8 ms·

YouTube comments are heavily manipulated, and I fear for our democracy

127 points by rawrmaan 8y ago

stefan_ 8y ago
Americans think so little of their fellow citizens, it's astonishing.
- GavinMcG 8y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you're trying to say here, or how it relates to this article?
  - stefan_ 8y ago
    If you believe a significant chunk of the voting population is swayed by YouTube comments in their political beliefs, you could just as well be arguing for forcibly sterilizing the feebleminded.
    - GavinMcG 8y ago
      There are other potential problems than swaying voters, though: swaying non-voters (to keep them uninvolved) and swaying potential future voters (such as teenagers). To the extent that people engage in any format, propaganda in that format is concerning. And like it or not, people do engage in YouTube comments.
    - rawrmaan 8y ago
      If you think that being smart and vigilant is enough to protect yourself from this type of manipulation, I think you're wrong. I find it very easy to fall for social proof in internet comments, and I've been in the tech industry for over 10 years. This has nothing to do with intelligence.
    - tree_of_item 8y ago
      It's not just YouTube. Twitter and the rest are vulnerable to the same problem. The whole idea of humans socializing on the internet is vulnerable to this.
dreamdu5t 8y ago
It’s a little odd to me that people are so focused on supposed Internet comment manipulation when we’ve had one of the largest media empires pushing hate 24/7 through mainstream channels like Fox News for at least a decade.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  It is normalization bias. Teenagers dancing to <new music> is dangerous! Organized crime, oligarchs, epidemics, pollution, car accidents? A shrug and "Eh what can you do about them." I suspect a lot of cognitive dissonance is evolutionary survivalship bias of "don't question the big man with the club/sword" and also why public speaking is commonly feared worse than death - because it could kill more than just you in barbaric days.
- sgarman 8y ago
  The existence of fox news does not negate the value of identifying other, possibly more subversive methods of manipulation. If anything if we were satisfied with calling out only fox news then it has does it's job.
- cpr 8y ago
  Right, "hate" as in "opinions that differ from the progressive zeitgeist."
- bioinformatics 8y ago
  Exactly. And especially when you have CNN doing the same thing on the other side of the spectrum.
- thrower123 8y ago
  I suspect that people that believe wholeheartedly that Fox News is some evil bastion of hate-mongering demagoguery don't actually watch very much of it. It's considerably less hysterical than the national nightly news I see on the old big three.
  - slededit 8y ago
    MSNBC took the formula and brought it to a new level.
ihuman 8y ago
Do people even read YouTube comments? Serious question. They've been pretty low-quality for years, so I've stopped reading them a long time ago.
- danso 8y ago
  That's exactly what I was thinking. I'll sometimes skim comments during a boring bit in a video (such as an old-school NES/SNES speedrun), but I don't attempt nor expect serious discussion or rebuttals. I imagine the noise-to-signal ratio is even worse for videos with any type of political content.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  I get a chuckle out of them sometimes.
- rawrmaan 8y ago
  It's a pretty easy question to answer: Yes, they do. Look at the engagement in terms of likes and replies on almost any video. Clearly people are reading and participating.
- l9k 8y ago
  They are not available on TV (Smart TV, Fire Stick, PS4...) which is used more and more. So I guess, fortunately, they are not that important to Google
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  I only look at the first 5 comments, incase the youtuber responds to them or likes them directly. Everything else is just repetitive low quality spam usually
- CM30 8y ago
  I sometimes read them, especially on my own channel. Surprisingly, I haven't really encountered too much in the way of political idiocy there, perhaps because I don't tend to make videos about politics/anything that could get an ideological reaction. So if a channel is fairly obscure and doesn't focus on politics, the comments can be... bearable. But anything remotely popular is a hive of scum and idiocy that most people will rightfully not touch with a fifty foot bargepole. Less political there just means more 12 year olds posting outdated memes in place of the Russian bot farms and political trolls.
doomrobo 8y ago
I'm conflicted here. YouTube is an awful place to get political commentary, so I'd say that anyone whose opinion is primarily decided on YouTube has made a mistake to begin with. On the other hand, a LOT of people seemingly do get their political commentary from YouTube, and we might want to mitigate the damage that that causes. On the third hand, YouTube is not a public forum and doesn't have to do anything for us.
- what_ever 8y ago
  What's your go to place to get political commentary then?
  - Diederich 8y ago
    You're not asking me, but I'll briefly weigh in. While not a complete list, I look at https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/ and https://old.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ The latter, especially, is heavily curated. The former is, I think, fair.
  - doomrobo 8y ago
    I read TheSkimm (https://www.theskimm.com/ https://www.theskimm.com/) and WSJ for the most part
btown 8y ago
The problem is not bots; it's that money can flow towards troll farms consisting of real individuals, posting of their own free will, but massively amplified. And it's almost always cheaper to sow discord than to scale a "fact checking farm." I'm not sure if democracy has actually proven itself to be stable; perhaps it's an unstable system whose oscillations were artificially dampened until 2016, because this strategy and the requisite technology had not yet matured.
- dreamdu5t 8y ago
  Money has been spreading misinformation long before troll farms. Fox News doesn’t care about fact checking. We had birther conspiracies, Obama is a Muslim sympathizer, immigrants are coming to kill you, and other crazy narratives peddled by the most watched cable news channel for over a decade. The alt-right started with the mainstream media.
  - fredley 8y ago
    The difference is that until recently, you saw this stuff on Fox, and other stuff elsewhere. Sure, some people (a lot of people!) only watched Fox and swallowed it all, but a lot of people didn't. They knew that Fox was Fox, etc. Nowadays, in a pile of YouTube comments, or Twitter replies, or Facebook posts, you cannot tell who or what is behind it. You know when a story is broadcast on Fox that it's Fox. When it's a comment, is it a real person? A bot? A troll-farm worker? If one of the latter, where is the money coming from? There's no way of knowing. Add to this group polarization[1] and other known psychological factors, and it's easy to flood out a particular online space with a particular narrative, with no visible accountability. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Money has been spreading misinformation long before troll farms. Fox News doesn’t care about fact checking. It goes back far before that. Even into this nation's early history; and all the way back, at least, to the Protestant Reformation. Check out the Library of Congress image collection. You wouldn't believe some of the fliers (the "memes" of their time) published about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They make today's trolls and alt-right look like nuns.
notahacker 8y ago
The problem with online discourse in general is less the existence of the troll farms and more an abundance of people who voluntarily produce and endorse stuff in a manner essentially indistinguishable from the troll farms. If you want people to endorse the veracity of your scam, you'll have to pay. Want them to endorse the veracity of claim you've just made up about $politicalentity and you won't...
redleggedfrog 8y ago
If you're reading YouTube comments, you're already a lost cause.
notacoward 8y ago
"What is Google going to do about it?" Absolutely nothing, unless diverting attention counts. A few product announcements, something something net neutrality, a little more "juice" for every possible news item with an anti-Facebook or anti-Twitter vibe, and voila! Nobody's talking about YouTube any more. They're in the attention business, after all. They know that letting attention dissipate is their best strategy in this case. In a better world, they'd be using some of those vast resources and ML expertise to detect the kinds of vote/comment clustering that signal both commercial and political manipulation. Others have done it already. The fact that the self-styled "best and the brightest" are way behind on this says that they don't have the interest.
- lgeorget 8y ago
  "Others have done it already." Others with the same number of accounts and daily visits? With the same flowrate of publications and comments?
  - notacoward 8y ago
    Yes. Facebook has been doing this for spam for ages, for Russian and Chinese and Iranian political influence rings more recently. It's sure not easy at that scale, but it's not beyond Google's capabilities. Disclaimer: I work at Facebook, though I'm only involved in those efforts to the extent that I work on the data-storage systems that support the data scientists.
esotericn 8y ago
To me, this feels like a precursor to the actual issue that's going to happen. Eventually, we won't be able to distinguish between real humans and bots online. No CAPTCHA will work, no Turing test, none of that stuff. Message authentication (e.g. keysigning, or a centralised provider you trust) works for individual identities that you're already aware of, but the general case of trusting comments online? Even without all of that, you've never had any idea whether the "person" replying to your comment is paid, or has a bias, or whatever else. If, say, 30% of Hacker News commenters were "fake" in that future scenario, would we know? How would we know? Once we develop a method, can't that be gamed?
- rawrmaan 8y ago
  It's one of the biggest problems that I worry about with the internet. Yes, public key cryptography can prove that "message x came from source y". But nobody's figured out a way to prove "source y is a person" or even better "source y is definitely the person they say they are". I like the approach projects like Keybase and Stellar are taking: Building a decentralized network of trust based on existing, real-world trust-based relationships.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  As for HN, do you think it’s less than 30% today? If so/not,how do you know? What do you count as “fake”? Actual bots, sure, but what about a real person running an automation that spams overnight? What about many real people mass-typing “opinions” on behalf of someone who pays them? What about a single businessman typin a falsehood that helps his business? Which of these count as fake?
  - esotericn 8y ago
    a) I don't know! b) All of the ones you've mentioned, at least. I deliberately didn't define it because I think it's difficult.
- opwieurposiu 8y ago
  If you had to pay a fee to post a comment, the bots would not scale. Even 1 cent would work.
mlb_hn 8y ago
It's not just comments - the ability to drown out other views applies to actual news articles too. We saw back in 2009 with the Time Person of the Year campaign how easy it was for coordinated groups to drown out the public (https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/21/4chan-takes-over-the-time-100/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/21/4chan-takes-over-the-time-...). As legitimate news organizations increasingly use analytics as part of their decision processes, that unsolved vulnerability presents an opportunity for click farms to drive traffic to articles and indirectly manipulate the production and placement of actual articles as well =/
pnw_hazor 8y ago
I watch youtube on my TV using Roku so comments are not even visible or accessible. I consider that a feature.
micah94 8y ago
Wow. I thought this was going to be a discussion of how Google/Youtube was manipulating the comments. But it was merely about some silly bots fooling a bunch of kids. Youtube is never going to do anything about that. They prefer the "Community Guideline Strike" Hammer or take down your channel completely. They can disable comments completely (if they want to) or change them here and there. I've seen complaints about this but it's hard to prove. But we've all probably seen videos with COMMENTS HAVE BEEN DISABLED (and not by the owner). They WANT you to be manipulated by the comments on channels they allow. This guy is completely missing the boat here...
- tree_of_item 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That Google is editing people's comments, and that's the real problem? I thought the article was insightful and brought up a relevant issue, and I'm not sure what boat you claim it's missed.
  - micah94 8y ago
    I believe the real issue is Google itself manipulating the comments for their own ends -- to make money and market to you. Bots fooling kids is not something they care about.
    - aeternus 8y ago
      I doubt there is any conspiracy here, Google is unlikely to be manipulating the comments themselves. This is likely just simple incentives: - Google uses comment count as a measure of video engagement - Monetization is based on engagement - Content producers are therefore incentivized to generate comments - Controversy is great at generating comments, so content producers get creative
    - tree_of_item 8y ago
      Yeah that's the part I don't get: how is Google "manipulating" the comments? And the article is not about kids; if you made it to the end you'd see implications for e.g. the November midterms in the U.S.
randomguy23 8y ago
And Hacker News comments are any better? The core issue becomes: who do you trust? If you read the comment and blithely accept what it says without thinking about it, you'll fall for any scam that comes along. You need to examine the ideas within the comment, compare it with other information (from hopefully different sources) and then come to a conclusion as to it's veracity. It's part of being in a society where freedom of speech is a right (a US centric viewpoint, since that's where I'm from).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rawrmaan 8y ago
  I never said that anywhere was any better. I'd like to think Hacker News is a place where fewer people would be fooled, because this is a place specifically for critical thought and discussion. YouTube is not. It's a website that everyone uses, and where the most impressionable or least politically aware members of the population are the most numerous, easiest targets.
  - YinglingLight 8y ago
    Believe me. You can be politically aware and still fall into a hallucination bubble. However I will say that Engineers, good ones, are accustomed to being wrong and taking the initiative to change their thinking.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    And most importantly: YouTube lacks a dang. The volume of comments that are processed vastly exceeds what human moderation could possibly do, and community up-or-down-flag moderation of comments has massive known vulnerabilities to sock-puppeteering and signal-jamming. It's an extremely ripe target for this type of manipulation.
    - charlesism 8y ago
      If YouTube cared about anything aside from "user engagement", they could quite easily whip their comments into shape. They're not really trying. > The volume of comments that are processed > vastly exceeds what human moderation could possibly do For every 500 comments, there is one video. For every 50 videos, there is one Channel with a Google user behind it. Force creators to handle the complaints about comments on their videos... an order of magnitude less work. I've gone into this before and there really seems to be total buy-in here to the idea that these companies couldn't possibly manage to weed the toxicity off their platforms. I don't believe it for an instant. It's true only if you refuse to entertain any decrease of "user engagement". If you are willing to lose some eyeballs, the problem is manageable. And that sacrifice, in the case of YouTube, isn't even a sacrifice! YouTube would wind up with more users if the comments weren't so toxic. Susan et al just don't have the courage to change anything.
pixelpp 8y ago
YouTube's comments engine is garbage.
robbrown451 8y ago
"YouTube the most-used social media site in the world" By a certain measure that may be true, but if you were to actually measure how often people read and post comments, and what percentage of users do, I think you might not reach that conclusion. There is a social media aspect to YouTube, but I don't think that is its main function for the vast majority of users (who are probably better described as "viewers"). (that said I think the article is good, and YouTube comment quality should be an embarrassment to Google)
fareesh 8y ago
If an attractive Russian seduces a politician for the purpose of espionage and influencing policy, their spouse is not going to excuse them because "Oh you cheated on me because of Russian meddling!" Like the marriage in the aforementioned hypothetical, left of center politics is failing worldwide for other reasons, not because of some nefarious social media plot. People are growing fed up with government as an entity, and as a result, they want less government in their lives. Over the past few decades, the practiced manner of a politician became something that was mimicked and parodied worldwide, and popular culture widely regarded the politician as a crook for far too long. Even some of the most charismatic leaders who were beloved worldwide - most recently President Barack Obama, have been wrought with scandals like Snowden's NSA revelations, and the weak and dishonest manner in which the President responded when the activities of the intelligence agencies were exposed. Even during his first term, he made the (perhaps superior) decision to bail out the Wall street banks, and was subsequently betrayed by the various corporations who gave large payouts to top executives. To working class folks, these things are unforgivable especially when they come at the hands of someone you admired, even loved. The trust in government as an idea is so low that all someone has to do is stand up and say "these crooks and rascals have lied to you all your life. They have practiced and poll-tested speeches but I am honest, raw and I speak from the heart. The fake and dishonest media there will tell you that I am a thug and I have said this and that. I am a thug, but I am your thug, give me a chance to show these crooks how it's done". The public will fall in love, because after what so many parts of the world have witnessed from their governments for so long, this kind of talk is like sweet seduction. This kind of post "I read YouTube comments written by bots and the world is going to end because my party lost the last election and they may lose the next one" are disappointing. People can vote for political candidates based on any whimsical or nonsensical reason be it race, religion, "he has a kind face" - whatever they want to. Voting is an individual right. Any attempt to influence a voter - whether it's a bot farm or a person writing an article to stop a bot farm, means only one thing: "I want this person to vote the way I vote". Democracy needs a free market of ideas. No number of botnets are going to convince me to vote for someone who espouses nazism, or worse, communism. If someone else is swayed, it is their right to be, that's okay. Great ideas will win in a free market, bots or no bots. All ideas, no matter how objectionable, should be heard.
- 8y ago
dang 8y ago
People make claims about shills, bots, astroturfers, and so on, all the time, also on HN, and experience has taught me that nearly all of this is projection: seeing what you want to see, or fear to see, or some other pre-existing perception. Overwhelmingly, people are seeing patterns that they themselves are reading into the material. I really do mean overwhelmingly, at least in our little corner of the internet. I don't know whether it's different for YouTube comments but don't see why it wouldn't be. Without some corroborating evidence, these claims don't hold any weight. It's not that they're necessarily wrong, it's that there's no way to tell. Imagination produces just the same perceptions, and there is a ton of imagination going around. Occasionally we do find evidence, and then we can do something about it. Absent that, though, the default explanation has to be that you can simply see anything in anything, especially when emotions are involved. Note the "I fear" in the title of this submission. What's frustrating is that users don't have access to most of the data, making it harder to look for evidence themselves. They have to rely on someone else to do it and then trust what they say. In a low-trust social climate, that's working less and less, which only fuels more imagination.
benbowdene 8y ago
I've noticed what I belive to be fake YouTube comments around politics and financial topics especially. For example, sometimes I'll watch a video related to the US stock market or currencies and then in the comments there will be a heavy bias against US corporations or the USD. I remember one video talking about stocks dropping had maybe ~60 comments in total, yet ~50 of which all heavily biased towards China and talked about how China is great and the USD will fall. Which I understand people out there have that opinion, but seeing 50 people all saying basically the same thing seemed like a well-orchestrated plot. I've noticed many instances of this and usually, I like looking at comments to find different views or different opinions but sometimes it's a bit too unanimous. I have a suspicion that many of the top comments are fake and made to look like a bunch of random people commenting on the video when it's really a group of people that are trying to change how people think. Which sounds silly but people follow the masses, if the majority of YouTube comments are saying that x thing is bad/good, then people just see that and start believing it as fact since everyone else seems to belive it. I mean the entire comment section is saying that x person is bad, plus there's 100 upvoted on the first comment going into why that is, sooo it must be true :P
- TranceMan 8y ago
  Good Bot :) Sorry, seriously though, have you noticed this with HN comments? I sometimes get that feeling when browsing here, I really notice it on the comments that immediately flood in when Apple are having a conference....
  - benbowdene 8y ago
    To be clear, I wouldn't say it's a fully programmed bot. It's probably a real human writing the "fake" comments. I wouldn't be shocked if a couple of governments had tens of thousands of YouTube accounts that they created many years ago and then let age and try to make it act like a real account for a couple of years. Of course, over time they'd start using it to write comments that are related to their agenda. Say, every 30th comment or so could be related to pushing their agenda and as long as each comment is different it'd be hard to ban such an account. This type of operation sounds silly until you realize you could push your agenda to tens of millions of unique people reading the comments section on YouTube alone. If this idea sounds crazy, just remember the recent US elections were found to have a similar scenario occur with fake websites being pushed on various social media platforms and eventually people believed and trusted the articles written on the sites and started reposting, liking, etc. the fake news. "have you noticed this with HN comments?" As for HN comments, I don't spend a lot of time reading through comments here to know. I'd assume that it happens on every social media platform. If this is occurring on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then every platform is in the targets. It's all about the eyeballs, so I'd be shocked if there weren't already thousands of fake accounts already opened either aging or already in use on HN. If I were running this type of operation, I'd have thousands of accounts on each platform: Pinterest, Twitch, Quora, TikTok, Snapchat, you name it, I'd have it. If it has millions of users per month and is a social media platform where discussions and opinions occur *or might occur in the future (new potential features on places like Snapchat), you better believe I'd have accounts on it.
bahmboo 8y ago
If it is truly this corrupted (youtube comments were already horrible) then YouTube should turn off adding and viewing comments before the election.
eaenki 8y ago
I thought about it deeply. I think in an utopian future we should give a monopoly on politics to a few public news outlets which have to as transparent as Ethereum is. Plus a few strictly enforced rules, e.g an article is either an opinion, boldly labeled as such at the start and the end, or a fact sheet. That will have the effect of said news outlets being extremely scrutinized. At the same time, any platform such as Twitter, IG & FB should be made illegal worldwide. The only content based platforms that are fine would be heavily scrutinized educational platforms where no politics are allowed. I know it'll likely never happen. But what about 1000 years from now? Maybe so. There's no other way around it. Information is power, and those systems are ripping apart humanity. The printing press and propaganda were/are also obviously bad. BUT. If they were made hyper transparent, hyper centralized, and obliged to follow a few rules such as clear labeling, it'd be way better imho. Said news outlet should be just one. Regulated by some new UN entity.

127 points by rawrmaan 8y ago

stefan_ 8y ago

Americans think so little of their fellow citizens, it's astonishing.

GavinMcG 8y ago
Can you elaborate on what you're trying to say here, or how it relates to this article?
- stefan_ 8y ago
  If you believe a significant chunk of the voting population is swayed by YouTube comments in their political beliefs, you could just as well be arguing for forcibly sterilizing the feebleminded.
  - GavinMcG 8y ago
    There are other potential problems than swaying voters, though: swaying non-voters (to keep them uninvolved) and swaying potential future voters (such as teenagers). To the extent that people engage in any format, propaganda in that format is concerning. And like it or not, people do engage in YouTube comments.
  - rawrmaan 8y ago
    If you think that being smart and vigilant is enough to protect yourself from this type of manipulation, I think you're wrong. I find it very easy to fall for social proof in internet comments, and I've been in the tech industry for over 10 years. This has nothing to do with intelligence.
  - tree_of_item 8y ago
    It's not just YouTube. Twitter and the rest are vulnerable to the same problem. The whole idea of humans socializing on the internet is vulnerable to this.

dreamdu5t 8y ago

It’s a little odd to me that people are so focused on supposed Internet comment manipulation when we’ve had one of the largest media empires pushing hate 24/7 through mainstream channels like Fox News for at least a decade.

Nasrudith 8y ago
It is normalization bias. Teenagers dancing to <new music> is dangerous! Organized crime, oligarchs, epidemics, pollution, car accidents? A shrug and "Eh what can you do about them." I suspect a lot of cognitive dissonance is evolutionary survivalship bias of "don't question the big man with the club/sword" and also why public speaking is commonly feared worse than death - because it could kill more than just you in barbaric days.
sgarman 8y ago
The existence of fox news does not negate the value of identifying other, possibly more subversive methods of manipulation. If anything if we were satisfied with calling out only fox news then it has does it's job.
cpr 8y ago
Right, "hate" as in "opinions that differ from the progressive zeitgeist."
bioinformatics 8y ago
Exactly. And especially when you have CNN doing the same thing on the other side of the spectrum.
thrower123 8y ago
I suspect that people that believe wholeheartedly that Fox News is some evil bastion of hate-mongering demagoguery don't actually watch very much of it. It's considerably less hysterical than the national nightly news I see on the old big three.
- slededit 8y ago
  MSNBC took the formula and brought it to a new level.

ihuman 8y ago

Do people even read YouTube comments? Serious question. They've been pretty low-quality for years, so I've stopped reading them a long time ago.

danso 8y ago
That's exactly what I was thinking. I'll sometimes skim comments during a boring bit in a video (such as an old-school NES/SNES speedrun), but I don't attempt nor expect serious discussion or rebuttals. I imagine the noise-to-signal ratio is even worse for videos with any type of political content.
beatgammit 8y ago
I get a chuckle out of them sometimes.
rawrmaan 8y ago
It's a pretty easy question to answer: Yes, they do. Look at the engagement in terms of likes and replies on almost any video. Clearly people are reading and participating.
l9k 8y ago
They are not available on TV (Smart TV, Fire Stick, PS4...) which is used more and more. So I guess, fortunately, they are not that important to Google
Kagerjay 8y ago
I only look at the first 5 comments, incase the youtuber responds to them or likes them directly. Everything else is just repetitive low quality spam usually
CM30 8y ago
I sometimes read them, especially on my own channel. Surprisingly, I haven't really encountered too much in the way of political idiocy there, perhaps because I don't tend to make videos about politics/anything that could get an ideological reaction. So if a channel is fairly obscure and doesn't focus on politics, the comments can be... bearable. But anything remotely popular is a hive of scum and idiocy that most people will rightfully not touch with a fifty foot bargepole. Less political there just means more 12 year olds posting outdated memes in place of the Russian bot farms and political trolls.

doomrobo 8y ago

I'm conflicted here. YouTube is an awful place to get political commentary, so I'd say that anyone whose opinion is primarily decided on YouTube has made a mistake to begin with. On the other hand, a LOT of people seemingly do get their political commentary from YouTube, and we might want to mitigate the damage that that causes. On the third hand, YouTube is not a public forum and doesn't have to do anything for us.

what_ever 8y ago
What's your go to place to get political commentary then?
- Diederich 8y ago
  You're not asking me, but I'll briefly weigh in. While not a complete list, I look at https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/ and https://old.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ The latter, especially, is heavily curated. The former is, I think, fair.
- doomrobo 8y ago
  I read TheSkimm (https://www.theskimm.com/ https://www.theskimm.com/) and WSJ for the most part

btown 8y ago

The problem is not bots; it's that money can flow towards troll farms consisting of real individuals, posting of their own free will, but massively amplified. And it's almost always cheaper to sow discord than to scale a "fact checking farm." I'm not sure if democracy has actually proven itself to be stable; perhaps it's an unstable system whose oscillations were artificially dampened until 2016, because this strategy and the requisite technology had not yet matured.

dreamdu5t 8y ago
Money has been spreading misinformation long before troll farms. Fox News doesn’t care about fact checking. We had birther conspiracies, Obama is a Muslim sympathizer, immigrants are coming to kill you, and other crazy narratives peddled by the most watched cable news channel for over a decade. The alt-right started with the mainstream media.
- fredley 8y ago
  The difference is that until recently, you saw this stuff on Fox, and other stuff elsewhere. Sure, some people (a lot of people!) only watched Fox and swallowed it all, but a lot of people didn't. They knew that Fox was Fox, etc. Nowadays, in a pile of YouTube comments, or Twitter replies, or Facebook posts, you cannot tell who or what is behind it. You know when a story is broadcast on Fox that it's Fox. When it's a comment, is it a real person? A bot? A troll-farm worker? If one of the latter, where is the money coming from? There's no way of knowing. Add to this group polarization[1] and other known psychological factors, and it's easy to flood out a particular online space with a particular narrative, with no visible accountability. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Money has been spreading misinformation long before troll farms. Fox News doesn’t care about fact checking. It goes back far before that. Even into this nation's early history; and all the way back, at least, to the Protestant Reformation. Check out the Library of Congress image collection. You wouldn't believe some of the fliers (the "memes" of their time) published about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They make today's trolls and alt-right look like nuns.

notahacker 8y ago

The problem with online discourse in general is less the existence of the troll farms and more an abundance of people who voluntarily produce and endorse stuff in a manner essentially indistinguishable from the troll farms. If you want people to endorse the veracity of your scam, you'll have to pay. Want them to endorse the veracity of claim you've just made up about $politicalentity and you won't...

redleggedfrog 8y ago

If you're reading YouTube comments, you're already a lost cause.

notacoward 8y ago

"What is Google going to do about it?" Absolutely nothing, unless diverting attention counts. A few product announcements, something something net neutrality, a little more "juice" for every possible news item with an anti-Facebook or anti-Twitter vibe, and voila! Nobody's talking about YouTube any more. They're in the attention business, after all. They know that letting attention dissipate is their best strategy in this case. In a better world, they'd be using some of those vast resources and ML expertise to detect the kinds of vote/comment clustering that signal both commercial and political manipulation. Others have done it already. The fact that the self-styled "best and the brightest" are way behind on this says that they don't have the interest.

lgeorget 8y ago
"Others have done it already." Others with the same number of accounts and daily visits? With the same flowrate of publications and comments?
- notacoward 8y ago
  Yes. Facebook has been doing this for spam for ages, for Russian and Chinese and Iranian political influence rings more recently. It's sure not easy at that scale, but it's not beyond Google's capabilities. Disclaimer: I work at Facebook, though I'm only involved in those efforts to the extent that I work on the data-storage systems that support the data scientists.

esotericn 8y ago

To me, this feels like a precursor to the actual issue that's going to happen. Eventually, we won't be able to distinguish between real humans and bots online. No CAPTCHA will work, no Turing test, none of that stuff. Message authentication (e.g. keysigning, or a centralised provider you trust) works for individual identities that you're already aware of, but the general case of trusting comments online? Even without all of that, you've never had any idea whether the "person" replying to your comment is paid, or has a bias, or whatever else. If, say, 30% of Hacker News commenters were "fake" in that future scenario, would we know? How would we know? Once we develop a method, can't that be gamed?

rawrmaan 8y ago
It's one of the biggest problems that I worry about with the internet. Yes, public key cryptography can prove that "message x came from source y". But nobody's figured out a way to prove "source y is a person" or even better "source y is definitely the person they say they are". I like the approach projects like Keybase and Stellar are taking: Building a decentralized network of trust based on existing, real-world trust-based relationships.
ryandrake 8y ago
As for HN, do you think it’s less than 30% today? If so/not,how do you know? What do you count as “fake”? Actual bots, sure, but what about a real person running an automation that spams overnight? What about many real people mass-typing “opinions” on behalf of someone who pays them? What about a single businessman typin a falsehood that helps his business? Which of these count as fake?
- esotericn 8y ago
  a) I don't know! b) All of the ones you've mentioned, at least. I deliberately didn't define it because I think it's difficult.
opwieurposiu 8y ago
If you had to pay a fee to post a comment, the bots would not scale. Even 1 cent would work.

mlb_hn 8y ago

It's not just comments - the ability to drown out other views applies to actual news articles too. We saw back in 2009 with the Time Person of the Year campaign how easy it was for coordinated groups to drown out the public (https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/21/4chan-takes-over-the-time-100/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/21/4chan-takes-over-the-time-...). As legitimate news organizations increasingly use analytics as part of their decision processes, that unsolved vulnerability presents an opportunity for click farms to drive traffic to articles and indirectly manipulate the production and placement of actual articles as well =/

pnw_hazor 8y ago

I watch youtube on my TV using Roku so comments are not even visible or accessible. I consider that a feature.

micah94 8y ago

Wow. I thought this was going to be a discussion of how Google/Youtube was manipulating the comments. But it was merely about some silly bots fooling a bunch of kids. Youtube is never going to do anything about that. They prefer the "Community Guideline Strike" Hammer or take down your channel completely. They can disable comments completely (if they want to) or change them here and there. I've seen complaints about this but it's hard to prove. But we've all probably seen videos with COMMENTS HAVE BEEN DISABLED (and not by the owner). They WANT you to be manipulated by the comments on channels they allow. This guy is completely missing the boat here...

tree_of_item 8y ago
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That Google is editing people's comments, and that's the real problem? I thought the article was insightful and brought up a relevant issue, and I'm not sure what boat you claim it's missed.
- micah94 8y ago
  I believe the real issue is Google itself manipulating the comments for their own ends -- to make money and market to you. Bots fooling kids is not something they care about.
  - aeternus 8y ago
    I doubt there is any conspiracy here, Google is unlikely to be manipulating the comments themselves. This is likely just simple incentives: - Google uses comment count as a measure of video engagement - Monetization is based on engagement - Content producers are therefore incentivized to generate comments - Controversy is great at generating comments, so content producers get creative
  - tree_of_item 8y ago
    Yeah that's the part I don't get: how is Google "manipulating" the comments? And the article is not about kids; if you made it to the end you'd see implications for e.g. the November midterms in the U.S.

randomguy23 8y ago

And Hacker News comments are any better? The core issue becomes: who do you trust? If you read the comment and blithely accept what it says without thinking about it, you'll fall for any scam that comes along. You need to examine the ideas within the comment, compare it with other information (from hopefully different sources) and then come to a conclusion as to it's veracity. It's part of being in a society where freedom of speech is a right (a US centric viewpoint, since that's where I'm from).

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rawrmaan 8y ago
I never said that anywhere was any better. I'd like to think Hacker News is a place where fewer people would be fooled, because this is a place specifically for critical thought and discussion. YouTube is not. It's a website that everyone uses, and where the most impressionable or least politically aware members of the population are the most numerous, easiest targets.
- YinglingLight 8y ago
  Believe me. You can be politically aware and still fall into a hallucination bubble. However I will say that Engineers, good ones, are accustomed to being wrong and taking the initiative to change their thinking.
- fixermark 8y ago
  And most importantly: YouTube lacks a dang. The volume of comments that are processed vastly exceeds what human moderation could possibly do, and community up-or-down-flag moderation of comments has massive known vulnerabilities to sock-puppeteering and signal-jamming. It's an extremely ripe target for this type of manipulation.
  - charlesism 8y ago
    If YouTube cared about anything aside from "user engagement", they could quite easily whip their comments into shape. They're not really trying. > The volume of comments that are processed > vastly exceeds what human moderation could possibly do For every 500 comments, there is one video. For every 50 videos, there is one Channel with a Google user behind it. Force creators to handle the complaints about comments on their videos... an order of magnitude less work. I've gone into this before and there really seems to be total buy-in here to the idea that these companies couldn't possibly manage to weed the toxicity off their platforms. I don't believe it for an instant. It's true only if you refuse to entertain any decrease of "user engagement". If you are willing to lose some eyeballs, the problem is manageable. And that sacrifice, in the case of YouTube, isn't even a sacrifice! YouTube would wind up with more users if the comments weren't so toxic. Susan et al just don't have the courage to change anything.

pixelpp 8y ago

YouTube's comments engine is garbage.

robbrown451 8y ago

"YouTube the most-used social media site in the world" By a certain measure that may be true, but if you were to actually measure how often people read and post comments, and what percentage of users do, I think you might not reach that conclusion. There is a social media aspect to YouTube, but I don't think that is its main function for the vast majority of users (who are probably better described as "viewers"). (that said I think the article is good, and YouTube comment quality should be an embarrassment to Google)

fareesh 8y ago

If an attractive Russian seduces a politician for the purpose of espionage and influencing policy, their spouse is not going to excuse them because "Oh you cheated on me because of Russian meddling!" Like the marriage in the aforementioned hypothetical, left of center politics is failing worldwide for other reasons, not because of some nefarious social media plot. People are growing fed up with government as an entity, and as a result, they want less government in their lives. Over the past few decades, the practiced manner of a politician became something that was mimicked and parodied worldwide, and popular culture widely regarded the politician as a crook for far too long. Even some of the most charismatic leaders who were beloved worldwide - most recently President Barack Obama, have been wrought with scandals like Snowden's NSA revelations, and the weak and dishonest manner in which the President responded when the activities of the intelligence agencies were exposed. Even during his first term, he made the (perhaps superior) decision to bail out the Wall street banks, and was subsequently betrayed by the various corporations who gave large payouts to top executives. To working class folks, these things are unforgivable especially when they come at the hands of someone you admired, even loved. The trust in government as an idea is so low that all someone has to do is stand up and say "these crooks and rascals have lied to you all your life. They have practiced and poll-tested speeches but I am honest, raw and I speak from the heart. The fake and dishonest media there will tell you that I am a thug and I have said this and that. I am a thug, but I am your thug, give me a chance to show these crooks how it's done". The public will fall in love, because after what so many parts of the world have witnessed from their governments for so long, this kind of talk is like sweet seduction. This kind of post "I read YouTube comments written by bots and the world is going to end because my party lost the last election and they may lose the next one" are disappointing. People can vote for political candidates based on any whimsical or nonsensical reason be it race, religion, "he has a kind face" - whatever they want to. Voting is an individual right. Any attempt to influence a voter - whether it's a bot farm or a person writing an article to stop a bot farm, means only one thing: "I want this person to vote the way I vote". Democracy needs a free market of ideas. No number of botnets are going to convince me to vote for someone who espouses nazism, or worse, communism. If someone else is swayed, it is their right to be, that's okay. Great ideas will win in a free market, bots or no bots. All ideas, no matter how objectionable, should be heard.

8y ago

dang 8y ago

People make claims about shills, bots, astroturfers, and so on, all the time, also on HN, and experience has taught me that nearly all of this is projection: seeing what you want to see, or fear to see, or some other pre-existing perception. Overwhelmingly, people are seeing patterns that they themselves are reading into the material. I really do mean overwhelmingly, at least in our little corner of the internet. I don't know whether it's different for YouTube comments but don't see why it wouldn't be. Without some corroborating evidence, these claims don't hold any weight. It's not that they're necessarily wrong, it's that there's no way to tell. Imagination produces just the same perceptions, and there is a ton of imagination going around. Occasionally we do find evidence, and then we can do something about it. Absent that, though, the default explanation has to be that you can simply see anything in anything, especially when emotions are involved. Note the "I fear" in the title of this submission. What's frustrating is that users don't have access to most of the data, making it harder to look for evidence themselves. They have to rely on someone else to do it and then trust what they say. In a low-trust social climate, that's working less and less, which only fuels more imagination.

benbowdene 8y ago

I've noticed what I belive to be fake YouTube comments around politics and financial topics especially. For example, sometimes I'll watch a video related to the US stock market or currencies and then in the comments there will be a heavy bias against US corporations or the USD. I remember one video talking about stocks dropping had maybe ~60 comments in total, yet ~50 of which all heavily biased towards China and talked about how China is great and the USD will fall. Which I understand people out there have that opinion, but seeing 50 people all saying basically the same thing seemed like a well-orchestrated plot. I've noticed many instances of this and usually, I like looking at comments to find different views or different opinions but sometimes it's a bit too unanimous. I have a suspicion that many of the top comments are fake and made to look like a bunch of random people commenting on the video when it's really a group of people that are trying to change how people think. Which sounds silly but people follow the masses, if the majority of YouTube comments are saying that x thing is bad/good, then people just see that and start believing it as fact since everyone else seems to belive it. I mean the entire comment section is saying that x person is bad, plus there's 100 upvoted on the first comment going into why that is, sooo it must be true :P

TranceMan 8y ago
Good Bot :) Sorry, seriously though, have you noticed this with HN comments? I sometimes get that feeling when browsing here, I really notice it on the comments that immediately flood in when Apple are having a conference....
- benbowdene 8y ago
  To be clear, I wouldn't say it's a fully programmed bot. It's probably a real human writing the "fake" comments. I wouldn't be shocked if a couple of governments had tens of thousands of YouTube accounts that they created many years ago and then let age and try to make it act like a real account for a couple of years. Of course, over time they'd start using it to write comments that are related to their agenda. Say, every 30th comment or so could be related to pushing their agenda and as long as each comment is different it'd be hard to ban such an account. This type of operation sounds silly until you realize you could push your agenda to tens of millions of unique people reading the comments section on YouTube alone. If this idea sounds crazy, just remember the recent US elections were found to have a similar scenario occur with fake websites being pushed on various social media platforms and eventually people believed and trusted the articles written on the sites and started reposting, liking, etc. the fake news. "have you noticed this with HN comments?" As for HN comments, I don't spend a lot of time reading through comments here to know. I'd assume that it happens on every social media platform. If this is occurring on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then every platform is in the targets. It's all about the eyeballs, so I'd be shocked if there weren't already thousands of fake accounts already opened either aging or already in use on HN. If I were running this type of operation, I'd have thousands of accounts on each platform: Pinterest, Twitch, Quora, TikTok, Snapchat, you name it, I'd have it. If it has millions of users per month and is a social media platform where discussions and opinions occur *or might occur in the future (new potential features on places like Snapchat), you better believe I'd have accounts on it.

bahmboo 8y ago

If it is truly this corrupted (youtube comments were already horrible) then YouTube should turn off adding and viewing comments before the election.

eaenki 8y ago

I thought about it deeply. I think in an utopian future we should give a monopoly on politics to a few public news outlets which have to as transparent as Ethereum is. Plus a few strictly enforced rules, e.g an article is either an opinion, boldly labeled as such at the start and the end, or a fact sheet. That will have the effect of said news outlets being extremely scrutinized. At the same time, any platform such as Twitter, IG & FB should be made illegal worldwide. The only content based platforms that are fine would be heavily scrutinized educational platforms where no politics are allowed. I know it'll likely never happen. But what about 1000 years from now? Maybe so. There's no other way around it. Information is power, and those systems are ripping apart humanity. The printing press and propaganda were/are also obviously bad. BUT. If they were made hyper transparent, hyper centralized, and obliged to follow a few rules such as clear labeling, it'd be way better imho. Said news outlet should be just one. Regulated by some new UN entity.