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Forgive me, as I don't use twitter much, but what is the problem with twitter bots? If I don't follow them, aren't they essentially invisible to me? I guess th

Forgive me, as I don't use twitter much, but what is the problem with twitter bots? If I don't follow them, aren't they essentially invisible to me? I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?

itomato 9y ago
As a system, Twitter is easy to "game", if your goal is to spread information. It's trivial to boost the apparent "credibility" of a given account with followers, likes, and retweets. There is essentially no barrier to exploiting these "commodities" with networks of bots artificially boosting these stats. Soon, the synthesized noise from bot accounts drowns out the organic signal of genuine accounts. Waves of content reverberate through the Twittersphere, into and from other channels like 4chan, Facebook and Instagram.
hellbanner 9y ago
Did you read the article? It's political. "n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida." some of these bots, were not bots btw
- sandov 9y ago
  "Our citizens are too stupid to have a personal opinion and distinguish between a bot and a real person"
  - twblalock 9y ago
    Sadly that's true, on Twitter as well as on Facebook, and it's pretty well documented at this point.
    - sandov 9y ago
      Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.
      - beedogs 9y ago
        Yes: let's just go back and re-teach everyone. That is surely an easier solution to implement than banning Twitter bots.
        LoSboccacc 9y ago
        Of course not but there’s not effort either being made to improve the current status for the future generations - quite the opposite actually. States need to play the long game after all.
      - subsection1h 9y ago
        It's an understatement say that the development of critical thinking skills in US schools is lacking. For example, it's estimated that 1 out of 3 Americans believe that all life has existed in it's present form since the beginning of time.[1] Educating these people is difficult because they are trained by their parents and religious leaders to mistrust professors[2] and other experts from an early age. It's much easier to ban bots. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/10/darwin-day/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/10/darwin-day/ [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/13/republicans-much-colder-than-democrats-in-views-of-professors/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/13/republicans-...
      - unclebucknasty 9y ago
        That'd be great but you can't teach everyone to be awesome critical thinkers. There is a question of aptitude. That focus also overlooks the fact that much of the propaganda is emotionally-driven and appeals to certain instincts. For even the most rational of human beings, emotion can overwhelm critical thinking. So, while we can definitely do better in teaching critical thinking skills, we're just going to have a percentage of the population that is susceptible. And, given the fact that we're split almost down the middle politically (the election came down to 85,000 votes across three states), the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country. A more effective root cause mitigation might be to break the two-party monopoly so that a broader set of ideas can flourish. This binary for-or-against system is also unhelpful to say the least.
  - IIAOPSW 9y ago
    The alternative solution (don't let people that stupid vote) is too impalpable for society right now. Even if just 10% of people are that dumb, 10% is more than enough to swing an election.
    - tedeh 9y ago
      I have a pretty good idea on who is going to decide which person is too stupid to vote in such a society — I mean, you must be pretty stupid in the first place to even consider voting for anyone else than the most powerful party/government, right?
      - nasredin 9y ago
        The people in that one party who have been found by courts to repeatadly disenfranchise certain groups?
    - krylon 9y ago
      The basic idea underlying democracy is not that people are intelligent enough to make the right choices, but that they have the right to choose their government regardless of their intelligence. Even if that means you end up with people like George W. Bush junior or Donald Trump in the White House. I am still somewhat shocked that Donald Trump is really President of the USA[1], but I am deeply convinced that denying arbitrary people their right to vote is an acceptable "solution". [1] Really, it sounds like satire, doesn't it?
      - a_tractor 9y ago
        Actually, the basic idea underlying democracy is that people are not only intelligent enough to make the right choices in the benefit of their own interests and the interest of their nation, but that the people are also moral and virtuous enough to guide themselves without the need for outside intervention. That has all been corrupted. Democracy without intelligence, morality, and virtue is not desirable by anyone, that is chaos and will only result in tyranny. Today we do everything in our power to be free of that responsibility. We shun traditional morals and think fraudulent virtue signalling is a replacement for honest hard-earned virtue. People now see government as a provider for freedom, not from outside meddling and tyranny, but from the negative consequences of their failures and poor decisions, and will vote for anybody that offers them the most shit out of their neighbor's pockets, and will gladly accept whatever tyrannical means needed to accomplish that. Democracy was created for an intelligent, moral, and virtuous society seeking national independence, but which now considers those same qualities to be able-ist, oppressive, dangerous, and xenophobic. American nationalism has been subverted by marxism. McCarthy was right. It is impossible to deny without remaining willfully ignorant. The corrupt and foolish idea that the right to choose your government comes without any cost or responsibility is one of the ways we got here. As soon as people were given the ability to vote for handouts, the morality required to keep democracy a just political system was corrupted. There should be no pretense to what it is today. And really, if you still really think Trump is satire, or that the election of Trump is some kind of eye-opening unfathomable result to you, it is my opinion that you have no idea what you are talking about.
- douglaswlance 9y ago
  >"...hundreds of tweets..." You realize how few that is right? Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion? If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans from countries around the world who comment on USA politics?
  - unclebucknasty 9y ago
    >Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion? Demanding proof of effect is an oddly defensive response that seems aimed at exonerating bad behavior. The GP didn't even assert anything about influence; just stated a fact. But what difference does it make? Are you saying we should just accept it if we can't definitively prove it had a certain influence? Sounds an awful lot like a certain U.S. president. >If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans False equivalence. A concerted effort by one person to use technology in amplifying a specific narrative against an adversary is not the same as actual human beings rendering their frequently diverse opinions. Surely you see the difference.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    Millions of real live non-Americans who comment on US politics are not doing it on behalf of a hostile government.
orng 9y ago
They can still follow you, comment, like and retweet your posts. You can block them but if you are popular enough it might be a problem. They also make search a lot worse and the hashtag system for some tags completely useless since all the posts you'll find under that tag are spam posts.
TheSmiddy 9y ago
If you follow any billionaires and read their comments they are full of crypto scams. Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to <address> and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"
- jeffwass 9y ago
  Do people actually fall for this? I thought this is the whole reason to use the blue check mark, so you can immediately tell real Elon from bot Elon. But there are weird celebrity bots too. Eg, I followed Adam Sandler, and within a few hours a couple Adam Sandler bots started following me. They just had retweets of Adam Sandler tweets, but also a few hundred followers. Makes me wonders who are the people that follow these back, maybe just other bots?
  - branchless 9y ago
    Whenever anyone follows me on Twitter I check their account. If it's not someone genuine i block them. Wouldn't work for someone famous but for a normal person it's worth it.
- always_good 9y ago
  And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed. Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in <1 hour, but it's still clearly lucrative. This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots. It's clear that Twitter has held a Laissez-faire or blind-eye philosophy towards bots, but it's hard to keep procrastinating once you can trivially verify that your platform is a lucrative tool for scammers. Not to mention, the top N responses to every high profile tweet are now these scammers and it makes their platform look absolutely uncontrolled.
  - 21 9y ago

itomato 9y ago

As a system, Twitter is easy to "game", if your goal is to spread information. It's trivial to boost the apparent "credibility" of a given account with followers, likes, and retweets. There is essentially no barrier to exploiting these "commodities" with networks of bots artificially boosting these stats. Soon, the synthesized noise from bot accounts drowns out the organic signal of genuine accounts. Waves of content reverberate through the Twittersphere, into and from other channels like 4chan, Facebook and Instagram.

hellbanner 9y ago

Did you read the article? It's political. "n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida." some of these bots, were not bots btw

sandov 9y ago
"Our citizens are too stupid to have a personal opinion and distinguish between a bot and a real person"
- twblalock 9y ago
  Sadly that's true, on Twitter as well as on Facebook, and it's pretty well documented at this point.
  - sandov 9y ago
    Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.
    - beedogs 9y ago
      Yes: let's just go back and re-teach everyone. That is surely an easier solution to implement than banning Twitter bots.
      - LoSboccacc 9y ago
        Of course not but there’s not effort either being made to improve the current status for the future generations - quite the opposite actually. States need to play the long game after all.
    - subsection1h 9y ago
      It's an understatement say that the development of critical thinking skills in US schools is lacking. For example, it's estimated that 1 out of 3 Americans believe that all life has existed in it's present form since the beginning of time.[1] Educating these people is difficult because they are trained by their parents and religious leaders to mistrust professors[2] and other experts from an early age. It's much easier to ban bots. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/10/darwin-day/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/10/darwin-day/ [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/13/republicans-much-colder-than-democrats-in-views-of-professors/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/13/republicans-...
    - unclebucknasty 9y ago
      That'd be great but you can't teach everyone to be awesome critical thinkers. There is a question of aptitude. That focus also overlooks the fact that much of the propaganda is emotionally-driven and appeals to certain instincts. For even the most rational of human beings, emotion can overwhelm critical thinking. So, while we can definitely do better in teaching critical thinking skills, we're just going to have a percentage of the population that is susceptible. And, given the fact that we're split almost down the middle politically (the election came down to 85,000 votes across three states), the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country. A more effective root cause mitigation might be to break the two-party monopoly so that a broader set of ideas can flourish. This binary for-or-against system is also unhelpful to say the least.
- IIAOPSW 9y ago
  The alternative solution (don't let people that stupid vote) is too impalpable for society right now. Even if just 10% of people are that dumb, 10% is more than enough to swing an election.
  - tedeh 9y ago
    I have a pretty good idea on who is going to decide which person is too stupid to vote in such a society — I mean, you must be pretty stupid in the first place to even consider voting for anyone else than the most powerful party/government, right?
    - nasredin 9y ago
      The people in that one party who have been found by courts to repeatadly disenfranchise certain groups?
  - krylon 9y ago
    The basic idea underlying democracy is not that people are intelligent enough to make the right choices, but that they have the right to choose their government regardless of their intelligence. Even if that means you end up with people like George W. Bush junior or Donald Trump in the White House. I am still somewhat shocked that Donald Trump is really President of the USA[1], but I am deeply convinced that denying arbitrary people their right to vote is an acceptable "solution". [1] Really, it sounds like satire, doesn't it?
    - a_tractor 9y ago
      Actually, the basic idea underlying democracy is that people are not only intelligent enough to make the right choices in the benefit of their own interests and the interest of their nation, but that the people are also moral and virtuous enough to guide themselves without the need for outside intervention. That has all been corrupted. Democracy without intelligence, morality, and virtue is not desirable by anyone, that is chaos and will only result in tyranny. Today we do everything in our power to be free of that responsibility. We shun traditional morals and think fraudulent virtue signalling is a replacement for honest hard-earned virtue. People now see government as a provider for freedom, not from outside meddling and tyranny, but from the negative consequences of their failures and poor decisions, and will vote for anybody that offers them the most shit out of their neighbor's pockets, and will gladly accept whatever tyrannical means needed to accomplish that. Democracy was created for an intelligent, moral, and virtuous society seeking national independence, but which now considers those same qualities to be able-ist, oppressive, dangerous, and xenophobic. American nationalism has been subverted by marxism. McCarthy was right. It is impossible to deny without remaining willfully ignorant. The corrupt and foolish idea that the right to choose your government comes without any cost or responsibility is one of the ways we got here. As soon as people were given the ability to vote for handouts, the morality required to keep democracy a just political system was corrupted. There should be no pretense to what it is today. And really, if you still really think Trump is satire, or that the election of Trump is some kind of eye-opening unfathomable result to you, it is my opinion that you have no idea what you are talking about.
douglaswlance 9y ago
>"...hundreds of tweets..." You realize how few that is right? Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion? If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans from countries around the world who comment on USA politics?
- unclebucknasty 9y ago
  >Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion? Demanding proof of effect is an oddly defensive response that seems aimed at exonerating bad behavior. The GP didn't even assert anything about influence; just stated a fact. But what difference does it make? Are you saying we should just accept it if we can't definitively prove it had a certain influence? Sounds an awful lot like a certain U.S. president. >If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans False equivalence. A concerted effort by one person to use technology in amplifying a specific narrative against an adversary is not the same as actual human beings rendering their frequently diverse opinions. Surely you see the difference.
- nasredin 9y ago
  Millions of real live non-Americans who comment on US politics are not doing it on behalf of a hostile government.

orng 9y ago

They can still follow you, comment, like and retweet your posts. You can block them but if you are popular enough it might be a problem. They also make search a lot worse and the hashtag system for some tags completely useless since all the posts you'll find under that tag are spam posts.

TheSmiddy 9y ago

If you follow any billionaires and read their comments they are full of crypto scams. Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to <address> and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"

jeffwass 9y ago
Do people actually fall for this? I thought this is the whole reason to use the blue check mark, so you can immediately tell real Elon from bot Elon. But there are weird celebrity bots too. Eg, I followed Adam Sandler, and within a few hours a couple Adam Sandler bots started following me. They just had retweets of Adam Sandler tweets, but also a few hundred followers. Makes me wonders who are the people that follow these back, maybe just other bots?
- branchless 9y ago
  Whenever anyone follows me on Twitter I check their account. If it's not someone genuine i block them. Wouldn't work for someone famous but for a normal person it's worth it.
always_good 9y ago
And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed. Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in <1 hour, but it's still clearly lucrative. This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots. It's clear that Twitter has held a Laissez-faire or blind-eye philosophy towards bots, but it's hard to keep procrastinating once you can trivially verify that your platform is a lucrative tool for scammers. Not to mention, the top N responses to every high profile tweet are now these scammers and it makes their platform look absolutely uncontrolled.
- 21 9y ago