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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Musk's ideas about free speech extend to allowing unfettered botting.

Comment isn't referring to spam bots, but the bot networks used for astroturfing.

The "bot networks used for astroturfing" are a much used fiction of pro-Musk and anti-Musk people alike. They basically don't exist. Upvote bot networks exist certainly however.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6246561/

> Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand articles on Twitter during ten months in 2016 and 2017. We find evidence that social bots played a disproportionate role in spreading articles from low-credibility sources. Bots amplify such content in the early spreading moments, before an article goes viral.

I would also be interested in finding more studies that relate to what percentage of scientific research Americans thoughtlessly write off as "fiction" and the corresponding media diets.

You should be aware that academic research into Twitter bots is indeed unreliable. Calling it fiction wouldn't be far wrong. A selection from the many issues you'll find if you read such papers:

- Inability to be replicated, not even in principle.

- Using definitions of "bot" that captures verified humans like e.g. the POTUS.

- Ignoring false positives in the data set or not even trying to measure them at all.

- Using opaque ML models trained off an irrelevant data set which (when measured by outsiders) have 50%+ FP rates.

- Logic errors and difficulty reasoning about causality.

- Mis-statements about what their own data actually shows.

- Refusal to acknowledge or address any of these problems.

There's a paper that thoroughly debunks this field here:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191

and it's also available in talk form here:

https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...

and if you're in a hurry I summarized the paper here:

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...

NB: Some of my own meta-research into these papers is cited in their paper and talk.

Edit: I took a quick look at the paper you linked and it has many of the same problems. Amongst other things it explicitly classifies satire as "digital misinformation". One of the authors is Flammini who is well known for writing nonsensical pseudo-scientific papers in this space, in fact, he's mentioned in the talk linked above.

Different cases. Those things are funded by politicians and foreign governments to influence the general populace. The scale is completely different.

What does that even mean? The study refers to the type of bots I was talking about, the same as I suspect that comment's GP is talking about. If there's an extra special variety of astroturfing bots that don't exist, that's great. It seems obvious to me that this discussion was about bots that do exist.

Twitter themselves have said that they have millions of fake accounts in bot networks[1].

What evidence do you have that Twitter is lying about this? Why would they harm their brand by saying that they're infested with bot networks when they actually aren't?

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/exclusive-twitter-pul...

There is plenty of evidence they do, can you prove the contrary?

Proving a the lack of existence of something is impossible.

In other words, you're making a claim that's impossible to verify?

He said he's a "free speech absolutist," which is an obvious lie. But if we take him at face value, then free speech must include people paid by foreign governments to post pre-written messages.

That definition of free speech isn't even alien to the US. Corporations' freedom of speech in this country is protected even when it includes paying other people to speak.

An absolutist wouldn't have an issue with a teenager posting public flight data about his jet. Given his maturity level, it wouldn't surprise me if the entire stock purchase started as an attempt to shut down @elonmuskjet.

On 4/9 Musk twitted that he would be in favor of $2/month fee for verified account, paid annually to deter bots.

How can anyone tell the difference between a fascist disinformation network and a sincere idiot?

Well, one has a social security number. Just look at all the information Facebook takes from people, requiring a government issued credential to verify your account isn't even farfetched anymore.

Many governments have been rolling out SSO for their suite of digital service applications, I can totally imagine an "internet passport" type situation in the future, where a government issued SSO authorization can be used by social media companies.

For the record, I'm wholeheartedly against that kind of thing, but it's hardly beyond the pale for the companies in question I think.

> requiring a government issued credential to verify your account isn't even farfetched anymore

Facebook already does this with driver's licenses in the US in some cases.

France does this with age-verification for porn sites. Visit pornhub via French vpn to see.

Why wouldn't government-sponsored influence networks mint "legitimate" passports for their bots/legends?

I wonder whether he's really thought about the technical ramifications, though. Even an edit button would have pretty major consequences and things could get into the weeds pretty fast if you had to start diffing edits to see who retweeted what at which point. This might be the kind of thing that would be a major distraction for Musk if he started to put his engineering mind to it, rather than just making a few snarky quips and letting people make of them what they will.

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