Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

The bot panic is IMHO overblown.

This comment is however NOT a defense of bots. I think bot detection and deletion of bot accounts would be a good thing.

But the concern seems out of proportion.

Society is full of disingenuous message amplification systems: a large subset of advertising (TV, magazine, billboards, direct marketing, etc), biased news media, spam, and now twitter bots.

Twitter bots are a bit worse than the others because we can no longer tell what opinions are actually popular and which ones are manipulated... via Twitter. But the ability to make such judgements via Twitter has only been with us since 2006. The basic problem is not a novel one.

The bot problem cuts both ways because people will overly compensate. I've been accused of being a bot, signalling to everyone that it's perfectly OK to ignore the content of my argument. I fear many other right-leaning people are getting the same treatment. This treatment further divides society (actual bots do too, which I am NOT defending; I'm just showing that the issue cuts both ways). Other commenters in this thread have been flagged and their comments are dead apparently because (if you believe surrounding comments) they are seen as a bot.

The day that Twitter becomes a voting platform, or voting platforms allow bots... that is the day that I will panic about bots.

All that being said, carry on. Let's squash the bot problem. Let's also fix advertising. Let's also fix news media bias. And spam.

You say that the problem is overblown but then go on to talk about the dangerous effects the problem has on discourse. Not only are the bots spewing out propaganda, but as you say they destroy the trust we have in each other which further builds the mindset of "Anything I believe in is true and anything else must be bots". In my mind this makes the bot problem very bad.

The problem is made even worse when you have non bot accounts that spam out low effort bad faith posts like "If climate change is real then explain x". It takes 2 seconds to post that but 10 minutes to properly reply. And when you look in to the post history of these accounts you can see they have been given the same answer repeatedly but ignore it because their objective is not to have a discussion or to learn, their objective is to waste peoples time and create doubt.

Someone just has to put 10 minutes in, the rest is copy paste.

Then a casual observer will see two sides apparently debating an issue, and infer a false equivalency. The media is especially guilty of assuming that people who disagree with equal passion must be equally correct. I dont think anyone would claim that bots are improving the quality of discourse.

I don't think it's at all possible to have something resembling a discourse on Twitter.

Or maybe they've never gotten what they feel to be an acceptable or compelling answer.

There never will be an acceptable or compelling answer to these people though. They refuse to accept new information or anything that is different to the talking point they have latched on to. Its especially true for bad news, we all want climate change to be a hoax, its much more convenient to believe this than to accept reality.

It's ironic that it's often the lone opposing voice that is accused of being a bot. Claiming bots is a valid argument against votes, or against a mass of similar comments and opinions. Claiming bots is not a valid argument against the logic of a single comment or opinion. Yet too often it is the lone contrary opinion, often with supporting evidence and logic (since the person is aware they have a contrary opinion), that is dismissed as simply being a bot.

If a solid logical argument comes from a bot it is still a solid logical argument.

The difference I see between Twitter bots and the other classical examples you mentioned is that anyone and their grandmother can make a destructive Twitter bot on a given day, with comparably little effort, negligible expenses, high anonymity, and hardly any traceability. Which I mean is basically the foundation of Twitter: it's based on the premise that everyone's speech should have worldwide reach with absolutely minimal effort. Whether the larger picture is a good thing or a bad thing, it does mean the bot problem is very much a novel problem and you can't just pretend is similar to the classical ones and deal with it the same way.

Maybe it's because I don't use Twitter, but I don't see much bot panic personally. This article certainly doesn't have anything to do with panic, it's just an investigation of one example.

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