Characterizing and identifying shills in social media (2017) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Characterizing and identifying shills in social media (2017) [pdf]

sbp-brims.org

55 pointsuLogMicheal48 comments

One of the footnotes mention that you can get a JSON version of a Reddit page by adding .json to the end of the URL.

Sure enough I tried it and it works: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/.json

TIL. I wonder if that's going away given the recent Reddit API access shenanigans.

I found that trick a while back when trying to write a bookmarklet for downloading videos from reddit. I got it to work, but it downloads a version without audio... Since this is often superior, I stopped work and declared victory.

Try making a bookmark whose url is this:

    javascript:fetch(document.location.href.replace(/\/$/, '') + '.json').then(r => r.json()).then(j => {document.location.href = (j[0].data['children'][0].data.secure_media ? j[0].data['children'][0].data.secure_media.reddit_video.fallback_url : j[0].data['children'][0].data.crosspost_parent_list[0].secure_media.reddit_video.fallback_url)})

Then go to any reddit page where the main post is a video file, and click the bookmark!

> After reading all of the 1,000 replies by the user, the human then made the assignment based on the following criteria: (1) “Did the user’s replies entirely, or almost entirely support one candidate?”; (2) “Did the user’s posts generally contain claims to support their arguments?”; and (3) “Did the user explicitly mention a tie to any campaign?”

If they can't see why these criteria are nonsensical then their entire premise should be discarded.

> why these criteria are nonsensical

I don't conduct surveys or other research so it's not immediately obvious to me. I would guess that it's some combination of:

1) Humans making subjective calls like "generally contain claims to support" (and even just the subjectivity of the word "support");

2) Most opinionated users (read: people who reply 1,000 times) on social media are going to "entirely, or almost entirely support one candidate";

3) Most people are going to post things which "generally contain claims to support their arguments".

But I'm not really sure if those are (to a researcher who ought to know) the obvious problems with these criteria. Is there another problem that is seen which is not listed here? (Are these suggested "problems" even problems in this case?)

All correct. Added: you cannot establish 'ground truth' by a subjective analysis and then base your entire premise on its accuracy. They are the DOJ -- they could have found out who these people actually were if they wanted to. It isn't that hard to dox people on reddit.

See also most analysis of "Russian" "trolls", etc - basically, any individual or "organization" that's not "down with the program", for which accurate information is not available, so it is hallucinated into existence.

This reminds me of this:

https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies

Not sure about the title of this submission. The construction is ambiguous. The shills identified here were not funded by the DoD. They seem to have probably been funded by political campaigns. This study was funded by the DoD.

Sounds like what a shill would say

Tried to fit it all, maybe "DoD Report:" would have been better? On another note, would be great to see the amount of money that flows from our gov into such programs.

Why lead with the DoD at all. If anything, the funding source is of secondary interest.

Why do people care more when they see YC in the title of a post?

YC hosts this forum. If we were on a DoD forum it would matter more.

The site guidelines ask you to "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

If the study was DoD funded, that's a great piece of information to share—but please do so via a comment in the thread. Title fields are not supposed to be for sharing the details that the submitter considers important. (Other social news sites work that way, but HN intentionally doesn't.)

Past explanations here in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Were there any other actions taken to moderate this post beyond the title change? Genuinely curious, momentum halted and post fell to page 4 shortly after.

It got all the actions: first a moderator downweighted it (so that it would be lower on the front page, but not off it), then it set off the flamewar detector, and it also got flagged by users. I've rolled back most of that now.

A sad reality of discussion surrounding this topic. Thank you for the transparency.

Have they tried walking down the hall to find the various people whose campaigns were/are funding them?

I think the interesting thing about this article is how quaint it feels five years on. In terms of methods, sure, but also the goal.

There's this implicit assumption that a) ML could effectively spot bad actors, and b) this is a fight someone, somewhere is able to win.

I feel the information environment has degraded so badly over the last decade that this feels naive.

They don't mention /u/Cant_Trust_Hillary on Reddit who said in an AMA that they were paid to be a serial poster under that username.

I don't think they posted anything political, they were similar to /u/GallowBoob where they were good at making the front page.

Are shills misinformation adjacent in some way? It's interesting to see activists listed as potential shills, though they don't clearly explain the body of evidence that aligns activists as potentially harmful. An activist can be a shill but I'm not sold that they're all bad, but I've definitely run into a good number of activists who border so far on not knowing what they're talking about or how to talk about it that they're essentially harmful to either information quality or discourse among regular people.

Shills are absolutely misinformation because they distort the weighting.

If I am one guy and I complain about the font used in the question mark under the help menu, I am just one guy. If I spawn or buy or suborn a thousand accounts to complain about it, my message is amplified and can distort priorities, pass thresholds, and so forth. Shills can downvote something out of being seen at all, even on here unless you turn on "showdead." It's basically the commodification of a Sybil attack.

or even passive bots that run sentiment analysis and attach votes to what they favor...

It was odd to me that government actors seemed to not be a mention in this study. Maybe they fall under the activist category?

It is funded by the US Government. The only shills it will find are Russian, maybe the Chinese these days, the politically unpopular, and social media marketers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com