP address through a proxy server, and basic tools like Google Analytics can identify this. In Google Analytics, just find the "Network" section, and see how much of your traffic is from "amazon web services", and just block all of it.
It may not block sophisticated scrapers, and it could potentially harm legitimate users (e.g., amazon based VPN services), but it's amazing how much "bot" traffic is identifiable.
The only real bot traffic that's hard to identify are actual people with machines that have been compromised.
Yang: 95%; 1,061,978 Real 48,878 Fake
Bernie: 69%; 7,052,953 Real 3,124,469 Fake
Warren: 84%; 2,966,118 Real 560,776 Fake
Buttigieg: 93%; 1,481,598 Real 102,999 Fake
Biden: 84%; 3,375,998 Real 619,266 Fake
Trump: 79%; 56,463,132 Real 14,292,673 Fake
@berniesanders: 69% | 7,052,953 Real | 3,124,469 Fake
@sensanders: 74% | 6,480,666 Real | 2,171,758 Fake
@senwarren: 68% | 3,668,103 Real | 1,694,620 Fake
@ewarren: 84% | 2,966,118 Real | 560,776 Fake
So cumulatively the scores are more like:
Bernie: 71% Total non-fake followers: 8,237,392
Warren: 79% Total non-fake followers: 4,939,601
At the end of the day the percentage/ratio of real to fake doesn't matter. What matters is the REAL people following a candidate, Besides trump, Bernie beats all others.
Disclaimer: My account looks like a Bernie Bot, but my followers real % is 85 which actually surprised me lol. I'd support Yang or Tulsi. Probably not anybody else running. I'm an independent, and align more with leftist/socialist libertarianism (not the GOP think-tank ran version of American libertarianism). I don't just vote for any 'blue' because they're blue. I don't do party politics.
If we trust twitter audit over her (which tbf I don't see any good reason to trust one over another) then her piece seems at best naive and at worse a hit piece.
Knowing Yang Gang, and knowing that there's a lot of people turning from Trump (they literally pride themselves on it [0,1,2,3,4], I can go on pretty easily with a lot like [2]), it makes me inclined to believe that the analysis is naive (I'm hesitant to call this a hit piece) because she mentioned the suspicion of MAGA and YG. MAGA and YG connections makes a lot of sense if you just checked out the subreddit for ten minutes.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/et3v4z/...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/et24dh/...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/ekhp4o/...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/epq2dd/...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/cn5vsl/...
I had the same reaction. I follow all of the candidates on twitter. Most of the campaigns are periodic quite frankly boring posts by the candidates. Yang lets his gang do most of the tweeting and he retweets their posts. In person he does the same thing. There is a lot of audience participation during his speeches. This makes his campaign more lively.
The reason why I doubt they are bots is that the tweets are intelligent. About a week ago I tweeted something about Yang that was factually incorrect. Someone tweeted back within minutes and very politely corrected what I said. We had a few tweet exchanges then someone else jumped in and said that my confusion was something that they would take back to the campaign. A few days later Yang mentioned my confusion in one of his interviews. I am not exactly sure if this was a coincidence...
Multiple accounts with the same name, image, and profile, coupled with radical changes in the types of content posted, and also with superhuman (clearly automated) posting rates? What more evidence do you need?
HN tends to be a more technical place. So when we have two competing narratives and analyses people become suspicious (high number or retweets, high number of likes). When one analysis basically characterizes bots similarly to how the president tweets, people get suspicious. When one analysis characterizes bots as having expected behavior of users (Yangers having connections to MAGA, which was a MAJOR part of her analysis), people become suspicious. When the author says that they only identified 3 bots from Trump's twitter account, one becomes suspicious. When you link to Mother Jones as your coup de ta and the article doesn't characterize your link's words, people become suspicious.
So forgive me if I personally need more evidence.
Like, 'like like'? Or just 'like'?
There are a lot of people there that created Twitter accounts just to follow Yang and participate in those polls about who is more popular. So when the author mentions the creation of new accounts when Yang started, it actually doesn't surprise me. The campaign is very technocentric after all. Also, these people (a lot of them "true believers" types) do post A LOT on Twitter and get involved in any mention of Yang (go check any YouTube video about Yang). You have to "yang" everyone that you can. It is a really weird community to be honest. But one where they are actively telling one another to create social media accounts to promote Yang. What this post really tells me is that it is hard to distinguish real people from bots. Here's a post even about YouTube comments[1].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/esycun/...
Maybe it's not the same, but those folks were all in on the Paul Train (or whatever they called it). They were eggcited!
There is too little detail of methodology in this article to take it too seriously, but still interesting.
Ha! Never heard that one. It is by far more clever than any of the half-dozen or so that I did.
One key thought experiment I like to do is to project out a behavior pattern for all people and then asking whether that would be a positive or negative for yourself and society. If everyone were to campaign and push for the ideas they care about, I do believe that would result in a more informed and better society. Through the marketplace of ideas, we can fight through the differences and hopefully create better policy and have better leaders execute on our future.
I think for a lot of people, taking action to affect change for the community/society you live in is very natural. On a small scale that can be something like running for class president or joining your HOA. At a larger scale, politics is where change happens.
If you believe in a set of principles, it is sometimes worth your personal time, effort, and money to affect change. Hopefully you can see that from their perspective they are about their own future and this is the most effective way to impact that prospective future.
I also think politics (I'm not sure if it has always been that way, but I don't remember it like this when I was younger) has a lot of parallels to religion and that similarity is growing. I do actually believe this is rooted in the growing partisanship. That political answers are not "best solution vs a different solution" but "good vs evil". Partisanism relies on good vs evil. There's a John Cleese skit about extremism that always makes me laugh[0].
That's bound to stir up some passion on both sides, being that the stakes are rather high.
He became a "bitcoin zealot" when that was popular, he became a AI fearmongerer, now he's a Trumpian provocateur. There is no cohesion between any of these identities other than the fact that they are reflections of what's popular at any one point. To me it's facade he's constantly draping over himself but to him that is identity.
I think humans are evolutionarily tribal and naturally some members are going to be more dogmatic than others. Myself not exhibiting that behavior, it's somewhat odd to observe from the outside.
For me it’s because I see massive potential in UBI to transform society.
So it’s easy to understand there are others who are uniquely attracted to his campaign and want to do whatever they can to help.
After a couple very negative experiences with the Yang Gang, where anything less than instant adulation must mean you're anti-Yang, I'm anti-Yang.
Hopefully over time he can earn back your trust.
Her people were icing on the cake.
If nobody existed but a Yang Gang member and Bernie - could they really admit he wasn't authentic and wanted to make the world better?
Is he corrupt?
Is he in this for himself?
To enrich his businesses per se?
Sell more books?
Has he changed his message to win? Or is he consistent?
I mean look at the candidate. Sure the community can get toxic like a rivalry highscool football game with pranks and shit, but in the end. Are the players really evil, or do their fans just go way out of proportions and get way too overly excited and/or angry when things don't go their way?
Serious question, why is this a metric?
Changing your mind should be a good thing. I find this odd coming from a tech and more science oriented website. I'm not saying that we should just encourage people to change on a whim but changing positions because 1) you're presented with new evidence and/or 2) the people you are representing have changed positions, this should be respected. There's a difference between changing positions and feigning belief. It is especially bad if you feign a position and work against that position (I can respect you if you even if disagree with a position but work for it because your constituents hold said belief). #1 is obvious why it is good (because we're human and fuck up). #2 is good because you're adapting to what those that you represent believe.
I for one DO NOT want a president that is going to double down on bad beliefs and not change beliefs as either culture changes (e.g. Obama changed positions with gay marriage as the US culture changed) or because they are presented with new evidence. These things should be regarded as a good trait.
tldr: why is consistency such a highly regarded metric?
It's not about consistency, it's about being right consistently. Unfortunately, most decisions whether made by an individual, CEO, or politician have to be made with imperfect information. The data just isn't there to do a full analysis. In data's absence, when you need to make a decision, you rely on instinct and foundational principles.
Of course, when the data becomes available you can adjust, as anyone should. But when you have good enough instincts or principles, you can operate effectively without good data, and that makes for a good leader.
Does that even exist? We're not talking about something that can be scientifically modeled here. There's always going to be a "better" answer post hoc. Like you're suggesting. So it seems like a weird metric still. I think you're agreeing too. But it takes more critical thinking to judge someone on the decisions they made given the data available to them vs judging them based on decisions made from a post hoc analysis. The latter is always easier, you have (at least partially) the answer in front of you.
For me personally, Yang is the first political candidate who sees and reasons about the world in a similar way to myself. He's a systems thinker. Everything in society is connected and to correctly address issues you have to understand how one component will influence another. That is very exciting for me!
He has a lot of policies, i don't agree with all of them but i'm a lot more aligned with him than any other candidate. Left or right.
A. we're not all that bad.
B. You can't blame us for what gets banned by mods of a reddit when they use bots to do so.
C. Many of us would support Yang if he were on top or higher than Bernie in polls. But we want a chance at winning, and Bernie has a strong grassroots.
D. Whether the online real/fake people on reddit/twitter are 'toxic' in your opinion doesn't even matter isn't relative because THEY aren't Bernie. They could even be bots or trolls. Listen to the candidate and make your decision from that, whether they're a good or bad person.
Well, Bernie's subreddit literally bans every single person who makes a post containing the word "Yang". They even remove him from the poll results. Certainly doesn't give any socialist dictatorship vibes (that, and his support of Venezuela).
Do please remember that the subreddit is not a full expression of Yang's support, as in it is biased towards people who are active on Reddit. The number of anti-bernie posts on there are indeed very annoying, and the quality has indeed gone downhill as the number of subscribers has increased (which is a very common, often repeated pattern, e.g. eternal september)
> C. Many of us would support Yang if he were on top or higher than Bernie in polls. But we want a chance at winning, and Bernie has a strong grassroots.
This is exactly why we need Ranked Choice Voting (or another similar non-FPTP system like Approval Voting), so you can actually vote your true preference. An alternative voting system is a concept that I've personally supported for many years and is one of Andrew Yang's policies: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/rankedchoice/ which is one of the reason's that I support him.
> All of them had bot activity of some kind. Given enough time to collect the data, bot networks would eventually appear for all of them.
I think the analysis could be very interesting but they're injecting too much personal spin on the motivations of everyone involved. Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too?
I think it would be interesting to study bots and how they intersect with media and politics in a less biased manner.
But yeah I did get the same tinge of condescension about the “sad” and “lonely” teenager Mike because he works at Taco Bell, doesn’t want to go into $100k worth of debt going to college and is following bots from campaigns she doesn’t agree with.
> He seemed lonely. Eager to please. His last video blog he announced he wasn’t going to college after all…
Like you said, what if he followed Bloomberg bots, would he be described as “sad” too.
However at the same I would have to concede that writing an unbiased article about political bots in this day and age is probably not gonna happen, either.
Which party do you think Yang is running for?
Anyway, the article was clearly describing as "sad" that the teenager is trying to build an online following but his "following" is just bots using him to look less like bots.
It doesn’t look good to Democrats to see memes for Yang or back to Trump so I cannot be cynical here.
edit: Because it's a bad look with Democrats to have a lot of right leaning support I take the MAGA supporters at their word. Particularly because I'm a Yang supporter and became politically disengaged after supporting Bush in my first election cycle.
Unfortunately I think I'm being mis-read and unfortunately I am blind to why. ...it happens
If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior. Activities the author describes as bot-like to me seem like activities a noob on twitter would engage in.
Twitter itself does a lot to self-create these node clusters, with a circle jerk of recommended followers based on your activity. If you have a bunch of twitter noobs, all liking and retweeting Yang and his surrogates, they will inevitably get clustered together via twitter's own algorithms.
I think it's a mistake to assume that politically disengaged folks who would like to stay anonymous online, and are only joining a social media platform to promote their candidate or two, would behave like "real" users.
I say this as someone who converted an old twitter account from 2011 I used when I was a teenager for spam purposes, to become a Yang account. I'm sure I'm considered a bot by the author's software.
To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate. It is definitely an agenda that is pushed. Lots of new Twitter accounts that are pro Yang is not surprising if you visit the subreddit. It also shouldn't be surprising that these accounts would be associated with MAGA bots and supporters. After all, Andrew is targeting the same demographic as Trump. There's several posts a day on the yang subreddit about ex-Trump supporters turning.
All of this makes me think that it is very hard to distinguish bots from real people who are excited by the campaign.
So I fully agree with this
> I think it's a mistake to assume that politically disengaged folks who would like to stay anonymous online, and are only joining a social media platform to promote their candidate or two, would behave like "real" users.
Not only that, Yang ran a couple of UBI-themed contests offering a chance to win money for following and retweeting him. What better use is there for acquiring an army of fake accounts?
Regardless of the numbers, the stress it’s placing on discourse is devastating, and there seem to be few serious, market-driven solutions to this problem.
The growth-at-all-costs mentality has put companies like Twitter in a position where they must choose between profits and responsible community development and moderation. It’s clear which path they’ve chosen.
If you're truly looking to support him this probably isn't a good way to help his case.
It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills.
The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those who still can't accept that the US elected the current president, is that things like Twitter bots and fake Facebook ads are just sideshows.
Given the crude tactics outlined in this article, with accounts making 400 tweets per day in regular intervals, duplicate accounts of the same alleged person and so on I think it's pretty bad that platforms like Twitter do not pursue the issue much more agressively.
As for the article, I'll address it in another comment.
His support is consistently enough nonzero across multiple polls that you can say he has some support, but it's often within the margin of error of zero on individual polls. He's not gaining enough to have a welk's chance in a supernova of winning.
On the other hand, he generally leads NY Times-endorsed Klobuchar (and yet, pollsters are less likely to include him in their polls), so there's that.
Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively.
Paying attention to individual polls produces more noise than useful information; you get more value (though less cherry-picking opportunities) from a poll aggregator like 538s.
But if you want to play that game, the most recent national primary poll I can find that includes Yang has him at 3%, the best recent polling was at 5% in a couple of polls about two weeks ago. [0] The only 8% for him I can find is a poll of voters under 30. [1]
> Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively.
No, Bloomberg—who started much later and actually is polling in the neighborhood of 8% now—is gaining massively. Yang's been bouncing around between 2-5% with no real trend since October; he's not gaining or losing anything that isn't small enough to be obscured by noise.
[0] see the list of polls here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary...
[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-da...
Bloomberg is also at over 3x Yang's support in the Ipsos poll that covers the same time as that Emerson poll, and ahead of Yang by a similar amount in most othere recent polls that are within a couple days of that Emerson poll.
Now, it could be that the Emerson poll is showing a real phenomenon that appeared suddenly and that Ipsos missed, but its vastly more likely that its just a statistical outlier blip.
Both of those claims are simple. Either the election was a farce, or nothing is wrong and all the criticism is fearmongering. That kind of simplicity feels good.
It doesn't feel as good to say, "Trump won in part because the system was hacked, but if a bunch of people hadn't also genuinely wanted him, hacking the system would not have been enough to make him win."
People are hardwired to look for clear, easy-to-reason-about patterns or rules that they can just universally apply to every situation. Real patterns like that are rare, usually uncommon events have multiple causes. Usually reality is more complicated than we expect.
I don't think that bots/plants are as big of an issue as people say. I certainly don't think they're an existential threat to democracy. I also don't think we should ignore them, I do think they have an impact. They're one element of many that can influence an election.
Read between the lines.
Why? When people measure how ads perform, the null hypothesis is that the ad has no effect on the behavior of the viewer. Bots are sort of like ads that look like native content.
That being said, I don't think a single data point (Yang) is enough to be conclusive, but it does change my beliefs a little bit on the effectiveness of bots.
Instead, we should consider the fact that all these bots make a lot of information noise and that's a problem to how we view candidates. With enough bots spamming fake articles or posting links that favor the candidate/smear his opponents, they muddy the waters and make it harder to find real information. This alone won't win anybody elections but it brings prominence to smaller candidates, makes it harder to find legitimate dirt on others (bring certain links as evidence and people dismiss them, saying 'Oh, those are part of the bot campaign'), and makes any political discussion on Twitter a horrible idea. (Whether or not I think Twitter is already a horrible place for political discussion is another matter entirely.)
This is not logical. "This kind of thing poisons the political process" does not come close to implying 'any candidate who engages in this kind of thing is likely to become wildly popular'. That would be an obviously crazy position, and refuting it is only useful as a way to avoid engaging with non-strawmanned concerns about social media manipulation.
Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit.
"Struggling" is not accurate.
Also polls are politicized now.
He's been bouncing around between 2-5% in the polls since October; he's not steadily rising, he's stuck in one place.
> Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit.
A number of the candidates that have dropped out have been consistently polling above Yang. They haven't dropped out sooner because they were doing worse, they've dropped out sooner because they have a different calculus about the value of staying in the race.
Yang isn't still going strong, he's still stuck in neutral.
About twitter and Yang, I created a twitter account just to follow him. Did not create any bot. And I also donated to his campaign multiple times. And I'm over 40 yrs old.
The establishment is running through mental gymnastic excercise to rationalize these results. Thus them calling all supporters bots
In what? His polling position has been bouncing around within the margin of error with no progress for months.
Yang's got some good ideas, and he's certainly one of the most interesting candidates of the cycle. But he's got no momentum.
Fundraising is just a means to get money to spend (often, ineffectively) building/maintaining support. If you are raising and spending more money and not moving the needle in the polls, that's not progress.
> Others dropping out would count as progress too I guess.
No, if the field is narrowing and you aren't getting any of the support (and your remaining competitors are) that's also the opposite of progress.
> Although polling is still in single digit but 5-6% is certainly progress from 2-3%.
It would be, if he was consistently polling at the former and previously polling at the latter. But that's not what's happened to Yang. His national polling in January has ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in December ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in November ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in October ranged from 2-5%. And the margin of error on most of the polls is in the neighborhood of ±5%.
Yes, there's now been published a single poll which has him outside the MoE of zero. (Not outside the MoE of his polling average for any month since October, though, and statistically you'd expect with the number of polls at least one with him at 8% if he was just hovering at 3.5% for this long.)
While that's a landmark, I guess, it's a thin reed to ground a conclusion of any, much less rapid or exponential, progress.
If an army of Twitter bots could change voter's minds, why is it suddenly an illegitimate tactic? How is it different than any other form of political speech? Are politicians and political campaigns only dishonest when presented through new mediums?
Is this a problem with Twitter, free speech or just a timeless flaw within democracy which has been known since antiquity?
I would suggest that it is the latter. Misunderstanding the underlying principles results in the alarmist blaming of social media. This is nothing new, aside from a new opportunity to opine for regulation.
Yang has gone from 0 to 1 and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. All these articles are people who have a distorted views of reality and chalk up his support as bots in order to fit their world view. The most likely reason from my observation is bias against Asian American men in leadership positions.
Yang hasn't gone anywhere, he's been bouncing around in the same range for months with no systematic progress.
> and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer.
If he did something radical like doubling his support in Iowa in the, what, 10 days remaining, and the sources of support he gained were optimally distributed for him to move up positions, that would still only get him to fifth from his current sixth in Iowa, and he'd only be a little over half the support of #4.
The thing with exponential growth is that by the time you realize it, it is too late
I agree that Yang's passionate supporters grew quickly, and part of this 'bots' narrative is due to cognitive dissonance. But the 'bot' narrative is also a tactic to discredit Yang and his supporters.
Bias against Asian men may play a role, but there is much more going on here. The leadership of the DNC do not like to see people like Yang gain too much momentum.
Simplest explanation is probably that they don't care about election outcome, they just want to leach off of whatever's hot at the moment.
On the other hand, if they banned an account and it turned out to be a real person, they could get some first amendment lawsuits.
I like a lot of Yang's proposals. I just wish the enthusiasm of his supporters could be a little more... judiciously focused?
Access to post on Twitter is not a 1st Amendment right!
It's an interesting argument regardless of what you believe, but certainly your first amendment rights don't currently extend to Twitter.
If so, it has no legal basis for many reasons, including Twitter's first amendment rights to choose what they show. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no...
Also, isn't the whole reason we're on HN the moderation?
I don't think that HN, nor the community at large does as much as say twitter or reddit to stifle opposing points of view. Relegating extremist to their own echo-chambers is a good way of proliferating their beliefs. Were their ideas exposed to the world where they would have to defend them, they may be dissuaded from holding such extreme beliefs, or a passerby may see the flaws in their argument.
I wanted to point out it would require radical changes to our current laws and maybe the Constitution. I wasn't sure if he was aware of that. (Stronger versions of this argument, including ones deployed by members of Congress, have said it described current law)
> Were their ideas exposed to the world where they would have to defend them, they may be dissuaded from holding such extreme beliefs, or a passerby may see the flaws in their argument.
This is a popular position in a popular argument, and it's been debated to death better than we can. Here's an summary I found useful https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-gl...
One interesting study mentioned in that summation found that temporary internet outages in Germany reduced hate crimes against refugees.
> This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in major Facebook and internet outages, which fully undo the correlation between social media and hate crime. We further find that the effect decreases with distracting news events; increases with user network interactions; and does not hold for posts unrelated to refugees. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online messages and violent crime.
Whether there's other criteria that qualifies me for attack, such as the retweeting in combination with following that person, I'm not sure as I haven't tested that.
Anyway if anyone hasn't 100% made up their mind on Yang maybe watch a few YouTube videos of him.
edit: spelling
Edit: I could see this kind of mistreatment causing an increase in general anti-establishment sentiment.
> It does make me more interested in hearing what Yang has to say because it seems honest and like a statement from someone who hasn't been doing political activism for years.
Lots of people suggest the Joe Rogan podcast [0], but that is old, things have changed in his campaign, and it is long. I rather like the Now This interview [1] (30 mins). Others like the Iowa Town Hall[2] (hour).
The reasons I personally like Yang are #1, climate (I'm a scientist myself and work in labs with many climate scientists. I don't think his plan is going to solve everything, but I like it more than the other candidates. It is clear to me he has talked to experts), #2 I think he's trying to answer an important question that I've been curious about for a long time "How do we transition into a post scarcity society". Or specifically "how do you transition into an economy where you do not need a large number of workers. What do you do if 10% of your population is unemployable, not because of lack of skills, but because lack of demand?" It is the reason I am interested in UBI in the first place (where I've read a lot about here on HN). So I rather like his talk about changing the rules of the economy and making them human-centric. I do personally see a drastically changing economy and society, and I think he is asking the right questions about it. I have also seen him change positions after talking to experts, which I think is an essential quality in a president (though I know changing positions on a topic is often seen as negative in a political climate).
If you do want to learn more about him I highly suggest posting in the subreddit [3]. It is __extremely__ active and people really do want to answer every question you might have. It is a welcoming community and I do think feels different from other political subreddits.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTsEzmFamZ8
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ct-lC8lGg
In short, It’s become a term du jour for compromising and silencing those with whom you disagree.
Source: I'm Yang Gang
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The very fact that people are questioning whether political support is real or not the significant problem.
Ardent non-supporter of UBI here! Not a bot!!
The nefarious issue with UBI is that it threatens our existing social safety nets. The social goal is not to give everyone a single basic income, it's to give everyone a single basic standard of living.
It's far more fair and moral to give folks access to basic standards of human decency (e.g., healthcare, education, housing, food, air), than writing them a check and letting them fend on their own. The moral underpinning of social safety nets is not to increase the total or average, but to increase the lowest.
I like the idea of ending the current welfare system because it makes the recipient feel 'less' because they're on 'state assistance' vs everyone gets 3k/month + 500 per dependent per month.
We'd need a different tax system though, and need maybe VAT to offset it a little. It would move everyone above poverty though so pretty much everyone could afford at least some level of taxes. It would also give job mobility and more ability to negotiate wages. Some would choose to stay home and join esports leagues, or start an arts career or go back to school, or start a business. Meaning less people would be required by labor, meaning supply/demand would be in worker's favor -- which would drive up wages.
I think there's definitely a place for UBI on the table, AS LONG as single-payer and free college ALSO exist - -and college debt forgiveness.
I agree that those basics that make up common humanity should be covered. But I differ on how to get there. UBI means writing a check to someone, and letting them spend it how they wish. They can spend it on food and healthcare, their startup, or alcohol and gambling.
But if the purpose is to set a minimum level human decency (food, housing, healthcare), then we should provide that level of decency, rather than writing a check and hoping people will use it wisely. If an entrepreneur takes their UBI check and rather than buying healthcare, puts it into a startup that eventually becomes big, that may be a better result for the overall economy, but we've still failed that person in providing a minimum level of humanity.
The moral purpose behind UBI is not to just write checks, it's to allow humans to retain their humanity. Providing solid public schools, healthcare, and basic housing better provide that minimum level of dignity than sending a person a check.
Who in America would not be better off with a guaranteed $36000/year income? If they have a spouse and two kids they'd make around $50k...and that's BEFORE they take up a full or part-time job.
All the solutions I see for UBI are short term. What I posted on Twitter was the idea of addressing it in the long term:
For each of the 3919528 babies born in the USA in 2019 ((11.979 babies born per 1000 people, in 2019; 327.2 million population), deposit $100k in a lower risk growth mutual fund. , at a cost of $391 billion. Do this for 50 years. When the first cohort of babies turns 50 they should have around $1m available for retirement. So will each year's cohort after them for the next 50 years. Much of that money will be passed on to a new generation, or go back to the government if they die without issue (and that money goes into a mutual fund whose interest goes to help pay for subsequent cohorts).
Yes, it won't touch the problem for 50 years (hence the need for social program reform now too), and it requires both political parties to agree to not dismantle it (like Soc Security was tampered with). But if so, the problem is solved after 50 years, for at least 50 years and hopefully longer.
Yang has one of the strongest audit scores with 95% of followers being real. Contrasted with Bernie Sanders at only 69%. https://www.twitteraudit.com/andrewyang | https://www.twitteraudit.com/berniesanders
While there may be a few bad actors, it is definitely not representative of those that engage with Yang and his campaign. It shows up on the ground as well where Yang's following shows up in biggest numbers.
At least in Iowa, there were hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that flew in to canvass in the snow, outnumbering most campaign ground forces. In San Francisco, weekly hangouts have been growing to 30 people, and volunteer events turn out 15+ people regularly. I believe this is nationwide as well, there aren't many campaigns that have been matching the grassroots volunteer forces.
The question is are these bad actors acting in support of Yang or to undermine Yang? If you were against Yang, imagine how easy it would be to set up bots to "support Yang" and then have fellow operatives/journalists who are against Yang write about Yang "bots". It's just as easy for Yang's detractors to set up bots as it is for his supporters.
There seems to be a concerted effort by certain operatives/journalists/etc to undermine certain political candidates by tainting them with "russian asset" or "bot" labels.
Without a doubt, there have been bot activity starting with obama/ron paul/etc in 2008 and everyone since in political life. If the author ( who also submitted her own article here ) wanted to find bots, there are far better candidates to focus on. Why the focus on Yang?
As with bots, journalists, media and everything, we have to understand the context and agenda.
Since the author also has an account here, I would love to know what her political leanings are and who she is supporting. Has she work for any political candidate before?
I think its likely that many are, but that there are also many passionate supporters of the other candidates who just lurk on Twitter without posting due to social norms about how often you should chime in and how forcefully. The social norms around Yang supporters on twitter have changed by bots posting often and loudly, breaking the bubble and giving permission to people to do it too. If you then turn the bots off, the YangGang effect would last. (I'm sure this applies to not just Yang...)
Yet.
“Each audit takes a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”
It seems that the service would determine a lot of plain lurker accounts as fake. (And I’m a lurker on Twitter who almost never tweets and has a really low followed/follower ratio, so I would probably get flagged as a bot. Actually I think Twitter flagged me as one before, because my account got suspended once even when I didn’t really post anything at all, and I heard someone being unable to see one of my comments) Most bots have probably evolved a lot from simply lurking and following, so I don’t think the service provides an accurate picture of bots on Twitter.
Then posters could limit conversations to those with >90% human score (with score going up when twitter has more certainty that you are a human) located in the US (for US political conversations), etc.
I'd certainly pay a few bucks to be verified and contribute much more often to conversations than I do now, as now it just seems like screaming into the bot void.
It’s not really the people that have homes that are at risk. It’s the people who are renters, and are under the whims of landlords raising the rents to match expensive mortgages.
There’s no mention from him, about socializing the cost of housing. This is the primary source of inequality.
I am not a fan of socializing anything, but it’s clear to see, that rampant capitalism has run amok, and distorted the housing cost for everyone.
Is his he expecting that people will take the $12,000/year UBI, and move out to podunk Iowa somewhere, and buy a small plot of land, and farm the earth and raise chickens to be self subsistent?
Like, what happens after you receive this monthly UBI check?
Clearly, this isn’t enough to pay the rent. Will these people work part time driving for Uber, or delivering for DoorDash?
It isn't well mentioned on his website[0], but he has talked about it in more details before (sorry, I forgot which videos he specifically addresses this in. There are a lot and they are long). But the tldr is he wants to do better zoning, encourage high rise apartments, and throw in government incentives for affordable housing. If you post this question in the subreddit I know it'll get answered quickly, with many links, and will likely be updated on the website (that's the usual pattern).
> Is his he expecting that people will take the $12,000/year UBI, and move out to podunk Iowa somewhere, and buy a small plot of land, and farm the earth and raise chickens to be self subsistent?
In part UBI, but in part he wants the IRS to refund some moving costs[1]
> that rampant capitalism has run amok,
This is actually at the forefront of his campaign: "Human Centered Capitalism"[2] That the rules need to be rewritten and we need to make the economy human centric, not money first.
> Clearly, [UBI] isn’t enough to pay the rent. Will these people work part time driving for Uber, or delivering for DoorDash?
There's no way you can pass a living wage UBI in this political climate. But $1k/mo does more than $15/hr (presuming hours are stagnant and you can get full time work. Most states already pay above federal minimum) and it is something that Republicans are on board with (because it simplifies welfare and enables more choice). I know it isn't a complete win, but it is an obtainable win. People are already asking how you pay for UBI, now imagine if he doubled the amount. Let's not let perfection get in the way of good. Think of it as a step in the right direction, not a full solution.
[0] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/zoning/
What is the moral basis for this? Pretty much every other U.S. right and rule is grounded on U.S. citizenship, not where you're currently residing. Basing rights on where you live (rather than citizenship) also leads to some weird results. If you deny expats some right because they don't live in the country, then shouldn't you grant non-citizens who are indeed living in the country those same rights? After all, the standard is where you live rather than citizenship.
Well, this is what Trump believes. A solid 30% of the U.S. stock market is owned by foreigners, and so when U.S. corporations used their Trump tax break to increase their market value, 30% of that effectively gave foreigners a bump.
His tax plan effectively increased taxes in expensive "blue" states and gave that money to foreign investors.
The us already taxes the entire planet via the dollar / banking system. So it’s more of a relabel than a new conquest of the world.
I'm a 42 year old programmer who has never voted before. I am voting for Yang because his policies are superior and the other candidates have outdated policies or worldviews.
I have contributed around $400 or $500 and if there is something we are "trying to trend" I will retweet it (even though I never really used Twitter before now).
By the way, Yang has received endorsements from people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dave Chappelle, Donald Glover, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, James Gunn.
Saying the campaign is driven by bots is an unsubstantiated smear.
The machine is showing it's rust more and more, and the more it flails the more credibility it loses.