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They change the conversation, driving division and influencing opinion. Propaganda is very powerful, especially when a message appears to be coming from dozens/
by garethsprice 9y ago
They change the conversation, driving division and influencing opinion. Propaganda is very powerful, especially when a message appears to be coming from dozens/thousands of voices.
Look at any controversial tweet these days and the reply thread is full of inflammatory comments from users with numeric usernames (@Joe154354), blurry photos (that can't be reverse image searched) and that seem to ONLY post about political topics and retweet similar voices. Heuristically they are highly likely to be bots or provocateurs but it's hard to prove as Twitter doesn't expose much information.
Twitter has a serious bot/troll problem that they are choosing to ignore, and it is making the discourse on there toxic and untrustworthy. I find myself avoiding the platform these days as it just leaves me feeling stressed and sad.
- upofadown 9y ago>Propaganda is very powerful, especially when a message appears to be coming from dozens/thousands of voices. Well it shouldn't be on an anonymous forum. The only things that count in such a environment are ideas. Only the first one counts. The same ideas over and over again just count as a poor signal to noise ratio (which would be the root problem). I suspect that we are in some sort of eternal september[1] phase here where people are being exposed to such environments for the first time. If this sort of thing is going to be a social problem perhaps we need to teach anonymous forums in school. I personally have no interest in Twitter because I have passed the phase in my life where such a thing would be interesting. That doesn't mean that I think it is worthless but it seems that there are people who are taking it more seriously than it deserves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September