Analysis of 200M tweets discussing coronavirus suggests 45%-60% come from bots

I don't know if Twitter has bots or how they tilt. What I do know is post-coronavirus commerical "news" outlets have lost my trust, as has much of the political establishment, red or blue.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-dis...

I imagine they're going to publish the research, but it doesn't look like they have yet.

...though some of their methods are described.

It’s a lot harder problem then it might sound on the surface. And realize if you find bots 100%, they will change for round 2 and the game starts over.

a) it was a non profit and

b) people didn’t cry “censorship!” every time they do anything to curb abuse and

c) it would be ok to deactivate a % of real users by accident (these researchers can’t tell who’s a bot vs who’s an actual user _for sure_)

It’s not an easy problem.

(I'll add the link if I can find it, but a recent example pretty much boiled down to "actually, these accounts giving many repeated identical replies have totally normal timelines otherwise. And it turns out, many identical replies in short time shows someone knows about copy-and-paste, not that they're a bot")

It's not in their best interest to wipe out the bots at any large scale. Sure, the occasional cleanup or purge as a token effort or to get the most egregious stuff but remove them all? Nope.

The difference in my perception is that the presence of the bots and bad actors on Twitter that come to the attention of reporting like this increases engagement and views, and thus top line revenue.

This isn’t saying “bots count as views, so we get more ad dollars”. It’s that bots and bad actors promote topics and conversations that bring more real users to the platform, and increase the session duration for new and existing users.

I would imagine that Twitter sees spam bots and purveyors of illegal content as unwelcome and probably has an engineering team that dispatches those accounts quickly. But whether deliberately or unconsciously, they probably don’t apply the same rigor to accounts that break the TOS but manage to drive the top line up.

I’d love to hear from an engineer from Twitter who works in this space.

Kidding, but there's a real point. 40% of tweets are from bots? OK, how many "studies" are from bots? (I believe that's in the neighborhood of Drybones' point.) But how many comments responding to the studies are from bots?

Way back in the day, I remember reading the Cluetrain Manifesto. It said that corporate-speak sounded literally inhuman. Well, the bots have gotten better over the years. But also, it seems to me that the humans have gotten worse. They are less able to say "Wait, that doesn't make sense." They are even less able to say "Wait, that doesn't sound like the way humans talk." And that's bad. As the bots get better, the humans need to be developing better filters, not regressing.

That condition is the key. Are you sure they can do that? It’s very tough to do with certainty.

Perhaps we should all step back and evaluate whether our internal thought processes are being shaped by bad actors via an appeal to our innate tribalism? Notice how easily you fall into the script: 1) it’s the other team only 2) my team should do something to fight back 3) maybe it’s sponsored by a foreign state.

If you primarily think one side is crafting ridiculously bad content and it’s therefore a misinformation campaign from a foreign state, I think it’s wise to consider how much of that is personal bias and if you’re perhaps “giving a pass” to stupid content that at least aligns with your views.

“Well, they meant well, so it’s probably just a right-minded American who made a simple off-by-factor-of-a-million arithmetic error and no one spent 50ms doing a basic sanity check. No one’s perfect.”

Or “Look, maybe I think Obama did an Ok job, but I saw all that content about he wasn’t born here, and there has to be something to it if so many people are talking about it. The government hides things; the truth is out there, ya know? Oh, and Epstein didn’t kill himself.”

Through there are many countries in which this can be indeed done reliably sand effectively.

Through the main problem is still this networks are global, so bots will just register with origins where IDs can be easily faked/stolen etc.

But it might still help a lot for local discussions if you would make it clearly visible if a person had a no or a non local real person identification.

If such a system is done cleverly it could also help law enforcement while it still upholds privacy. Through it's will always be someway prone to abuse by police and similar if not done perfectly transparent but you can be sure that certain lobbies will invest insane amounts of money into making it non transparent over time. Which makes such systems potential dangerous to have.

Not sure if you’re joking, but this would be a completely awful privacy situation. Why would you ever give your social security number to a social media site?

https://xkcd.com/2305/

As for twitter bots, I have one running by ifttt, another by script, and three more in planning. I welcome the human/bot accounts being made clear.