12 ms·

Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts

104 points by hemapani 10y ago

gozur88 10y ago
The article doesn't render on my browser for some reason. But what does that mean, "fake accounts"? Accounts made by computers? If it's just people creating accounts under assumed names, well, that's not too surprising.
- mcphage 10y ago
  They mean bots.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Online, immediate publish, publicly visible, no barrier to entry, crowd source moderation / no moderation, mass access media... Is toxic. Convince me otherwise.
- anon69 10y ago
  but 4chan does have good memes... Fast churn allows you to measure the zeitgeist?
- csydas 10y ago
  I would agree that it has a lot of serious issues right now, but I would disagree on "toxic". The free flow of information is incredibly important and has introduced a new age of information for the planet. With small SoC computers becoming more and more regular and fit for purpose of general computing at a phenomenally low price, this brings an incredible swath of information available to the masses in a way that has not been available before in history, and it also gives "experts" a means of communicating their expertise to audiences without the need for traditional publishing routes that existed before. Seriously, this is a really wonderful time to live in, and I hope that development for software on the various SoC's continues so that we can truly be in a world where everyone can access and share information. The downside to this is that there is now a higher burden on readers to vet their information and to be trained in how to research. Traditional gatekeepers of information (news, text books, etc) no longer have the strength they once had - these mediums aren't irrelevant, but their authority has been completely underminded, and we're in an adjustment period as people learn how to properly research and interpret information. This isn't me being coy and suggesting that a certain interpretation or filtering out specific viewpoints, this is me suggesting that most people don't know the basics of research, like the stuff many of us learned in gradeschool, such as actually read and understand evidence before you make a claim, find opposing viewpoints and research and try to understand how this information affects your understanding of what you currently know, and, perhaps most importantly, how to withold judgement when there isn't enough information to even begin processing what you have been provided. I am grateful for the immediately published, publicly visible, no barrier to entry, no moderation videos providing me with information on how to plumb a sink, or how to fix a washing machine that doesn't drain, or the numerous science experiments or even just opinion pieces that are presented on various content curating websites. (Youtube, Medium, et. al.,) A lot of it is trash and non-sense that is not congruent with reality , but at least I have the ability to research and determine if it's congruent with reality or not. I agree - it's very frustrating how much influence spam accounts, people gaming reputation algorithms, and just assholes in general have in the current age of information; relying on algorithms to save us from this is the wrong idea and it's a poor idea. But this is the reality of the world when information flows freely - as a people, we need to learn how to better assess the information we're given and we need to learn how to withold judgement/reactions until information is better vetted, corroborated, and confirmed, and we need to learn healthy skepticism when it comes to the sources of information available to us now. It will take time to adjust, and there are many bad-faith efforts to vet information, with many online sources trying to take on the role of gatekeeper for people and doing so in bad-faith. But the information isn't going to go away, nor are the shysters who use it to further their agendas. Institutions that curate information as well as people who access this information need to get better collectively at interpreting it.
  - colllectorof 10y ago
    I thought about this a lot recently. Expecting people to spontaneously more skeptical and analytical is unrealistic. Non-shit mass media is something we desperately need these days, but it's not the only solution. We have tools to make producing and consuming information easy for an average person. It's pretty clear that we also need tools that augment our ability to analyze information. The key, I think, is to ignore the immediate issues with politics and think in higher order terms of knowledge acquisition. Douglas Engelbart talked about such things in the past and Alan Kay with Bret Victor talk about them right now. Personally, I imagine the following. Custom search bots that we control. Networks that allow users to ask questions, rather than just read and write self-contained posts. Tools for rapid modeling, record-keeping and statistical analysis. For example, being able to plot Twitter activity and connections in an easy fashion would likely reveal a lot of paid shills and bots. But it's really hard to do right now. You need to mess around with bad APIs, complex software and the data is often unavailable in the first place. But it doesn't have to be this way. (Publishing was way more complicated and we made it trivial.)
    - csydas 10y ago
      I disagree slightly, mainly because I'm not expecting it to be spontaneous. In my mind, I see this going on for years if not decades, since no matter how many tools we add to try and assist with curation of information, the core issue comes down to this scenario: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDj1bfTW0AAwZ2Y.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDj1bfTW0AAwZ2Y.jpg Forgive me for linking a comic to assist in a point, but a lot of it is more that right now we still have many people used to authoritative sources; they find one source that is complimentary to their viewpoint, and the details on the source don't matter. I've seen commentaries and opinion pieces that we're in a "post-fact" era, but I think a more accurate assessment is just that the number of authoritative sources has grown while the previous ones have diminished in scope and authority. It's incredibly easy to find an authoritative seeming source for just about any opinion or item you care for at this point, be it a journal paer, a tweet or reddit post, or just a website dedicated to that subject. I guess that's my ultimate issue with the idea of provide better tools, it's that as information is liberated, you have an untrained public making use of it. I don't particularly care what conclusion they draw as long as people aren't jumping the gun on conclusions and just assuming so much. Twitter astroturfing and similar activities I think is just going to be one of those problems that continues - there are businesses, as far as I'm aware, behind these projects, and if their livelihood is threatened, it seems to me they'd just adapt. I fully expect that, if Twitter hasn't been bought out or changed drastically by the next election, that we'll see Twitter bot armies out in greater force than ever before and it will have an amazing influence as media from all varieties will happily use it for reference. Heck, we still use # of google search results as a metric as if the total number of results even means anything. That's not something you can just do away with on a tool, because it's not the fault of the tools reporting bad data - it's people latching onto irrelevant data points. This isn't a call that the world just needs that little more education and suddenly we'll all debate rationally - that is not going to happen short of major worldwide reprogramming of people. It's more just getting the idea out of how to judge a resource or realize why certain metrics just aren't a good measure of anything most of the time, like how a large number of retweets doesn't mean much more than "many accounts retweeted this message". People are still adjusting to what a completely online world means and what automation can do. You don't need IBM's Watson to make a political poopshoot or to generate a fancy looking paper, you don't need a state sponsored astroturfing group to spread an idea. A little gaming with algorithms and you can propogate just about any piece of information you want.
- return0 10y ago
  Offline, publish after consulting with the boss, his political allies and husband. Everything under the table. Huge barrier to entry. Editor moderation. Is toxic because it leads to spreading lies like, for example, that HRC would win the election. My point is , an equally toxic lot of shit happens in offline media too. It's just that you don't see it, and it doesnt bother you Also, most people follow some blogs they trust, and most blogs do try to vet their stories. (maybe i 'm wrong, as i 've been out of facebook since forever).
  - davesque 10y ago
    To simply swing to the other extreme, and when the OP isn't even advocating for that, isn't much of a counter-argument.
    - return0 10y ago
      > much of a counter-argument. I wasnt making one
davesque 10y ago
Honestly, why would a malicious actor not do this? Automate the e-mail creation, the sign-up, hook your script up to the post forms and you've got an instant larger-than-life megaphone. Hell, I bet you could even train a RNN to make passably realistic short-length responses to people that decide to engage your posts.
generic_user 10y ago
This story reads more like 'fake news' won the election narrative peddling more then new insight into the bot situation. There has been plenty of research on the avalanche of bots spewing tweets, comment and stories for years now that 'sway peoples opinions'. Not just political but in every other domain also. Why is this now, after the election a big important story thats popping up all over the media.
- adnzzzzZ 10y ago
  Is it really a big surprise? The legacy media has noticed they don't have as much of an influence over people as they used to after their candidate lost the election, and so they're trying to understand how that could possibly have happened. Clearly they aren't at fault because they're never wrong, so it must that Russian bots are creating fake stories and that most people are too stupid to realize all those stories are fake. You're watching the last gasps of desperation of legacy media in its attempt to drive people away from alternative sources of media. This will fail spectacularly and further diminish legacy media's influence over people.
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    By your logic they should not learn from their failures, but roll over and die? How un-american is that? By the way, lots of media outlets have admitted they were wrong. Fake news is a real issue that deserves to be reported about, it's not a scapegoat
    - adnzzzzZ 10y ago
      >Fake news is a real issue that deserves to be reported about, it's not a scapegoat It's too late to start treating fake news as a real problem after such an ugly an biased coverage of the election on their part. No one trusts them anymore
      - spiderfarmer 10y ago
        > No one trusts them anymore Disagree. I'd say that your nation is so divided that 50% doesn't trust the other 50%. That means that a large part still trusts eachother. As an outsider, I think bias was just a small part of what was wrong with the coverage. I mean, if you know that an outlet is left or right leaning, you can place their news in a certain light. But the coverage was all focused on the wrong issues. The right wouldn't shut up about Benghazi and e-mails. And the left was way too "OMG look at this monster". Not a word on actual policies.
xnull2guest 10y ago
Yup, in the US and elsewhere. It's called "astroturfing". The US military has been doing it for a decade or more (Operation Earnest Voice, etc). The new technology is to augment bot behavior with "persona management" software. Basically contractors who sit around all day and impersonate simulated people online in communities where messages are targeting permeation. Militaries around the world participate in this, with the UK and US organized into information warfare brigades.
- flukus 10y ago
  Astroturfing has typically involved people. By far the biggest use of it I've seen has been in global warming discussions.
  - xnull2guest 10y ago
    Right, "persona management" is a technique for keeping track of simulated people with simulated interests, simulated aging (so the accounts can exist for years and be reputable), simulated interests and consistent simulated schedules, and simulated vocabulary. "Persona management" software allows centers of contractors to maintain the identities of these people in a rotating fashion, with the software helping the contractor to choose the right accents and vocabulary, etc. The biggest use I've seen it in is in politics, specifically events of national security importance.
    - _mhr_ 10y ago
      That's wild. You have personal anecdata seeing this in action? How do you detect it? How do you know you aren't just being... paranoid? Can you give irrefutable evidence of an simulated persona? How would one even prove that?
      - flukus 10y ago
        Too drunk to look now but I've read about such companies in the past. They're even willing to pay for older accounts with good karma on big sites. Try googling "Koch brothers astroturfing" I remember some news about their climate change astroturfing recently. Maybe also "Tony Abbott fake twitter likes". The Australian PM was paying for twitter likes.
kriro 10y ago
I thought it was interesting/a bit strange that Obama mentioned this problem during his "farewell tour" press conference in Germany (along with the portrayal of USA=Russia and the like on social media).
- Karlozkiller 10y ago
  Can you expand on "US=Russia"? or link the press conference in question.
- 75j 10y ago
  Obama mentioned that he wants an internet "curating function" for determining truthful information. Watch about 5 minutes of this talk starting at 58:00 to get the full context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BikQFWNYct4&t=3480s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BikQFWNYct4&t=3480s I refuse to believe that he's not smart enough to know how problematic that is. It's not totally clear from his speech (does he just want a central repository of trusted information, or does he want to actually remove certain information from the internet?) but it's a perfect example of Obama couching dangerous ideas in soft, pragmatic language.
  - dao- 10y ago
    It seems like we have no ideal choices here. Clearly we can't just sit back and let fake news / propaganda go viral and eventually determine the course of civilization. Curating is a very broad term, it can mean anything between having websites soft-rated, wikipedia-style crowdsourced curating, and opaque state-level censorship. The devil is in the details.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      I don't think an ideal solution exists for practically anything at a global scale. Modern sanitation increased public health significantly, but what of the plight of the humble chamberpot maker? What we have is ideology, and in America we have an ideology that speech is to be free and unrestricted.
  - 10y ago
Teever 10y ago
I wonder how much of the content posted in www.reddit.com/r/the_donald was organic and how much was dessiminated by paid users. Producing graphic memes and youtube videos with remix songs is something that can't yet be automated easily but it struck me how conveniently the high quality seeds of a meme would be planted and how quickly it would filter through to the more common subreddits.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Just a thought: While I believe every political party uses paid astroturfers, what is it with Trump that now everyone is so convince it happened? If it was other way around people would call you lunatic Glenn Beck follower etc. In fact, there is at least one known instance Democrats have used the technique.
  - lawless123 10y ago
    Because so much crap from the donald would front page, if you read through the comments you'd see loads of weeks old accounts just saying generic "fuck yeahs". Certain posts would frotpage far too shortly after being posted.
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      And the other political spectrum noticed big newspapers didn't publish enough "bad" things about Hillary and Wikileaks. You see, you're not so different after all. Both with bias, both believe in conspiracy ;)
  - shuntress 10y ago
    Glenn Beck is rethinking his life and choices to be more thoughtful, passionate, and understanding. Being a Glenn Beck follower in 2016 might actually be a good thing.
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      I'm not an American but I have noticed the sudden change. I have no idea what happened to this guy. I'm sure he was unstable to begin with, but he has really changed in every way.
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
What a surprise. Because people who are gainfully employed are all itching to get the Brandon Eich treatment.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hackuser 10y ago
This is also good, from the same author (and linked to at the bottom of the article): http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204021-the-rise-of-social-bots/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204021-the-rise-of-soci... Also, see the Project on Algorithms, Computational Propaganda, and Digital Politics at Oxford: http://politicalbots.org/ http://politicalbots.org/
quantum_state 10y ago
I m not surprised .. there r real ppl tweeting fake news .. fake ppl tweeting real news n fake ppl tweeting fake news ... not surprised it is more common than thought ..

104 points by hemapani 10y ago

The article doesn't render on my browser for some reason. But what does that mean, "fake accounts"? Accounts made by computers? If it's just people creating accounts under assumed names, well, that's not too surprising.

mcphage 10y ago
They mean bots.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

Online, immediate publish, publicly visible, no barrier to entry, crowd source moderation / no moderation, mass access media... Is toxic. Convince me otherwise.

anon69 10y ago
but 4chan does have good memes... Fast churn allows you to measure the zeitgeist?
csydas 10y ago
I would agree that it has a lot of serious issues right now, but I would disagree on "toxic". The free flow of information is incredibly important and has introduced a new age of information for the planet. With small SoC computers becoming more and more regular and fit for purpose of general computing at a phenomenally low price, this brings an incredible swath of information available to the masses in a way that has not been available before in history, and it also gives "experts" a means of communicating their expertise to audiences without the need for traditional publishing routes that existed before. Seriously, this is a really wonderful time to live in, and I hope that development for software on the various SoC's continues so that we can truly be in a world where everyone can access and share information. The downside to this is that there is now a higher burden on readers to vet their information and to be trained in how to research. Traditional gatekeepers of information (news, text books, etc) no longer have the strength they once had - these mediums aren't irrelevant, but their authority has been completely underminded, and we're in an adjustment period as people learn how to properly research and interpret information. This isn't me being coy and suggesting that a certain interpretation or filtering out specific viewpoints, this is me suggesting that most people don't know the basics of research, like the stuff many of us learned in gradeschool, such as actually read and understand evidence before you make a claim, find opposing viewpoints and research and try to understand how this information affects your understanding of what you currently know, and, perhaps most importantly, how to withold judgement when there isn't enough information to even begin processing what you have been provided. I am grateful for the immediately published, publicly visible, no barrier to entry, no moderation videos providing me with information on how to plumb a sink, or how to fix a washing machine that doesn't drain, or the numerous science experiments or even just opinion pieces that are presented on various content curating websites. (Youtube, Medium, et. al.,) A lot of it is trash and non-sense that is not congruent with reality , but at least I have the ability to research and determine if it's congruent with reality or not. I agree - it's very frustrating how much influence spam accounts, people gaming reputation algorithms, and just assholes in general have in the current age of information; relying on algorithms to save us from this is the wrong idea and it's a poor idea. But this is the reality of the world when information flows freely - as a people, we need to learn how to better assess the information we're given and we need to learn how to withold judgement/reactions until information is better vetted, corroborated, and confirmed, and we need to learn healthy skepticism when it comes to the sources of information available to us now. It will take time to adjust, and there are many bad-faith efforts to vet information, with many online sources trying to take on the role of gatekeeper for people and doing so in bad-faith. But the information isn't going to go away, nor are the shysters who use it to further their agendas. Institutions that curate information as well as people who access this information need to get better collectively at interpreting it.
- colllectorof 10y ago
  I thought about this a lot recently. Expecting people to spontaneously more skeptical and analytical is unrealistic. Non-shit mass media is something we desperately need these days, but it's not the only solution. We have tools to make producing and consuming information easy for an average person. It's pretty clear that we also need tools that augment our ability to analyze information. The key, I think, is to ignore the immediate issues with politics and think in higher order terms of knowledge acquisition. Douglas Engelbart talked about such things in the past and Alan Kay with Bret Victor talk about them right now. Personally, I imagine the following. Custom search bots that we control. Networks that allow users to ask questions, rather than just read and write self-contained posts. Tools for rapid modeling, record-keeping and statistical analysis. For example, being able to plot Twitter activity and connections in an easy fashion would likely reveal a lot of paid shills and bots. But it's really hard to do right now. You need to mess around with bad APIs, complex software and the data is often unavailable in the first place. But it doesn't have to be this way. (Publishing was way more complicated and we made it trivial.)
  - csydas 10y ago
    I disagree slightly, mainly because I'm not expecting it to be spontaneous. In my mind, I see this going on for years if not decades, since no matter how many tools we add to try and assist with curation of information, the core issue comes down to this scenario: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDj1bfTW0AAwZ2Y.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDj1bfTW0AAwZ2Y.jpg Forgive me for linking a comic to assist in a point, but a lot of it is more that right now we still have many people used to authoritative sources; they find one source that is complimentary to their viewpoint, and the details on the source don't matter. I've seen commentaries and opinion pieces that we're in a "post-fact" era, but I think a more accurate assessment is just that the number of authoritative sources has grown while the previous ones have diminished in scope and authority. It's incredibly easy to find an authoritative seeming source for just about any opinion or item you care for at this point, be it a journal paer, a tweet or reddit post, or just a website dedicated to that subject. I guess that's my ultimate issue with the idea of provide better tools, it's that as information is liberated, you have an untrained public making use of it. I don't particularly care what conclusion they draw as long as people aren't jumping the gun on conclusions and just assuming so much. Twitter astroturfing and similar activities I think is just going to be one of those problems that continues - there are businesses, as far as I'm aware, behind these projects, and if their livelihood is threatened, it seems to me they'd just adapt. I fully expect that, if Twitter hasn't been bought out or changed drastically by the next election, that we'll see Twitter bot armies out in greater force than ever before and it will have an amazing influence as media from all varieties will happily use it for reference. Heck, we still use # of google search results as a metric as if the total number of results even means anything. That's not something you can just do away with on a tool, because it's not the fault of the tools reporting bad data - it's people latching onto irrelevant data points. This isn't a call that the world just needs that little more education and suddenly we'll all debate rationally - that is not going to happen short of major worldwide reprogramming of people. It's more just getting the idea out of how to judge a resource or realize why certain metrics just aren't a good measure of anything most of the time, like how a large number of retweets doesn't mean much more than "many accounts retweeted this message". People are still adjusting to what a completely online world means and what automation can do. You don't need IBM's Watson to make a political poopshoot or to generate a fancy looking paper, you don't need a state sponsored astroturfing group to spread an idea. A little gaming with algorithms and you can propogate just about any piece of information you want.
return0 10y ago
Offline, publish after consulting with the boss, his political allies and husband. Everything under the table. Huge barrier to entry. Editor moderation. Is toxic because it leads to spreading lies like, for example, that HRC would win the election. My point is , an equally toxic lot of shit happens in offline media too. It's just that you don't see it, and it doesnt bother you Also, most people follow some blogs they trust, and most blogs do try to vet their stories. (maybe i 'm wrong, as i 've been out of facebook since forever).
- davesque 10y ago
  To simply swing to the other extreme, and when the OP isn't even advocating for that, isn't much of a counter-argument.
  - return0 10y ago
    > much of a counter-argument. I wasnt making one

davesque 10y ago

Honestly, why would a malicious actor not do this? Automate the e-mail creation, the sign-up, hook your script up to the post forms and you've got an instant larger-than-life megaphone. Hell, I bet you could even train a RNN to make passably realistic short-length responses to people that decide to engage your posts.

generic_user 10y ago

This story reads more like 'fake news' won the election narrative peddling more then new insight into the bot situation. There has been plenty of research on the avalanche of bots spewing tweets, comment and stories for years now that 'sway peoples opinions'. Not just political but in every other domain also. Why is this now, after the election a big important story thats popping up all over the media.

adnzzzzZ 10y ago
Is it really a big surprise? The legacy media has noticed they don't have as much of an influence over people as they used to after their candidate lost the election, and so they're trying to understand how that could possibly have happened. Clearly they aren't at fault because they're never wrong, so it must that Russian bots are creating fake stories and that most people are too stupid to realize all those stories are fake. You're watching the last gasps of desperation of legacy media in its attempt to drive people away from alternative sources of media. This will fail spectacularly and further diminish legacy media's influence over people.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  By your logic they should not learn from their failures, but roll over and die? How un-american is that? By the way, lots of media outlets have admitted they were wrong. Fake news is a real issue that deserves to be reported about, it's not a scapegoat
  - adnzzzzZ 10y ago
    >Fake news is a real issue that deserves to be reported about, it's not a scapegoat It's too late to start treating fake news as a real problem after such an ugly an biased coverage of the election on their part. No one trusts them anymore
    - spiderfarmer 10y ago
      > No one trusts them anymore Disagree. I'd say that your nation is so divided that 50% doesn't trust the other 50%. That means that a large part still trusts eachother. As an outsider, I think bias was just a small part of what was wrong with the coverage. I mean, if you know that an outlet is left or right leaning, you can place their news in a certain light. But the coverage was all focused on the wrong issues. The right wouldn't shut up about Benghazi and e-mails. And the left was way too "OMG look at this monster". Not a word on actual policies.

xnull2guest 10y ago

Yup, in the US and elsewhere. It's called "astroturfing". The US military has been doing it for a decade or more (Operation Earnest Voice, etc). The new technology is to augment bot behavior with "persona management" software. Basically contractors who sit around all day and impersonate simulated people online in communities where messages are targeting permeation. Militaries around the world participate in this, with the UK and US organized into information warfare brigades.

flukus 10y ago
Astroturfing has typically involved people. By far the biggest use of it I've seen has been in global warming discussions.
- xnull2guest 10y ago
  Right, "persona management" is a technique for keeping track of simulated people with simulated interests, simulated aging (so the accounts can exist for years and be reputable), simulated interests and consistent simulated schedules, and simulated vocabulary. "Persona management" software allows centers of contractors to maintain the identities of these people in a rotating fashion, with the software helping the contractor to choose the right accents and vocabulary, etc. The biggest use I've seen it in is in politics, specifically events of national security importance.
  - _mhr_ 10y ago
    That's wild. You have personal anecdata seeing this in action? How do you detect it? How do you know you aren't just being... paranoid? Can you give irrefutable evidence of an simulated persona? How would one even prove that?
    - flukus 10y ago
      Too drunk to look now but I've read about such companies in the past. They're even willing to pay for older accounts with good karma on big sites. Try googling "Koch brothers astroturfing" I remember some news about their climate change astroturfing recently. Maybe also "Tony Abbott fake twitter likes". The Australian PM was paying for twitter likes.

kriro 10y ago

I thought it was interesting/a bit strange that Obama mentioned this problem during his "farewell tour" press conference in Germany (along with the portrayal of USA=Russia and the like on social media).

Karlozkiller 10y ago
Can you expand on "US=Russia"? or link the press conference in question.
75j 10y ago
Obama mentioned that he wants an internet "curating function" for determining truthful information. Watch about 5 minutes of this talk starting at 58:00 to get the full context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BikQFWNYct4&t=3480s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BikQFWNYct4&t=3480s I refuse to believe that he's not smart enough to know how problematic that is. It's not totally clear from his speech (does he just want a central repository of trusted information, or does he want to actually remove certain information from the internet?) but it's a perfect example of Obama couching dangerous ideas in soft, pragmatic language.
- dao- 10y ago
  It seems like we have no ideal choices here. Clearly we can't just sit back and let fake news / propaganda go viral and eventually determine the course of civilization. Curating is a very broad term, it can mean anything between having websites soft-rated, wikipedia-style crowdsourced curating, and opaque state-level censorship. The devil is in the details.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    I don't think an ideal solution exists for practically anything at a global scale. Modern sanitation increased public health significantly, but what of the plight of the humble chamberpot maker? What we have is ideology, and in America we have an ideology that speech is to be free and unrestricted.
- 10y ago

Teever 10y ago

I wonder how much of the content posted in www.reddit.com/r/the_donald was organic and how much was dessiminated by paid users. Producing graphic memes and youtube videos with remix songs is something that can't yet be automated easily but it struck me how conveniently the high quality seeds of a meme would be planted and how quickly it would filter through to the more common subreddits.

angry-hacker 10y ago
Just a thought: While I believe every political party uses paid astroturfers, what is it with Trump that now everyone is so convince it happened? If it was other way around people would call you lunatic Glenn Beck follower etc. In fact, there is at least one known instance Democrats have used the technique.
- lawless123 10y ago
  Because so much crap from the donald would front page, if you read through the comments you'd see loads of weeks old accounts just saying generic "fuck yeahs". Certain posts would frotpage far too shortly after being posted.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    And the other political spectrum noticed big newspapers didn't publish enough "bad" things about Hillary and Wikileaks. You see, you're not so different after all. Both with bias, both believe in conspiracy ;)
- shuntress 10y ago
  Glenn Beck is rethinking his life and choices to be more thoughtful, passionate, and understanding. Being a Glenn Beck follower in 2016 might actually be a good thing.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    I'm not an American but I have noticed the sudden change. I have no idea what happened to this guy. I'm sure he was unstable to begin with, but he has really changed in every way.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago

What a surprise. Because people who are gainfully employed are all itching to get the Brandon Eich treatment.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hackuser 10y ago

This is also good, from the same author (and linked to at the bottom of the article): http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204021-the-rise-of-social-bots/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204021-the-rise-of-soci... Also, see the Project on Algorithms, Computational Propaganda, and Digital Politics at Oxford: http://politicalbots.org/ http://politicalbots.org/

quantum_state 10y ago

I m not surprised .. there r real ppl tweeting fake news .. fake ppl tweeting real news n fake ppl tweeting fake news ... not surprised it is more common than thought ..