Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Needless to say I didn't finish reading the article.
I have problems with articles on both sides of the issue using all kinds of speculation and innuendo to try and discredit the opposite side. I would rather just read articles that cover studies explaining results (data) and methods used to support their position.
NB: not affiliated with Bot Sentinel
Interestingly it identified my sister in law as a bot, but looking at her account, I'd assume the same. Anyone else I checked seemed accurate as well.
False positives are generally curated accounts, corporate accounts, and government accounts (which are really bots with their software in managerial documents); porn accounts; and people who reblog the news but don't really "use" twitter.
There are multiple people in this thread that have been incorrectly tagged as bots, I’d like to see proper tests done with the software identifying the level of accuracy. It shouldn’t be too much to ask since their entire study is hinged on the accuracy of this software.
Just the other day a prominent dutch account got auto-blocked on twitter for saying 'Die Rutte toch.', where 'Die' (a pretty common dutch word, which in this case translates as 'That') was mistaken for a threat to our prime minister.
Same things with BotSentinel - it's just garbage.
Along with this, there is the pre-emptive and dogmatic assertion without proof or serious argument that any disagreement with official dogma must necessary be deliberate 'disinformation' spread by those with an immoral vested interest in spreading falsehood.
Yes, that is as much as we can deduce from the data presented in the paper, given that they apparently just took the 'Botometer' verdicts at face value without taking the extra steps to see if they were indeed accurate. It may, of course, be absolutely true that the 'denier' accounts are just scripts, but further investigation is necessary to establish this.
> I wonder what else makes you more likely to be characterized as a bot?
That would best be established by examining the bot-detector's algorithm. Another commenter on this thread noted that he received a high rating based on the fact that he rarely logged into his account.
The result is that in 2021 people tell me things that influence their opinions that are either misleading, out of date or absolutely false. We’re talking things like climategate or that volcanoes give off more co2 than all of human civilization.
I’m just a regular person, I don’t believe in climate change, I’ve researched it, it’s something I’m concerned about. A million dollar PR campaign against me and my friends, family and coworkers is not something anyone can standup against.
The dogma that you perceive comes from people reacting to dissatisfaction from an important issue that isn’t being taken seriously. We are citizens, regular people, against what amounts to artificial intelligences that are maximizing the number of paper clips they produce. David and Goliath doesn’t come close to the situation we’re up against.
So I genuinely wonder how people can look into it and not look at the absorption spectra of CO2 go ahh I see and then move on. I mean such a calculation isn’t enough for policy changes or anything, but it’s putting a high hurdle on the other side.
Is it some disagreement about the physics involved, or just a bunch of people you believe saying something different, or what?
Similarly, if hypothetically increased global temperature results in increased cloud formation that reduces the impact of climate change that presupposes some increase in temperature otherwise the change in cloud formation doesn’t happen. As such it’s reasonable to argue about the magnitude of change but not the direction of change.
I can clearly see arguing about a specific location bucking global trends because there complexity actually plays a direct role, thus the term climate change. But, globally I can’t see how everywhere on average would buck these trends.
Push a complex system too far and it will not come back. The popular belief that uncertainty undermines the case for taking seriously the "climate crisis" that scientists tell us we face is the opposite of the truth. Properly understood, as driving the case for precaution, uncertainty radically underscores that case, and may even constitute it.
You may have great social circles with intelligent and curious people, but in my life the facts don’t work because the facts don’t matter. The number of people actually interested in the science and not just the science (tm) is dismally low, we’re talking less than 10% in my experience. This includes people who have degrees in physics and engineering and a university engineering professor I knew.
People are hungry, vulnerable, emotional, scared, and prideful creatures. That’s what we are; and we like stories. We like stories where we’re hero’s on an epic journey with villains to defeat.
If you tell someone a fact that breaks their story, makes them scared, and makes them less prideful, you’re not having a conversation for very long, doesn’t matter if you can support it with evidence and reasoning. What PR added on top of this human tendency is people think about climate way more than they otherwise would, they think about it in terms of a story, in us vs. them terms (PRs narrative), and if you say something counter to that narrative, now you’re the villain.
I’ve had people I respect flat out tell me that climate change is a hoax and if we reduced carbon emissions it would just be virtue signaling. They are not joking, they are serious and they’ve been told this by talking heads for over 20 years.
You’ll never get to the back of the envelope calculation.
As an aside, for those interested, the GitHub page for the tool's Python API (https://github.com/IUNetSci/botometer-python) lists relevant papers regarding the functioning/design of the tool.
Kind of annoyed that Botometer requires me to authorize it to access my Twitter account, when all my tweets are public (and who cares about bots that make private tweets, if that's even a thing). Bot Sentinel didn't require this.
- it's 50/50 accurate picking actual bots I know I follow
- the more simple the reading level, the higher it scored
- however, extremely heady accounts also score high
- the farther right/left the account goes seems to up the score a little
- accounts that quote authors frequently score very high, even if they're human behind them
- everything from Chinese state media scored higher than anything
- everything that was frequently highly critical of China scored extremely high
- most Trumpers and Antifa I follow had very low scores (but most are high-up/origin accounts)
- most news organizations from both sides scored middle range, including known propagandists and "reputable" organizations
- accounts from both sides of the COVID discussion were mostly low
Hard to say, but my best guess is "low effort" is the defining factor. Only exception is the pro/anti-Chinese stuff, which is definitely a mix of real people and bots.
I keep pretty good tabs on the accounts I follow and I think I'm pretty good at determining who is "a real person with real feelings saying real things they really think" and bots, and from this analysis, I have zero faith that this tool has any modicum of reliability in a research setting.
I think it's possibly accurate enough to say "yes, this is definitely a human", but totally fails to identify bots. Thus, any research that uses this tool as a measure of bot influence is way off, because there are way too many false positives. Which I guess is a good thing for anyone who wants to say, "look at all these people being suckered by all these bots!" which is pretty unscrupulous.
YMMV
YouTube comment sections on videos related to covid are an absolute cess pit of covid deniers, misinformation spreading and conspiracy theory peddling.
I would like to think these are bots and not a very vocal but significant section of society but given recent world events I am not sure at all.
Have recent events involved significant sections of society?
Give that bot a foreign name and virtually every native English speaking person will assume it's simply bad grammar.
I don't use social media a lot but I do regularly post on HN for instance. I don't know what my average message rate is but it's probably around 1 message/day. Now if I just wanted to spam my political agenda on the site (and the site let me do it) I could very easily copy/paste the same bullshit a hundred times a day on every story on the frontpage. If like 20 other people did the same thing the amount of noise we'd generate is pretty large
Look at random fan wikis to see the amount of free work some dedicated individuals can achieve. I'm certain that many of these super active troll accounts are just that, dedicated individuals who feel very strongly about something and just spend 10 hours every day spamming and harassing and copy-pasting. If your output is like 100x that of a normal user (and you know how to game the algorithms to amplify your message) you don't need a huge number of accounts or automation to become a real nuisance.
Sometimes it is more obvious. People had MAGA campaign apps that lets Trump's team remotely activate otherwise-legit social media accounts. So the account is real, but popular messages were bot behavior. Twitter is even less likely to want to take down such an account, despite the prohibited behavior.
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists"
- Ascribed to an unnamed Yosemite Park Ranger. The quote may never really have happened, but I think it fits here.
If the people are intentionally acting as bots per the direction of other people, then what does that make the people acting as bots?
Then my tweets would get liked and followed. 95% of that was just bots.
Every now and then I would unfollow a real person and my account, which was clearly a bot, would get some hate mail telling me to re-follow them.
It was pretty surreal.
I think their purpose is equally interesting. I'd guess a lot of them are there to polarise discussions and drive people apart, but there are probably ones that have an agenda to drive a specific opinion as well.
I think this isn't just on Twitter, but other platforms as well.
And of course similar things are happening on all social media platforms.
It's deeply ironic that the West built all these tools with the intention of "connecting" people, something that's still Facebook's main mission statement, yet its biggest effects have been exactly the opposite, causing division and distrust between people, and contributing to real world conflicts and toppling of governments.
Social media today is weaponized by political agents to spread misinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale and the platforms are paying them to do it. The current political climate in the US is no surprise. It was a coordinated psyops attack and its enemies are laughing at how easy and inexpensive it was to destabilize a nation compared to traditional warfare.
I fear that we still haven't seen the worst of it, and frankly I'm not sure what the solution is.
[1]: https://www.lawfareblog.com/biggest-social-media-operation-y...
I assume if there is large amounts of money or power to be made, then there are most likely some type of digital propaganda efforts ongoing. This includes oil, big tech, and political parties just to name a few.
If a semi competent programmer can make a simple twitter bot in 4 hours, imagine what a well funded organization like a multi-billion dollar company can accomplish.
People are very easy to manipulate with propaganda, especially when most of the public are not aware that their social news feeds are likely filled with disingenuous information likely from, or influenced by, carefully crafted digital propaganda campaigns
Specifically, any change in public sentiment would be rather small and only accrue over the long term. It would therefore be of little use to, say, some PR executive at Shell.
"Big oil" is also made up of a number of companies. Any benefits would be spread out among all of them, while any costs would fall to just the one doing it.
As for costs: the big one would be the damage to your reputation, as an individual, company, and industry, that would follow if the public found out. I'm having trouble imaging a scenario where you run such an operation, certainly involving a dozen people or so, without ever pissing one of them off sufficiently to see them calling a reporter.
I don't know what's going on here. The tobacco industry comes to mind as one that engaged in such tactics even though a lot of the above was true for them as well. But "big oil" seems more diverse, including foreign firms and governments, companies that embrace the future such as Shell as well as more "conservative" donate-to-republicans-and-hope-this-will-blow-over kingdoms of darkness such as Exxon. Tobacco was a far more like-minded, sometimes family-owned community that would have been easier to co-ordinate in such conspiracies.
I'd argue that's pretty easy to refute. Just look how quickly the Q-Anon nonsense has spread. And they weren't even trying to pretend to be legitimate, they just kept making up crazier and crazier statements "for the lulz".
> As for costs: the big one would be the damage to your reputation, as an individual, company, and industry, that would follow if the public found out. I'm having trouble imaging a scenario where you run such an operation, certainly involving a dozen people or so, without ever pissing one of them off sufficiently to see them calling a reporter.
They were already caught funding the climate science denial reports despite knowing what was really going on. There was almost no backlash, why do you presume it would be any different this time?
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate-scientist-oil-com...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash...
I also agree with your thinking. I'm guessing green energy companies are likely running digital propaganda campaigns trying to sway people away from oil.
Also Big Green likes to half-truth about how ethical or clean green is. Here's for cobalt, but not the only problem: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...
When Digg, MySpace, and Slashdot became more convenient sources of disinformation?
But there were plenty of newsgroup users who preferred the tightly moderated newsgroups.
Hell, you want climate denial, just go publish old stories about lack of ice in certain port cities in the early 1900s and lack of snow or increasing strong storms. What is fun about perusing old news is how that much of the same claims made then are no different than today.
Make your own decision but never blindly trust even stories you agree with.
speaking of people whose mind is made up...
Twitter as a platform promotes toxic social interaction, tribalism, hot takes, low effort & low impact feel good activism and rage driven mobs.
It is literally a hack on human neurochemistry that hurts individuals and society as a whole. People should be connecting with others in a rich, high context, cooperative and supportive environment - like we often have in our physical communities. That is by definition healthy and productive. I wish social platforms were the virtual version of what we have in the real world - not this twisted and broken imitation. Twitter is the worst but that doesn't mean any of the other forums are much better. HN is often ok - but has its flaws too.
Tldr everyone thinks everyone is a bot AND there actually are bots too. That's because twitter is virtual heroin and it is hurting us by design. :(
Maybe people I disagree they have same arguments and are considered bots?
Or they just parrot same things?
Seems like the training data was selected to aid the answer they were looking for.
You have to remember people that believe their point if view is correct tend to share more and comment more so other people know they are misinformed.
I believe that we need a Greta Thunberg-like figure who is conservative-leaning on literally every major topic of political contention, except believes that anthropogenic climate change is real and we should take significant action to mitigate it, and then we need the media and entertainment industries to prop them up as virtuous. People's instinctive defences will be lowered and we will be surprised at how easily people's minds can be changed.
I would say the bulk of the resistance I see comes largely from distrust of institutions and people who are very pro climate change, and then secondary worry about the financial impact of decarbonization on them personally as well as losing competitiveness to countries like China who are huge polluters and honestly dgaf.
Maybe my idea of a conservative celebrity is a silly idea and won't work, but I believe the root cause is one of tribal conflict (combined with cynical disinformation campaigns), and to change their mind requires getting around these tribal defenses in some way.
According to Pew, 84% of Liberal Democrats think that humans significantly contribute to global warming, whereas 14% of Conservative Republicans do. I think this helps to confirm that there's a pretty important tribal dimension at play here (although we also can't rule out that financially self-interested people have self-selected themselves into the latter category).
Also, afaik all the botometers are crap, so studies based on them are also crap.
Still, all this puts "prevent bit usage by design" on the feature list for the next generation of social media (that and "prevent sharing without human moderation beyond a certain virality point", "clever shadow banning" ,and an eliza mode for those times you juste want to yell at the clouds...
Yes. it's that Easy and the most obvious solution to getting out of that echo chamber.
I know it's hard for many to actually uninstall and 'delete their accounts' but perhaps this sounds like a great new years resolution plan to stick to.
This time, you can do it.
Until then, Twitter has an outsized influence on the world.
That aside, you can find open positions at Density listed here: density.io/jobs