Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dem_Boys | Hacker News Reader

Since the first day I meddled in creating online bots I've had the intuition that large scale manipulation was occurring. If a single developer can create a twitter bot in 4 hours that likes posts about a topic, then what could a large company, political party, or entire country do?

I've always thought "Well they're just manipulating online opinions" but the capital and blm riots have shown that online opinions can have real world impacts.

Family and friends often are distressed by the state of the world, where their view of the world is social media. But how much of social media is real? How many of the radical opinions expressed are made by real people? Of those real people, how many of them were influenced by bots or "computational propaganda"?

I believe that we, even really smart engineers, are easier to influence that we want to believe

View on HN

> But how much of social media is real?

One of the biggest problems with social media is the fact that social media companies are financially incentivized to keep the public at large from knowing. Twitter has long refused to answer exactly how many of its users are bots as a percentage of its user base, Facebook did the absolute bare minimum in cooperating with Senate Intelligence in 2017 relating to Russian propaganda, etc.

Kara Swisher said it best in an interview with Preet Bharara around the time of the Russian propaganda scandal: "The Russians didn't hack into Facebook and manipulate its servers. They were users of Facebook, they were users of Twitter. They used these platforms exactly the way they were designed to be used."

Yes exactly!

And as you pointed out, some "bad actors" are not even bots, they are real people working on behalf of some organization.

It would be nice if more people were aware that the hyperbolic content they see on social media is possibly(probably?) either not a real person's thoughts, or has been influenced by some disingenuous source

The problem is that many wouldn't believe it if they were told (i.e. "this is what big tech wants me to think"). This is essentially what happened when Facebook and Twitter informed users that had interacted with suspected propagandized content.

Particularly after this current purge, social media companies have lost most of their authoritative credibility. Combined with a political culture that embraces wild conspiracy theories, you'd just be adding fuel to the fire.

> ...even really smart engineers...

No, ESPECIALLY really smart engineers.

"Techies" have some of the most crippling blind-spots when it comes to political sensibility. Moreover, it's not just bots and computational propaganda that we need to worry about (though that is serious problem too). Propaganda is just as "real" regardless of whether it's computational and offered up by bots, or if it's a guy with a megaphone, or if it's a poster or newspaper article (like in the 1930's).

What really matters is the intention behind the propaganda and that's what needs to be uncovered and dealt with. Coming up with AI to deal with AI-backed disinformation campaigns can only ever be an infinite game of wack-a-mole, unless the root-causes are addressed. These are political problems and they require a political solution. Facebook and Google aren't going to be the hero here.

> Family and friends often are distressed by the state of the world

I see this a lot too, and I have seen it the other way around as well. Where people believe everything is either Armageddon or a non-issue. Ironically I think this effect is applied to itself. Are we distressed because we think our world-view is wrong so we seek to the extremes for validation?

I'm no expert but this is my opinion.

1. We are all products of our environment

2. The internet and social media is becoming a higher percentage of our environment every day

3. Large parts of the internet and social media makes money by occupying our attention

4. The best way(that we know of) to occupy our attention for long periods is through hyperbolic/enraging material

^^^ Doing this long enough leads to enraged/hyperbolic population and I don't know of a reasonable way to stop it :(

I read a quote once: "What I eat becomes my body. What I read becomes my mind." (I would give credit where due, but I can't find the attribution at the moment.)

Social media becoming a higher percentage of our environment means that it becomes a higher percentage of our reading. That means it becomes a higher percentage of our mind. That's... rather disturbing.

i would disagree with #1, we are products of our curation and observation of information that is coming in forms of feelings or outer causes. you can be in a bad environment but still curate where do you put your attention by explicitly acknowledging what subjective values do you carry during your lifetime.

as above, curation is the main skill of the future, you can use youtube to watch stupid cat videos or to watch self development content, it is up to the viewer. if you are willing to read lies, you deserve to be deceived.

with the current abundance of information and possibilities it is a blasphemy to argue that people are manipulated, they are rather choosing this by being lazy or not curious enough or because it already confirms their biases / beliefs.

it is sad to see that people replicated the TV (Tell-Me-Vision) model on the internet.

I think you're right. We are products of our perception of reality. I just didn't want to get too deep in my summary.

I feel that people are manipulated on social media mostly by opinions/narratives and not incorrect facts. These opinions end up guiding how we feel about facts.

Example:

Fact -> Maga protesters stormed the capital

Opinion 1 -> "These protesters will be looked at as heroes for trying to protect our democracy"

Opinion 2 -> "These protesters are fools to do such a dangerous thing for a president that doesn't care about them"

I believe that depending on if you get more Opinion 1's or 2's on your feed, it probably will eventually shape how you feel about the fact. Sad thing is most of the time these opinions are hyperbolic and not balanced.

if you are willing to read lies, you deserve to be deceived.

This is too simple a statement. Most lies aren't advertised as such, so you are presuming:

1) subject matter expertise in every reader

2) a mental framework of truth and trust to accurately evaluate a source

Yes, critical thinking skills are important, but they must be taught, cultivated and honed to be effective. And even then, the deception skills of most (successful) deceivers are greater than the thinking skills of the general population. Remember that most deceivers have university degrees in sociology, psychology, marketing or economics.

> if you are willing to read lies, you deserve to be deceived.

What if you don't know if it's lies or not. Which party is responsible for a solution? Should people "wake up" first or should we as a society punish those who prey on the unknowing?

I think the solution is very straightforward: Turn off the platforms. So what if a few folks in SV lose jobs? They'll find new ones. The rest of the world will move on.

>If a single developer can create a twitter bot in 4 hours

Several years ago I took a week-long python class from a PhD who spent his days building and tweaking weather pattern models. A lot of the class was learning Pandas and other mathematical libraries. One of the assignments in class was twitter sentiment analysis using a prebuilt dictionary of weighted words. In other words I'm heartily agreeing with you that this is not difficult for anyone with skills and time.

> but the capital and blm riots have shown that online opinions can have real world impacts.

If people are acting based on what they read, is banning the words the real solution? It seems that learning the reasons why people are dissatisfied is the more useful approach.

Suppressing people's words or beliefs under the guise of Democracy has never been a good strategy throughout history.

I never suggested banning words and agree that opinions should not be surpressed.

The issue occurring is that bad actors are using social media as a tool to enrage people and shape their opinions.

I do not have a solution but I feel as though identitying this as a real problem is part of the solution. Most people are not aware that social media is filled with computational propaganda

> But how much of social media is real?

For me personally, I treat social media as entertainment. Sure you can have reliable sources of news, but I force myself to deal with social media like entertainment so that I moderate myself. I will never sit and watch TV all day and so I will never sit and scroll through social media all day. I keep my follow list manicured so if someone is tingling my BS meter, I drop them. It is far too easy to get inside an echo chamber. The goal is to always have credible but challenging points of view in my feed and to limit how much I time I spend in the feed.

The best example of this thing can be seen through the crypto giveaway scams on Twitter. Since the intent is to scam the other individual, this is the best snapshot you can see of someone trying to achieve an end within a few hours through bots (as opposed to political manipulation which made run on a longer time frame).

well reddit political subs are managed through email blasts by some groups and this is not even bots doing it but people who feel empowered to take part.

I have always been of the opinion that the only people who should be restricted with regards to how they get their message out are those in office but Trump has changed the game a bit and now I realize there are far too many who have been waiting this moment to find new means to regulate who and what message can be conveyed.

prior to the net and social media sites we had to rely only on the press, printed and televised. both were shown their bias if not outright distortion of truth by the same social media many are being told to revile.

in the end it comes down to educating people and accepting that in any free society you get the good with the bad

Reply on news.ycombinator.com