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This thesis ignores emergent properties of anonymous speech at scale, particularly when it's difficult or impossible to distinguish between real and automated "

This thesis ignores emergent properties of anonymous speech at scale, particularly when it's difficult or impossible to distinguish between real and automated "speech". The statement: Most Anonymous speakers are actually centrists want to engage in debate with out fear of retribution by the extremist on both sides. Not only would require significant evidence, but would need to specifically address the current issue of automated political speech online in order to be taken seriously.

cromwellian 8y ago
Just imagine a gazillion anonymous GPT-2 bots.
syshum 8y ago
>>would need to specifically address the current issue of automated political speech online in order to be taken seriously. I have yet to see significant evidence proving there is an issue with automated political speech online I see left activists claim that anyone that disagrees with the authoritarian left to be either "alt-right" or "bot accounts" but little by way of actual evidence Sure Twitter and other Tech companies like to talk about how they "banned thousands of bot accounts" but they offer not proof on how they came to that conclusion and given the bias of the companies I am not sure they are not just banning libertarian and conservative moderates under the guise of "abolishing bots"
- cromwellian 8y ago
  The tech companies have decades of experience fighting spam. Your comment is like saying "Gmail blocked billions of spam messages but they don't offer proof that they're not just banning libertarian and conservative emails!" The mechanisms by which they've fought spam and fraud have been documented and there are numerous academic studies on the bot networks, actively tracing Twitter bot accounts back to their country of origin, and tracing by traffic analysis all of the reposts and reshares. You can find lots of papers written on publicly available data on pre-print services, like https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291.pdf It wouldn't take you more than a few minutes to Google for this and read some of the papers instead of speculating in ignorance. The idea that they're somehow detecting libertarian messages and banning them is paranoid conspiracy theory nonsense.
  - syshum 8y ago
    When it has happened to me first hand, and people I know personally first hand is not conspiracy theory nonsense. While I do not dispute there are bots out in the world, bots are a convenient excuse for censorship allowing them to also suppress opinions they dislike under the guise of suppressing "bots and spam" Your assertation that "Google has been fighting spam" as proof is an ironic example of that because Google fights hard to prevent what they call "bad advertisements" which more or less equates to any ads not shown through one of googles many ads networks. Google Spam == Good non-google spam == BAD. Likewise to these tech companies Liberal Opinions == Good non-liberal Opinions == Bots While there is no doubt they are purging actual bots, they are selective about which bots they purge and they often sweep up human accounts in their purge as well

cromwellian 8y ago

Just imagine a gazillion anonymous GPT-2 bots.

syshum 8y ago

>>would need to specifically address the current issue of automated political speech online in order to be taken seriously. I have yet to see significant evidence proving there is an issue with automated political speech online I see left activists claim that anyone that disagrees with the authoritarian left to be either "alt-right" or "bot accounts" but little by way of actual evidence Sure Twitter and other Tech companies like to talk about how they "banned thousands of bot accounts" but they offer not proof on how they came to that conclusion and given the bias of the companies I am not sure they are not just banning libertarian and conservative moderates under the guise of "abolishing bots"

cromwellian 8y ago
The tech companies have decades of experience fighting spam. Your comment is like saying "Gmail blocked billions of spam messages but they don't offer proof that they're not just banning libertarian and conservative emails!" The mechanisms by which they've fought spam and fraud have been documented and there are numerous academic studies on the bot networks, actively tracing Twitter bot accounts back to their country of origin, and tracing by traffic analysis all of the reposts and reshares. You can find lots of papers written on publicly available data on pre-print services, like https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291.pdf It wouldn't take you more than a few minutes to Google for this and read some of the papers instead of speculating in ignorance. The idea that they're somehow detecting libertarian messages and banning them is paranoid conspiracy theory nonsense.
- syshum 8y ago
  When it has happened to me first hand, and people I know personally first hand is not conspiracy theory nonsense. While I do not dispute there are bots out in the world, bots are a convenient excuse for censorship allowing them to also suppress opinions they dislike under the guise of suppressing "bots and spam" Your assertation that "Google has been fighting spam" as proof is an ironic example of that because Google fights hard to prevent what they call "bad advertisements" which more or less equates to any ads not shown through one of googles many ads networks. Google Spam == Good non-google spam == BAD. Likewise to these tech companies Liberal Opinions == Good non-liberal Opinions == Bots While there is no doubt they are purging actual bots, they are selective about which bots they purge and they often sweep up human accounts in their purge as well