I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. They are contributing both to group psychosis and the destruction of democracy through the spread of disinformation.
I'd suppose that they cannot really tell the difference between a bot and a real person, at least at scale.
I follow a few non-English speaking hashtags that act as local news sources for their areas. These hashtags have been active for a few years. Though Twitter has a lot of policies for English twitter, these languages really have no policies. By that I mean they live-stream executions, have drug sales, solicit sex-work, etc. Illegal isn't really a thing in these places to begin with. That said, these cases are somewhat rare and these hashtags are mostly used as genuine news sources. Granted, these are 'edge case' languages, but still, it's a free for all that Twitter doesn't care to dive into.
Based on the 'extreme' cases and their long lived incoherence to Twitter policy, it's not hard to conclude that Twitter really does not care to enforce policies unless forced to.
[0] https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg [1] https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/your-twitter-account-has-be...
The point of these bots is to build up an account with credible behavior that you can use to make money (usually by scamming advertisers into buying paid tweets/followers, or by directly promoting scam products).
Political twitter is so formulaic and high volume that bot/sweatshop posts don't seem out of place compared to the usual traffic from real accounts.
If there were no politics on twitter they'd just send formulaic messages about pop culture or sports or something.
This is completely false. A cursory search will yield results explaining Russia's massive effort on social media (and Twitter in particular) to interfere in the election.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-elec...
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Ru...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a...
etc....
> Through our supplemental analysis, we have identified 13,512 additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period, representing approximately two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.
If that small of an effort can make that much of an impact on the core democratic process, then we need to consider a significant scale back of XXI century globalism to allow for second half of XX century democracy to survive. Not a popular opinion on a tech forum, where more users means more money, and there are always significantly more users outside one's national boundaries. Sigh.
The comparison of "50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content" to "the total accounts on Twitter at the time" makes no sense at all. It seems intended to mislead.
It would be more informative to know how many total accounts tweeted about the election, or how many politically active twitter accounts that bot army reached.
And in general, the election was decided by ~80,000 people [1]. To think that ~50,000 bots spamming Twitter with non-stop propaganda had no impact on that is extremely naive (especially when you consider that Twitter was just one piece in the overall interference).
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/do...
In practice, there is a negligible probability that posting a tweet from a random bot will end up in the feeds for a target demographic. The feed space of the 80k people WP claims decide the election is finite, and it costs significantly more money to reach them than setting up small scale botnets. Ultimately, Twitter is in control of the feeds, and it's their business model to happily direct any message from the highest bidder to the critical demographic, regardless of who or where the highest bidder is.
The hysteria over Russia as an excuse to ignore the concerns of Americans who support populist positions is pretty transparent at this point.
You're calling it "hysteria" to dismiss facts you don't like. "The Russian Hoax!", where have I heard that before?
But, to your second point, I completely agree that many on the left want to pretend it was _mostly_ because of foreign interference. I tend to think that had a pretty small impact, and the fact you pointed out is probably much more consequential: Americans are more receptive to a populist message than people think.
And you can recognize the trolls when one says/writes "Left" in the most capitalistic country on this planet. And by "Left" they mean the very minimal/basic social services, such as don't let people lose two legs but only one because the $1k insurance per month doesn't cover that. I wonder how failed is the USA when countries in EU have achieved that with $100 contributions per month. Miracle!!!
Americans live with the dream that they are all billionaire but somebody is blocking them (the commies, the socialists, the left, the Cubans, the anarchists, and in general "they" some without ID).
Russia always plays the looooong game, they try and succeed to sabotage a little bit every step of the way (antivaxers, interference with elections, oil price), you name it, they are in it.
I think I vented/ranted enough. I sometimes feel sorry for the 30-40% of USA citizens, they are confused and haven't read more than 10 books in their lives.. it's a potty for such a prosperous coubtry to suffer like this.
This isn't really true. You're going to get medical help with an urgent medical issue in any developed country, even if you don't have a penny to your name. Doctors/hospitals cannot turn you away for not having money.
There are also very few countries in the EU where insurance payments are $100. The only country I could think of would be Bulgaria and that's because they're the poorest EU country. Virtually everywhere else you're going to pay more than that and everybody has to pay it, including the poor. Depending on the country, if you don't pay that then you won't get medical care (other than the urgent kind) in those countries either.
The US has a lousy health insurance system. The cost is too high, insurance paperwork is ridiculous, and insurance doesn't always even cover you. But healthcare really isn't as amazing in most EU countries as you want to think. Many of them have similar problems.
That's a lot different from the USA, where tens of thousands of people die from lack of health insurance, and probably hundreds of thousands are bankrupted by the healthcare they get.
A quarter or more Americans put off seeking medical treatment because of the cost. By the time they seek treatment, it may be too late. I'm reminded of a carpenter who won $1 million and said he could finally go to see a doctor. He died a few weeks later from cancer.
A lot of Americans are one accident or illness away from financial ruin and poverty.
For all their problems, Europeans are a lot better off than this.
More than 26 000 Americans die each year because of lack of health insurance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2323087/
New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
The Americans dying because they can't afford medical care https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he...
More Americans Delaying Medical Treatment Due to Cost https://news.gallup.com/poll/269138/americans-delaying-medic...
Medical Bankruptcy: Still Common Despite the Affordable Care Act https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.3049...
Medical Bankruptcy Is Killing The American Middle Class https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/medical-bankruptcy-killing-a...
New York carpenter who won $1 million lottery prize dies of stage-4 cancer weeks later https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/02/02/lottery...
N.Y. man dies from cancer 3 weeks after winning $1M lottery https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...
Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick to optimize the latter rather than the former.
If the growth is largely from bots, then perhaps Elliot Management is right even if you disagree with the business dealings.
Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this (hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
_maybe_ that would put some pressure on Twitter?
https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/botslayer
https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.pdf
https://sparktoro.com/tools/sparkscoreI also wonder whether the mitigation strategy for this type of societal threat is not to be found via strictly technological means anyway since the line between bot and human actor appears to be blurring more and more as time passes and technology improves (artificial face generation, improved NLP, statistically-informed posting and behavioral modeling, etc.). Imagine how complicated the process of discriminating between automated and human-controlled accounts might become in ten or twenty years from now; it seems as though there will have to be some sort of public education component to reduce the credulity of human users in online environments - an adjustment of weights in the network of information sources among the general population, if you will, in a direction that de-emphasizes online content.
If it doesn't impact shareholders' profits, it goes to the bottom of the to-do list.