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> "I used Twitter accounts I controlled (“bots,” although they aren’t acting autonomously) to send messages" It's a shame they over-hyped the title and made it
by jk563 10y ago
> "I used Twitter accounts I controlled (“bots,” although they aren’t acting autonomously) to send messages"
It's a shame they over-hyped the title and made it all clickbaity. The post itself clearly states that they are not autonomous and therefore not programmed. Possibly not helped by the use of the word "bot" over and over. Am I right in saying "bot" implies autonomous?
That aside, interesting short read with a fairly intuative result. Good to see it backed up with actual research. Though it doesn't mention how many accounts were targetted during the research.
Is there potential a way of analysing messages for racism in the same way some do sentiment analysis? Is it the same sort of problem? Not even a beginner in the field, let alone an expert!
- rtpg 10y agothere's the small issue of the use-mention distinction, but generally I imagine it could work well. There are so many dog-whistles out there (especially for the alt-right) that the sort of overtly racist comments on Twitter would come out quickly. In Twitter's case, follower graphs would also probably be a good indicator, at least for people who follow less than 200 accounts. Not to mention that a lot of these people overtly say in their twitter bios that they're part of the frog police or whatever. Twitter could nuke Alt-right Twitter from orbit pretty easily. Then they'd just go run off and use some "actual free speech" twitter clone and fester in their own space. Just like they do when reddit/4chan cleans house.
- astrobe_ 10y agoPopulate those clone sites with troll-feeding bots for maximum efficiency.
- jk563 10y agoI don't think banning (my assumption of your intention behind nuking) is the correct course of action. I just had a similar chain of thought at a story of a students union wanting to ban certain newspapers from the campus. My opinion is that, in that instance, the union should focus on the people who buy those newspapers. Why do they buy them? Do they agree with the messages? Or perhaps they are believing what they see without critical thought? There is then either an ideological debate or perhaps critical thinking education that can be undertaken. Hiding the message of an organisation or individual seems morally wrong to me. I'd much rather see the opinions published and shunned rather than outright censored. In the Twitter example, I'd like to see the classifications used to help understand the viewpoint of others or provide further information prior to posting, rather than to censor / ban individuals or groups. Not a fully formed idea, for which I apologise. My gut (and it is only my gut) tells me there is a useful aid there.
- rtpg 10y agoI have a bit of trouble with these arguments, because the "free speech" argument feels really recent to me. At it's core, twitter is an assemblage of communities. Twitter can simply decide that, no, it doesn't want neo-nazis on its website. These people are then free to go make their own websites to hang out on. Websites like Digg or Something Awful, despite also not being about single topics, were never sitting around thinking "Oh, I want to ban this guy that goes around calling black people monkeys, but free speech". Even 4chan would ban people for that sort of dumb stuff. I feel like this argument only became prevalent after reddit became big. There is an argument to be made that reddit's philosophy on this point single-handedly made all "community" websites worse, because it stigmatized the notion of "drawing a line in the sand", and implied that all websites have to accept everyone. I think in the newspaper example, Twitter is a newspaper, not the campus. People can make new websites easily, just like they can make new newspapers. Twitter is under no obligation to "publish" stuff if they don't want to. The internet is the campus. No DNS blocking, just banning users from some websites. And, honestly, the amount of people who care about the "free speech" issue dwarfs the amount of people who see Twitter as "the place to get trolled at". It doesn't seem like good branding to be at the same level as 8chan on this point. Though, to your point, on a more general level, figuring out what's going on in the audience for these sorts of messages is important.
- yomly 10y agoActually I think there's more nuance than simply whether or not to silence certain views. The problem with the alt-right is that it is an idea. Ideas are very hard to kill by censorship and when you do let them "fester" they get more extreme and radical. This is in part how we arrived at the alt-right becoming what it is today. We should want the alt-right out in public in spaces where there are checks and balances. There, it can be killed by moderation (in both senses of the word, organic and inorganic) and dilution. If you push the alt-right to exclusively use their own walled gardens, to concentrate in their own unmoderated, subverted echo chambers, that's when you should be very terrified because that's when you birth actually scary groups. There will always be unpopular opinions on some subject. No matter how much proof you have, there will be flat earthers and creationists. No matter how much you promote equality, there will be bigots. But there is also always a continuum on the spectrum of these affiliations - some people may be mildly xenophobic and have valid concerns on immigration or have ignorant/antiquated views on gender equality, for example. When you take a hard-line stance on these opinions on the hope of promoting one ideal (no matter how noble) you always run the risk of also promoting the other through polarisation.
- krallja 10y agoIt's especially sad, because the word "sock-puppet" already exactly describes the accounts the researcher used.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]