6 ms·

First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News

70 points by trextrex 9y ago

jxramos 9y ago
Would have liked to have seen a concrete example of where it worked and walked the reader through a simple demonstration. At some point in the article you realize it's all just a bunch of hand-waving.
Fnoord 9y ago
Fake news goes further than politics. Its claws reach to everything unscientific. Those claws are -in theory- rather enormous for the amount of unscientific debate on the Internet is huge. Take the following two examples from the alt. health community: David 'Avocado' Wolfe [1] and Dr. Joseph Mercola [2]. The former is a self proclaimed health guru with no medical degree yet he makes all kind of (dangerous) health claims. The latter's similar tho he does have a degree. The latter's article is on a website called Quackwatch. If Quackwatch is credible (I didn't verify) it could be interesting to hook into them, perhaps via an API. Funny enough when I searched for these two (I used DDG, YMMV) in combination with the term fake news I found articles where they comment about other (supposed) fake news. For example, in one article they claimed in the headline CNN distributed fake news. I don't know if that's deliberate, but at least from a SEO PoV it seems clever of them. Another interesting question is, could -in a future- whitelisting be a better default modus operandi than blacklisting? [1] https://au.be.yahoo.com/lifestyle/real-life/a/34572713/david-wolfe-youre-fake-news-yahoo7-be/ https://au.be.yahoo.com/lifestyle/real-life/a/34572713/david... [2] http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html
creaghpatr 9y ago
>So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org. As long as it remains an assumption that these are 'independent' non-partisan fact-checking organizations, I would discard any conclusions drawn here. Also Breitbart is highly editorialized news and commentary, but it's certainly not fake. The fact that its CEO strategized the largest political upset in recent history is very, very real.
- gitonup 9y ago
  In the context of that sentence I take independent to mean "unrelated by connection to each other" rather than "unrelated by ideology." In that context I don't see a claim that they're non-partisan. For that matter, nor can I think of any outlet in modern days which would both a) report that information were they to find it and b) not be immediately and loudly labeled partisan by a significant portion of the internet.
- forgotmysn 9y ago
  many of breitbart's articles are so far removed from reality that they border on fake, and the onion is definitely fake as they exclusively publish satire. So although those sites may not be explicitly 'fake news', their inclusion in this research makes perfect sense.
- arstin 9y ago
  Obviously "fake news" has become used for content in which truth isn't really a dominant virtue...especially when it's being overridden by "strategizing political upsets"...and especially when that's tied to just making a shitload of money manipulating people. Traditional editorials like, say, in the National Review or NYT, may well be wrong, but at least they're trying to be right. Likewise, the "independence" of fact-checking orgs doesn't lie in being "non-partisan" so much as making speaking truly an overriding value. (I'd concede that Breitbart in particular probably isn't a paradigm example of a fake news outlet, but it's obviously on the spectrum.)
  - creaghpatr 9y ago
    Having said that, I suspect that Breitbart, The Onion, CNN, NYT, Buzzfeed, superPACs on both sides of the aisle et. al. do use bots to advance their social media engagement- because why wouldn't they? There's 2 elements to this study, one which is determining what is "fake news" and the other is "how do bots influence social media engagement?". The latter is important to study but how do we judge the organizations singled out in this study without a baseline of "real news" (for lack of better word) to compare them to?
siegecraft 9y ago
Distribution of propaganda by bots is at least sort-of democratic. I wish there was more analysis of the automated suppression of news by the various platforms (twitter, facebook et al).
- KirinDave 9y ago
  It's not democratic at all. It's specifically the use of resources to impersonate votes.
  - siegecraft 9y ago
    Ok, not democratic in that each person doesn't have an equal voice, but democratic in that anyone could buy some twitter botnet time and get their own message out.
    - KirinDave 9y ago
      It's not traditional to raft the notion of democracy to "how much money you have to rent a resource." In practice, sure. That can happen. But we tend to universally awknowledge that it dilutes the intent of democracy, which is to keep a government honest to the people it governs. It seems like, given the astronomical differences in wealth between individuals in this world, this is precisely the kind of thing where one person can use resources to dilute the power of many individuals.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
throwawaymanbot 9y ago
FoxNews and Brietbart are 2 sides of the same coin. They are right/far-right propaganda outlets, who's only aim is political discord. They will use fake or blown out of proportion or Pumped up editorial "news" segments to spread their message to serve an agenda. These bots help their message spread. Any guess who's agenda they serve?
- robattila128 9y ago
  Maybe it's justified. There's some big fear mongering and public shaming by the MSM against conservatives, especially lately. https://imgur.com/a/c1RnG https://imgur.com/a/c1RnG https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6rantp/does_anybody_have_any_fake_news_to_add_to_my_cnn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6rantp/does_any...
  - throwawaymanbot 9y ago
    Spare me "the Donald" reddit thread. You dont think in light of certain facts thats conservatives and fascists masquerading as conservatives getting heat is justified?
olivermarks 9y ago
The biggest challenge to branded corporate 'masthead credibility' information sources/'news' aggregators is their reliance on firms like Outbrain for advertising revenue. Outbrain packages up salacious and questionable material as click bait and runs it on sites like SFGate, supposedly as additional 'news' from a partner of SFGate. The result is deterioration of trust and respect for SFGate. The fuzzy term 'fake news' is fraught with problems. We've been lied to so many times in the western world via 'official' sources many people simply don't trust the mainstream media any more. Apparently more people were watching Yogi Bear reruns than CNN in the US a few weeks ago during prime time. The joy of the internet is our ability to consume information from a wide variety of sources, triangulate across many ideas, reporting and opinions to make up our own minds. The old model of having a small number of 'news outlets', such as the four commercial TV channels and one main 'news' broadcast a night that worked so well during the Vietnam war era is long gone. There seems to be a hankering for regulated, rubber stamped 'news' and credibility checks, which I think is profoundly undemocratic and against the principles of free speech.
- jerrylives 9y ago
  > Apparently more people were watching Yogi Bear reruns than CNN in the US a few weeks ago during prime time. lol fake news much? You got that from Sean Hannity's tweets. Cable news are reporting huge viewership http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/cable-news-ratings-cnn-fox-news-msnbc-q2-1202479416/ http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/cable-news-ratings-cnn-fox-n... http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sean-hannity-mocks-reruns-of-yogi-bear-are-beating-cnn/article/2628304 http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sean-hannity-mocks-reruns-...
  - olivermarks 9y ago
    I read that here on right wing financial site ZeroHedge. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-06/cnns-rating-collapse-prime-time-shows-draw-less-viewers-re-runs-yogi-bear http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-06/cnns-rating-collaps... Sean Hannity's tweets - along with any other TV bobble head of either political persuasion - are not something I ever pay attention too. I try and read a cross section of perspectives across the political spectrum and draw my own conclusions from that...
rssmllr 9y ago
It is way too simplistic to decree certain sites fake or not, and I would have hoped than an article from MIT would acknowledge this instead of reinforcing this "fake news" meme. If you've heard about yellow journalism as well as Project Mockingbird, then you can appreciate the fact that news is a tool to entertain and manufacture consent and occasionally inform. All of it lies on a spectrum between fake and not fake. Even The Onion which is intentionally satirical, typically has a nugget of truth in each of his stories, which is why it's good satire. If you're not already convinced how ridiculous this term is, consider for a moment: How do you prove if a certain publication is "fake news" or not? If a "not fake news" mainstream news source publishes a single story which is later corrected or retracted, is the entire publication forever labeled "fake news" or is a certain amount of fake stories required for a publication as a whole to be considered fake?
- gdulli 9y ago
  Journalists have been making mistakes since the beginning of journalism but if you're paying attention you know there's a new class of web site that's qualitatively different from journalism. It doesn't make an attempt to do anything but spread transparent lies. And it's effective because it's aimed at a specific audience that's susceptible to believing what it wants to believe without asking questions, regardless of the transparency of the lie to everyone else. There's a specific reason the term "fake news" was just recently coined. And there's a reason why some are trying to pervert the term by applying it to anything that's mistaken. Because then it applies to everyone instead of calling attention to those who are specifically benefiting from it.
  - rssmllr 9y ago
    I hear where you're coming from, and it could very well just be that the term appeared to help explain why Hillary lost the election. However, I believe the term can easily be used to silence independent news sources that are telling inconvenient truths. The motive for this could be that the proliferation of new media news sources (social media, blogs, youtube) is a threat to mainstream establishment news sources' bottom line, as well as their immense power in shaping public dialogue.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Dowwie 9y ago
arxiv link to the underlying research: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592
ManlyBread 9y ago
>Fake news were used to manipulate the recent election I see this being repeated often, but very little evidence behind it.
egberts1 9y ago
Paper would be better titled as "Examination of Online News Amplification through Social Bots". There are no multiple-bullet itemized criteria on what makes "Fake News" in the whitepaper. Some of the listed websites makes uses of only links to other websites, also of dubious nature. Perhaps, that's the criteria.

70 points by trextrex 9y ago

Would have liked to have seen a concrete example of where it worked and walked the reader through a simple demonstration. At some point in the article you realize it's all just a bunch of hand-waving.

Fnoord 9y ago

Fake news goes further than politics. Its claws reach to everything unscientific. Those claws are -in theory- rather enormous for the amount of unscientific debate on the Internet is huge. Take the following two examples from the alt. health community: David 'Avocado' Wolfe [1] and Dr. Joseph Mercola [2]. The former is a self proclaimed health guru with no medical degree yet he makes all kind of (dangerous) health claims. The latter's similar tho he does have a degree. The latter's article is on a website called Quackwatch. If Quackwatch is credible (I didn't verify) it could be interesting to hook into them, perhaps via an API. Funny enough when I searched for these two (I used DDG, YMMV) in combination with the term fake news I found articles where they comment about other (supposed) fake news. For example, in one article they claimed in the headline CNN distributed fake news. I don't know if that's deliberate, but at least from a SEO PoV it seems clever of them. Another interesting question is, could -in a future- whitelisting be a better default modus operandi than blacklisting? [1] https://au.be.yahoo.com/lifestyle/real-life/a/34572713/david-wolfe-youre-fake-news-yahoo7-be/ https://au.be.yahoo.com/lifestyle/real-life/a/34572713/david... [2] http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html

creaghpatr 9y ago

>So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org. As long as it remains an assumption that these are 'independent' non-partisan fact-checking organizations, I would discard any conclusions drawn here. Also Breitbart is highly editorialized news and commentary, but it's certainly not fake. The fact that its CEO strategized the largest political upset in recent history is very, very real.

gitonup 9y ago
In the context of that sentence I take independent to mean "unrelated by connection to each other" rather than "unrelated by ideology." In that context I don't see a claim that they're non-partisan. For that matter, nor can I think of any outlet in modern days which would both a) report that information were they to find it and b) not be immediately and loudly labeled partisan by a significant portion of the internet.
forgotmysn 9y ago
many of breitbart's articles are so far removed from reality that they border on fake, and the onion is definitely fake as they exclusively publish satire. So although those sites may not be explicitly 'fake news', their inclusion in this research makes perfect sense.
arstin 9y ago
Obviously "fake news" has become used for content in which truth isn't really a dominant virtue...especially when it's being overridden by "strategizing political upsets"...and especially when that's tied to just making a shitload of money manipulating people. Traditional editorials like, say, in the National Review or NYT, may well be wrong, but at least they're trying to be right. Likewise, the "independence" of fact-checking orgs doesn't lie in being "non-partisan" so much as making speaking truly an overriding value. (I'd concede that Breitbart in particular probably isn't a paradigm example of a fake news outlet, but it's obviously on the spectrum.)
- creaghpatr 9y ago
  Having said that, I suspect that Breitbart, The Onion, CNN, NYT, Buzzfeed, superPACs on both sides of the aisle et. al. do use bots to advance their social media engagement- because why wouldn't they? There's 2 elements to this study, one which is determining what is "fake news" and the other is "how do bots influence social media engagement?". The latter is important to study but how do we judge the organizations singled out in this study without a baseline of "real news" (for lack of better word) to compare them to?

siegecraft 9y ago

Distribution of propaganda by bots is at least sort-of democratic. I wish there was more analysis of the automated suppression of news by the various platforms (twitter, facebook et al).

KirinDave 9y ago
It's not democratic at all. It's specifically the use of resources to impersonate votes.
- siegecraft 9y ago
  Ok, not democratic in that each person doesn't have an equal voice, but democratic in that anyone could buy some twitter botnet time and get their own message out.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    It's not traditional to raft the notion of democracy to "how much money you have to rent a resource." In practice, sure. That can happen. But we tend to universally awknowledge that it dilutes the intent of democracy, which is to keep a government honest to the people it governs. It seems like, given the astronomical differences in wealth between individuals in this world, this is precisely the kind of thing where one person can use resources to dilute the power of many individuals.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

throwawaymanbot 9y ago

FoxNews and Brietbart are 2 sides of the same coin. They are right/far-right propaganda outlets, who's only aim is political discord. They will use fake or blown out of proportion or Pumped up editorial "news" segments to spread their message to serve an agenda. These bots help their message spread. Any guess who's agenda they serve?

robattila128 9y ago
Maybe it's justified. There's some big fear mongering and public shaming by the MSM against conservatives, especially lately. https://imgur.com/a/c1RnG https://imgur.com/a/c1RnG https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6rantp/does_anybody_have_any_fake_news_to_add_to_my_cnn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6rantp/does_any...
- throwawaymanbot 9y ago
  Spare me "the Donald" reddit thread. You dont think in light of certain facts thats conservatives and fascists masquerading as conservatives getting heat is justified?

olivermarks 9y ago

The biggest challenge to branded corporate 'masthead credibility' information sources/'news' aggregators is their reliance on firms like Outbrain for advertising revenue. Outbrain packages up salacious and questionable material as click bait and runs it on sites like SFGate, supposedly as additional 'news' from a partner of SFGate. The result is deterioration of trust and respect for SFGate. The fuzzy term 'fake news' is fraught with problems. We've been lied to so many times in the western world via 'official' sources many people simply don't trust the mainstream media any more. Apparently more people were watching Yogi Bear reruns than CNN in the US a few weeks ago during prime time. The joy of the internet is our ability to consume information from a wide variety of sources, triangulate across many ideas, reporting and opinions to make up our own minds. The old model of having a small number of 'news outlets', such as the four commercial TV channels and one main 'news' broadcast a night that worked so well during the Vietnam war era is long gone. There seems to be a hankering for regulated, rubber stamped 'news' and credibility checks, which I think is profoundly undemocratic and against the principles of free speech.

jerrylives 9y ago
> Apparently more people were watching Yogi Bear reruns than CNN in the US a few weeks ago during prime time. lol fake news much? You got that from Sean Hannity's tweets. Cable news are reporting huge viewership http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/cable-news-ratings-cnn-fox-news-msnbc-q2-1202479416/ http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/cable-news-ratings-cnn-fox-n... http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sean-hannity-mocks-reruns-of-yogi-bear-are-beating-cnn/article/2628304 http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sean-hannity-mocks-reruns-...
- olivermarks 9y ago
  I read that here on right wing financial site ZeroHedge. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-06/cnns-rating-collapse-prime-time-shows-draw-less-viewers-re-runs-yogi-bear http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-06/cnns-rating-collaps... Sean Hannity's tweets - along with any other TV bobble head of either political persuasion - are not something I ever pay attention too. I try and read a cross section of perspectives across the political spectrum and draw my own conclusions from that...

rssmllr 9y ago

It is way too simplistic to decree certain sites fake or not, and I would have hoped than an article from MIT would acknowledge this instead of reinforcing this "fake news" meme. If you've heard about yellow journalism as well as Project Mockingbird, then you can appreciate the fact that news is a tool to entertain and manufacture consent and occasionally inform. All of it lies on a spectrum between fake and not fake. Even The Onion which is intentionally satirical, typically has a nugget of truth in each of his stories, which is why it's good satire. If you're not already convinced how ridiculous this term is, consider for a moment: How do you prove if a certain publication is "fake news" or not? If a "not fake news" mainstream news source publishes a single story which is later corrected or retracted, is the entire publication forever labeled "fake news" or is a certain amount of fake stories required for a publication as a whole to be considered fake?

gdulli 9y ago
Journalists have been making mistakes since the beginning of journalism but if you're paying attention you know there's a new class of web site that's qualitatively different from journalism. It doesn't make an attempt to do anything but spread transparent lies. And it's effective because it's aimed at a specific audience that's susceptible to believing what it wants to believe without asking questions, regardless of the transparency of the lie to everyone else. There's a specific reason the term "fake news" was just recently coined. And there's a reason why some are trying to pervert the term by applying it to anything that's mistaken. Because then it applies to everyone instead of calling attention to those who are specifically benefiting from it.
- rssmllr 9y ago
  I hear where you're coming from, and it could very well just be that the term appeared to help explain why Hillary lost the election. However, I believe the term can easily be used to silence independent news sources that are telling inconvenient truths. The motive for this could be that the proliferation of new media news sources (social media, blogs, youtube) is a threat to mainstream establishment news sources' bottom line, as well as their immense power in shaping public dialogue.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Dowwie 9y ago

arxiv link to the underlying research: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592

ManlyBread 9y ago

>Fake news were used to manipulate the recent election I see this being repeated often, but very little evidence behind it.

egberts1 9y ago

Paper would be better titled as "Examination of Online News Amplification through Social Bots". There are no multiple-bullet itemized criteria on what makes "Fake News" in the whitepaper. Some of the listed websites makes uses of only links to other websites, also of dubious nature. Perhaps, that's the criteria.