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It's the difference between an angry mob and an angry mob of puppets controlled by one guy with an agenda. Normally, without the puppet/bot amplification, the
by darpa_escapee 8y ago
It's the difference between an angry mob and an angry mob of puppets controlled by one guy with an agenda.
Normally, without the puppet/bot amplification, the latter guy could be easily ignored. Now his bots can drown out real voices, and that's a problem.
See: the thousands of letters to the FCC regarding net neutrality that were sent by "bots" impersonating real people. Letters written by actual voters were dwarfed by the fake letters.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoThere's a more fundamental problem you're hitting on. Somehow we have shifted from responding to rationality to responding to noise. Granted it's always been the squeaky wheel that gets the oil, but now you have the cow squeaking for oil. That was one awkward metaphor... What I mean is that in times past getting involved in issues took a decent amount of effort and time. You had to really care about an issue to become active with it. Now the internet provides a 0 effort means for people to chip in with their 2 cents. And so there's a lot of noise that says absolutely nothing, even without bots. And the worst part is that companies and individuals are increasingly treating the noise as the signal, and that's counter productive.