13 ms·

The Yang Gang and Its Bots

110 points by mbellotti 7y ago

scottlocklin 7y ago
Theorem: 100% of these articles talking about "bots" on twitter are bullshit. None have any evidence, yet we're supposed to be impressed because ... muh plots. Nobody has any idea how many "bots" are following Trump or Yang or anybody else.
leptoniscool 7y ago
I'm surprised Twitter isn't doing more about political bots, since they've banned political ad dollars. On the other hand, if they banned an account and it turned out to be a real person, they could get some first amendment lawsuits.
- knodi123 7y ago
  I wish the local elementary school would do something about the yang gangers who draw lengthy screeds in shoepolish on the side of their van and park it in front of the doors every day. There's a rule against political ads on the property, but apparently not against cars parking there. I like a lot of Yang's proposals. I just wish the enthusiasm of his supporters could be a little more... judiciously focused?
- zachrose 7y ago
  > On the other hand, if they banned an account and it turned out to be a real person, they could get some first amendment lawsuits. Access to post on Twitter is not a 1st Amendment right!
  - hadtodoit 7y ago
    Some Senator who's name I can't recall was arguing otherwise. He said something to the affect of, if social media companies, or websites in general want protection under the law from content generated by their users, then they should not be able to dictate what their users can and cannot post barring illegal content. It's an interesting argument regardless of what you believe, but certainly your first amendment rights don't currently extend to Twitter.
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      Are you referring to platform/publisher? If so, it has no legal basis for many reasons, including Twitter's first amendment rights to choose what they show. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-not-require-platforms-be-neutral https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... Also, isn't the whole reason we're on HN the moderation?
      - hadtodoit 7y ago
        He wasn't arguing the current interpretation of the law as much as proposing an amendment. I don't think that HN, nor the community at large does as much as say twitter or reddit to stifle opposing points of view. Relegating extremist to their own echo-chambers is a good way of proliferating their beliefs. Were their ideas exposed to the world where they would have to defend them, they may be dissuaded from holding such extreme beliefs, or a passerby may see the flaws in their argument.
        iudqnolq 7y ago
        > He wasn't arguing the current interpretation of the law as much as proposing an amendment I wanted to point out it would require radical changes to our current laws and maybe the Constitution. I wasn't sure if he was aware of that. (Stronger versions of this argument, including ones deployed by members of Congress, have said it described current law) > Were their ideas exposed to the world where they would have to defend them, they may be dissuaded from holding such extreme beliefs, or a passerby may see the flaws in their argument. This is a popular position in a popular argument, and it's been debated to death better than we can. Here's an summary I found useful https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-gl... One interesting study mentioned in that summation found that temporary internet outages in Germany reduced hate crimes against refugees. > This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in major Facebook and internet outages, which fully undo the correlation between social media and hate crime. We further find that the effect decreases with distracting news events; increases with user network interactions; and does not hold for posts unrelated to refugees. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online messages and violent crime. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082972 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082972
  - harimau777 7y ago
    When the president is using Twitter as his primary means of communicating with the public, it becomes a 1st Amendment right. Granted, this may be more an issue of the president using a private system to communicate with the public.
- dawnerd 7y ago
  They're loving it though. Bots push something to trending, real people end up talking and sharing like crazy. Their KPIs since this last election must be insane.
- ngokevin2 7y ago
  I think they do what they can. But it's not really as prevalent in the Yang Gang as the article suggests.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  What really pisses me off about bot accounts isn't the fake info simply because I analyze things based off my own opinions and research, although I understand how this is an issue for the general majority. My issue is that if I happen to retweet somebody opposite of that running a bot farm, then the bots are trigger to all report me and then I need to verify my account again the next time I'm on. And the sad thing is that it works, because I'll stop retweeting that person's tweets just to avoid that verification process since it happens consistently. Whether there's other criteria that qualifies me for attack, such as the retweeting in combination with following that person, I'm not sure as I haven't tested that.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    Bots will slowly come to control Twitter discourse
  - jshevek 7y ago
    That is unfortunate. Sadly, it also happens without bots. Some communities self righteously abuse Twitter's reporting system just to silence or censor views they disagree with.
save_ferris 7y ago
It’s terrifying how cheap and easy it is to masquerade as hundreds of thousands to millions of people on social media using automation, and how little social media companies are doing to stop it. Regardless of the numbers, the stress it’s placing on discourse is devastating, and there seem to be few serious, market-driven solutions to this problem. The growth-at-all-costs mentality has put companies like Twitter in a position where they must choose between profits and responsible community development and moderation. It’s clear which path they’ve chosen.
- ngokevin2 7y ago
  It's also terrifying that headlines and articles can be taken as valid. Smear articles and misleading information are troubling as well in the upcoming years.
  - backupcavalry 7y ago
    Oh, the irony of an account created specifically to defend Yang in the discussion about bots created to defend Yang. If you're truly looking to support him this probably isn't a good way to help his case.
    - proximitysauce 7y ago
      An anonymous account is not the same thing as a bot. As acrimonious as the current state of politics is, I wouldn't blame anyone for using a pseudonym online to voice their opinion.
      - backupcavalry 7y ago
        Touche. But you'll have to pardon me for being distrustful of anyone that walks in just to defend a politician of any kind (without hard proof, anyway).
        godelski 7y ago
tonydiv 7y ago
If any journalists are writing about this in a serious capacity, contact me. I will trade info :)
proximitysauce 7y ago
That's a lot of narrative overlaid on the data. The author even says this about Democratic politician accounts: > All of them had bot activity of some kind. Given enough time to collect the data, bot networks would eventually appear for all of them. I think the analysis could be very interesting but they're injecting too much personal spin on the motivations of everyone involved. Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too? I think it would be interesting to study bots and how they intersect with media and politics in a less biased manner.
- rdtsc 7y ago
  I found it was a good intro to the world of Twitter bots. I don’t use Twitter but like to read about its influence and how others are using it. But yeah I did get the same tinge of condescension about the “sad” and “lonely” teenager Mike because he works at Taco Bell, doesn’t want to go into $100k worth of debt going to college and is following bots from campaigns she doesn’t agree with. > He seemed lonely. Eager to please. His last video blog he announced he wasn’t going to college after all… Like you said, what if he followed Bloomberg bots, would he be described as “sad” too. However at the same I would have to concede that writing an unbiased article about political bots in this day and age is probably not gonna happen, either.
- waisbrot 7y ago
  > Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too? Which party do you think Yang is running for? Anyway, the article was clearly describing as "sad" that the teenager is trying to build an online following but his "following" is just bots using him to look less like bots.
  - godelski 7y ago
    One of Yang's pitches is that he is pulling from the MAGA group. Just scroll down the subreddit [0] and you'll see tons of posts about MAGA/Republicans switching sides for Yang. If anything I'd __expect__ a real person to be more likely to be connected to both MAGA and Yang (compared to the average democratic voter). But that also makes it difficult to tell real people from bots, which is what this story is really about. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/
aazaa 7y ago
The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process. It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills. The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those who still can't accept that the US elected the current president, is that things like Twitter bots and fake Facebook ads are just sideshows.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  even assuming that's true and all other things being equal, people passing bots off as natural users rather than clearly marking that they're bots is simply lying and detrimental to discourse if for the sole reason that these bots are being mistaken for authentic users. Given the crude tactics outlined in this article, with accounts making 400 tweets per day in regular intervals, duplicate accounts of the same alleged person and so on I think it's pretty bad that platforms like Twitter do not pursue the issue much more agressively.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I agree and bots should be banned... Now that we're passed the perfect being the enemy of the good, I'm also quite concerned about, instead of bots, just paying some people to have your opinion - that's also a problem we're definitely going to need to address since if you subsidize the cost of living of someone who agrees with you then you can basically turn them into a 24/7 advocate for your point of view. If that person happens to live in a remote part of the third world then the actual out of pocket cost to subsidize them could be a negligible portion of your earnings.
- ngokevin2 7y ago
  Yang's campaign has been consistently growing and growing as other campaigns have dropped out. He raised $16.5M last quarter. Polls show him at 5%+ with an up arrow attached to it. And that's not counting that polls don't capture his base (first-time voters, independents, disaffected conservatives). As for the article, I'll address it in another comment.
ngokevin 7y ago
It deems accounts as bots if they post and retweet a lot and are newly created? Being familiar with the Yang Gang, people are extremely passionate almost to an addiction of supporting Yang. They follow his every move, his surrogates words, and engage with any tiny bit of content they can. Many are new accounts because few have ever followed politics and want to keep separate from their main accounts. Yang has one of the strongest audit scores with 95% of followers being real. Contrasted with Bernie Sanders at only 69%. https://www.twitteraudit.com/andrewyang https://www.twitteraudit.com/andrewyang | https://www.twitteraudit.com/berniesanders https://www.twitteraudit.com/berniesanders While there may be a few bad actors, it is definitely not representative of those that engage with Yang and his campaign. It shows up on the ground as well where Yang's following shows up in biggest numbers. At least in Iowa, there were hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that flew in to canvass in the snow, outnumbering most campaign ground forces. In San Francisco, weekly hangouts have been growing to 30 people, and volunteer events turn out 15+ people regularly. I believe this is nationwide as well, there aren't many campaigns that have been matching the grassroots volunteer forces.
- elfexec 7y ago
  > While there may be a few bad actors The question is are these bad actors acting in support of Yang or to undermine Yang? If you were against Yang, imagine how easy it would be to set up bots to "support Yang" and then have fellow operatives/journalists who are against Yang write about Yang "bots". It's just as easy for Yang's detractors to set up bots as it is for his supporters. There seems to be a concerted effort by certain operatives/journalists/etc to undermine certain political candidates by tainting them with "russian asset" or "bot" labels. Without a doubt, there have been bot activity starting with obama/ron paul/etc in 2008 and everyone since in political life. If the author ( who also submitted her own article here ) wanted to find bots, there are far better candidates to focus on. Why the focus on Yang? As with bots, journalists, media and everything, we have to understand the context and agenda. Since the author also has an account here, I would love to know what her political leanings are and who she is supporting. Has she work for any political candidate before?
- comnetxr 7y ago
  how do you know the passionate to the point of addiction Yang supporters are real? I think its likely that many are, but that there are also many passionate supporters of the other candidates who just lurk on Twitter without posting due to social norms about how often you should chime in and how forcefully. The social norms around Yang supporters on twitter have changed by bots posting often and loudly, breaking the bubble and giving permission to people to do it too. If you then turn the bots off, the YangGang effect would last. (I'm sure this applies to not just Yang...)
comnetxr 7y ago
Someone should make a Twitter-like that verifies posters at various levels based on humanness/geographic locale and other characteristics. Then posters could limit conversations to those with >90% human score (with score going up when twitter has more certainty that you are a human) located in the US (for US political conversations), etc. I'd certainly pay a few bucks to be verified and contribute much more often to conversations than I do now, as now it just seems like screaming into the bot void.
- trhway 7y ago
  that would destroy the main principle of the Web2.x - "on Internet, nobody knows you're a human"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
naveen99 7y ago
Yang supporters believe expats should also get the freedom dividend. It would be funny if yang just declares a United States of earth and distributes the freedom dividend to every human on the entire planet...
- aianus 7y ago
  If American expats pay US income tax, why shouldn’t they qualify? Maybe the US should stop taxing people that don’t even live in America like every other civilized country.
- bnjms 7y ago
  Not really. Yang is unequivocal that expats should not receive the dividend while they are abroad. And they deserve their part given we tax them as if they were present.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > Yang is unequivocal that expats should not receive the dividend while they are abroad. What is the moral basis for this? Pretty much every other U.S. right and rule is grounded on U.S. citizenship, not where you're currently residing. Basing rights on where you live (rather than citizenship) also leads to some weird results. If you deny expats some right because they don't live in the country, then shouldn't you grant non-citizens who are indeed living in the country those same rights? After all, the standard is where you live rather than citizenship.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > Yang supporters believe expats should also get the freedom dividend. Well, this is what Trump believes. A solid 30% of the U.S. stock market is owned by foreigners, and so when U.S. corporations used their Trump tax break to increase their market value, 30% of that effectively gave foreigners a bump. His tax plan effectively increased taxes in expensive "blue" states and gave that money to foreign investors.
  - naveen99 7y ago
thrower123 7y ago
It's always bots and foreign influences when an organic populist movement that doesn't fit the blessed agenda grows. The machine is showing it's rust more and more, and the more it flails the more credibility it loses.
xrd 7y ago
My favorite part was the link to the article where Newt Gingrich's Twitter account with 1.6M followers was shown to be only 8% real people.
Communitivity 7y ago
I encountered this myself after responding to someone's comment about the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept, and got spammed with negative replies. I figured it was just ardent supporters, bots make sense though given the speed of the responses. Sadly, I think this may be the new normal of politics in the 2020s.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I had the same experience. I wonder what's behind it and how well organised the group is.
- jshevek 7y ago
  From what I have seen of Yang Gangers, that could very well have been the result of real people. A high proportion of them are always online, highly vigilant, eager to participate in online activism.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > From what I have seen of Yang Gangers, that could very well have been the result of real people. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The very fact that people are questioning whether political support is real or not the significant problem.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > after responding to someone's comment about the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept, and got spammed with negative replies. I figured it was just ardent supporters, bots make sense though given the speed of the responses. Ardent non-supporter of UBI here! Not a bot!! The nefarious issue with UBI is that it threatens our existing social safety nets. The social goal is not to give everyone a single basic income, it's to give everyone a single basic standard of living. It's far more fair and moral to give folks access to basic standards of human decency (e.g., healthcare, education, housing, food, air), than writing them a check and letting them fend on their own. The moral underpinning of social safety nets is not to increase the total or average, but to increase the lowest.
KhoomeiK 7y ago
Kind of ironic that the candidate aiming to solve issues created by AI is being propelled forward by AI-driven bots
- ilaksh 7y ago
  I think that one article doesn't prove that Yang's campaign is driven by bots. I'm a 42 year old programmer who has never voted before. I am voting for Yang because his policies are superior and the other candidates have outdated policies or worldviews. I have contributed around $400 or $500 and if there is something we are "trying to trend" I will retweet it (even though I never really used Twitter before now). By the way, Yang has received endorsements from people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dave Chappelle, Donald Glover, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, James Gunn. Saying the campaign is driven by bots is an unsubstantiated smear.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    I am most definitely not a Yang support, I am critic, and yet I strongly agree with your last sentence. Saying the campaign is driven by bots, based on the 'evidence' presented so far, is an unsubstantiated smear.
  - KhoomeiK 7y ago
    I'm not for Yang nor do I hate Yang, just noting the irony of the article. Unrelated, do you speak Ithkuil?
fc_barnes 7y ago
Wasn’t it “low orbit ion cannon”?
godelski 7y ago
This is an interesting post if you also follow the subreddit for Yang[0]. There are a lot of people there that created Twitter accounts just to follow Yang and participate in those polls about who is more popular. So when the author mentions the creation of new accounts when Yang started, it actually doesn't surprise me. The campaign is very technocentric after all. Also, these people (a lot of them "true believers" types) do post A LOT on Twitter and get involved in any mention of Yang (go check any YouTube video about Yang). You have to "yang" everyone that you can. It is a really weird community to be honest. But one where they are actively telling one another to create social media accounts to promote Yang. What this post really tells me is that it is hard to distinguish real people from bots. Here's a post even about YouTube comments[1]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/esycun/the_daily_show_reposted_their_getting_to_know/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/esycun/...
- ci5er 7y ago
  Seems (to me) to be similar to the Ron Paul bots (fanatics, I should say, because they certainly weren't mechanical war-bots; They seemed like what the right calls NPCs these days, but they were just so ... into it! 24/7! It's actually kind of nice to see groups of new/young people get excited about politics - I think they might learn a lot through the process (maybe)) all over Reddit in 2008 (not just /r/politics, but they were everywhere), esp. since that also included all of the influx of rapidly migrating Diggers. Maybe it's not the same, but those folks were all in on the Paul Train (or whatever they called it). They were eggcited!
  - kevitivity 7y ago
    So true, the "Paulestinians" as I called them were the first thing that came to my mind while reading this. There is too little detail of methodology in this article to take it too seriously, but still interesting.
    - ci5er 7y ago
      > "Paulestinians" Ha! Never heard that one. It is by far more clever than any of the half-dozen or so that I did.
ilaksh 7y ago
I'm a 42 year old Yang supporter. I never voted before and only used Twitter for a week or so many years ago. A few Yang posts are the only things I have ever retweeted. In particular when he was excluded from the debates I was retweeting everything with #AmericaNeedsYang or whatever. I am not a bot. But my activity then might have seemed bot-like. Anyway if anyone hasn't 100% made up their mind on Yang maybe watch a few YouTube videos of him.
- godelski 7y ago
  This is an interesting comment from multiple directions. 1) because I could see someone calling __this__ comment a bot comment, but you're much more active here and so it seems like you aren't. 2) Because if you are real, it really shows the idea (I suggested this in another comment too) that Yang Gangers come off as bots. (I also found the statement about Yang accounts being linked to MAGA accounts as evidence as funny).
  - ilaksh 7y ago
    WTF makes you think I'm a bot? Because I took the time to write a full paragraph and tried to promote the presidential campaign I have invested my time and money into?
    - godelski 7y ago
      I don't think you are. The comment doesn't come across to me as one. But using the same analysis that the author of this post did, I think they'd characterize you as one. It was more a critique on the post. I think the author has never visited the subreddit.
    - crgt 7y ago
      Rick Deckard feels your pain. Kinda makes you wonder about the usefulness of the Turing Test too, if humans can’t pass it anymore..
      - EGreg 7y ago
vegcel 7y ago
I wonder how many people are more of the author's mistaken bots, like Mike mentioned in the article? If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior. Activities the author describes as bot-like to me seem like activities a noob on twitter would engage in. Twitter itself does a lot to self-create these node clusters, with a circle jerk of recommended followers based on your activity. If you have a bunch of twitter noobs, all liking and retweeting Yang and his surrogates, they will inevitably get clustered together via twitter's own algorithms. I think it's a mistake to assume that politically disengaged folks who would like to stay anonymous online, and are only joining a social media platform to promote their candidate or two, would behave like "real" users. I say this as someone who converted an old twitter account from 2011 I used when I was a teenager for spam purposes, to become a Yang account. I'm sure I'm considered a bot by the author's software.
- godelski 7y ago
  > If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior. To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate. It is definitely an agenda that is pushed. Lots of new Twitter accounts that are pro Yang is not surprising if you visit the subreddit. It also shouldn't be surprising that these accounts would be associated with MAGA bots and supporters. After all, Andrew is targeting the same demographic as Trump. There's several posts a day on the yang subreddit about ex-Trump supporters turning. All of this makes me think that it is very hard to distinguish bots from real people who are excited by the campaign. So I fully agree with this > I think it's a mistake to assume that politically disengaged folks who would like to stay anonymous online, and are only joining a social media platform to promote their candidate or two, would behave like "real" users.
  - DalekBaldwin 7y ago
    > To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate. Not only that, Yang ran a couple of UBI-themed contests offering a chance to win money for following and retweeting him. What better use is there for acquiring an army of fake accounts?
olivermarks 7y ago
Twitter in 2020 seems to be a seething mass of agenda driven automation. I am a Tulsi Gabbard for president supporter and am aware that 'like' counts on pro Gabbard posts appear to be regularly culled, presumably by Twitter themselves. Gabbard's team have complained loudly about this on Twitter (@CullenYossarian for example, Gabbard's press assistant). I recently started reusing Twitter, partially to explore this election cycle and am struck by the number of dissenting tweets appended to pro Gabbard posts (Russian asset etc etc) from obviously recently created accounts with very low 'followers'. (These posters almost never create an original post but retweet other posts 'as themselves' on their main account). If you challenge a comment, asking for proof that Gabbard is a Russian asset for example, the effect is similar to responding to a robocall, with the account suddenly being manned by a human for a few hours. There is typically a hail of abuse and denegration of the candidate, then the poster falls silent again, presumably going off duty. Regardless of who you are rooting for in the election I find this alarming. It is very difficult to know how to go about investigating these networks and who the actors are.
np_tedious 7y ago
Has anyone considered that bot operators might be latching onto movements, anything will do, simply to grow their audiences and networks? Simplest explanation is probably that they don't care about election outcome, they just want to leach off of whatever's hot at the moment.
systematical 7y ago
The Yang Gang is very active online and offline. Source: I'm Yang Gang
raz32dust 7y ago
The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. She makes that inference very quickly, and from then on, they are just referred to as "bots". I am 100% sure there are bots, but I am highly skeptical that Yang Gang is the worst offender here or stands out in any way compared to other campaigns. In fact a quick check on twitteraudit.com tells that he might be better than others, although I don't know how good their fake follower detection works. I have been following this campaign since a few months, and I can attest that it has pulled in a large number of voters who were not politically inclined, the members are very passionate, and also that Yang Gang is quite cliquey and live in an echo chamber. Given those facts, I won't be surprised if those accounts were mostly real people. Full disclosure: I like Yang.
- shiftpgdn 7y ago
  The whole time I was reading this I was thinking that she almost certainly has my account flagged as a bot. I only use Twitter for infosec and politics and lately about all I do is RT Yang (and Zach) tweets.
  - vjeux 7y ago
    > “ For example, my bot tracker focuses on bots that post on average 70 times a day or more. While a human being can certainly post to Twitter a hundred times in a day, it’s unlikely that a real human being would post a hundred times a day every day without some kind of automation helping out.” If that sentence is correct, you’re unlikely going to get flagged by the bot.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. The sad truth is that the vast majority of bots are extremely unsophisticated, they don't even try to hide their IP address through a proxy server, and basic tools like Google Analytics can identify this. In Google Analytics, just find the "Network" section, and see how much of your traffic is from "amazon web services", and just block all of it. It may not block sophisticated scrapers, and it could potentially harm legitimate users (e.g., amazon based VPN services), but it's amazing how much "bot" traffic is identifiable. The only real bot traffic that's hard to identify are actual people with machines that have been compromised.
turtlecloud 7y ago
How many startup people have actually read “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel? Yang has gone from 0 to 1 and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. All these articles are people who have a distorted views of reality and chalk up his support as bots in order to fit their world view. The most likely reason from my observation is bias against Asian American men in leadership positions.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Yang has gone from 0 to 1 Yang hasn't gone anywhere, he's been bouncing around in the same range for months with no systematic progress. > and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. If he did something radical like doubling his support in Iowa in the, what, 10 days remaining, and the sources of support he gained were optimally distributed for him to move up positions, that would still only get him to fifth from his current sixth in Iowa, and he'd only be a little over half the support of #4.
  - turtlecloud 7y ago
    According to the latest national Emerson poll today, Yang is in #4 with 8% support. The thing with exponential growth is that by the time you realize it, it is too late
- jshevek 7y ago
  I am opposed to Yang and his agenda, but I am sympathetic to his (and Yang Gangs) mistreatment. I agree that Yang's passionate supporters grew quickly, and part of this 'bots' narrative is due to cognitive dissonance. But the 'bot' narrative is also a tactic to discredit Yang and his supporters. Bias against Asian men may play a role, but there is much more going on here. The leadership of the DNC do not like to see people like Yang gain too much momentum.
zweep 7y ago
People exhibit such bot-like behavior in certain circumstances that the burden of proof for calling something a bot is extremely high. If you saw sports fans in a stadium you’d think they were bots authored by the team’s robotics division — the same behaviors manifest in online discussions of politics. It's like how CAPTCHAs today are virtually unsolvable for humans -- we meatbags are more bot than the bots.
DaniloDias 7y ago
Pretty graphs. No data. Qualitative analysis. No source code.
busymom0 7y ago
Slightly related - Twitter still hasn't done anything about those bot accounts with fake crypto scams. Elon Musks tweets for example always have these fake crypto scam tweets at the very top often using account names of popular people. I think it's been going on for almost 2 years now if I remember right. This should be such a simply thing to take care of but for some reason, Twitter hasn't bothered.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  I would love to know how many people actually fell for that. People who own bitcoin isn't your normal crowd but recent surges in the scams and hype, may have created a lot of people who are oblivious as to what bitcoin technically is but talk and broadcast it everywhere along with having invested a lot.
buboard 7y ago
ah another russian asset is born. good job
blackrock 7y ago
What I don’t understand about Yang and his UBI push, is that he doesn’t mention anything about the housing crisis. It’s not really the people that have homes that are at risk. It’s the people who are renters, and are under the whims of landlords raising the rents to match expensive mortgages. There’s no mention from him, about socializing the cost of housing. This is the primary source of inequality. I am not a fan of socializing anything, but it’s clear to see, that rampant capitalism has run amok, and distorted the housing cost for everyone. Is his he expecting that people will take the $12,000/year UBI, and move out to podunk Iowa somewhere, and buy a small plot of land, and farm the earth and raise chickens to be self subsistent? Like, what happens after you receive this monthly UBI check? Clearly, this isn’t enough to pay the rent. Will these people work part time driving for Uber, or delivering for DoorDash?
- godelski 7y ago
  > There’s no mention from him, about socializing the cost of housing. This is the primary source of inequality. It isn't well mentioned on his website[0], but he has talked about it in more details before (sorry, I forgot which videos he specifically addresses this in. There are a lot and they are long). But the tldr is he wants to do better zoning, encourage high rise apartments, and throw in government incentives for affordable housing. If you post this question in the subreddit I know it'll get answered quickly, with many links, and will likely be updated on the website (that's the usual pattern). > Is his he expecting that people will take the $12,000/year UBI, and move out to podunk Iowa somewhere, and buy a small plot of land, and farm the earth and raise chickens to be self subsistent? In part UBI, but in part he wants the IRS to refund some moving costs[1] > that rampant capitalism has run amok, This is actually at the forefront of his campaign: "Human Centered Capitalism"[2] That the rules need to be rewritten and we need to make the economy human centric, not money first. > Clearly, [UBI] isn’t enough to pay the rent. Will these people work part time driving for Uber, or delivering for DoorDash? There's no way you can pass a living wage UBI in this political climate. But $1k/mo does more than $15/hr (presuming hours are stagnant and you can get full time work. Most states already pay above federal minimum) and it is something that Republicans are on board with (because it simplifies welfare and enables more choice). I know it isn't a complete win, but it is an obtainable win. People are already asking how you pay for UBI, now imagine if he doubled the amount. Let's not let perfection get in the way of good. Think of it as a step in the right direction, not a full solution. [0] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/zoning/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/zoning/ [1] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/get-america-moving/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/get-america-moving/ [2] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/human-capitalism/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/human-capitalism/
dfsegoat 7y ago
Tangential thought: There is an biting element of dehumanization when you call someone a “bot” (who is actually a real person). I see this term thrown around a lot in political threads when the account in question is quite obviously human. In short, It’s become a term du jour for compromising and silencing those with whom you disagree.
- jshevek 7y ago
  Yes, this is a good and important point. There are many people who declare NPC a vile, dehumanizing term...who hypocritically call everyone who disagrees with them a bot.

110 points by mbellotti 7y ago

Theorem: 100% of these articles talking about "bots" on twitter are bullshit. None have any evidence, yet we're supposed to be impressed because ... muh plots. Nobody has any idea how many "bots" are following Trump or Yang or anybody else.

leptoniscool 7y ago

I'm surprised Twitter isn't doing more about political bots, since they've banned political ad dollars. On the other hand, if they banned an account and it turned out to be a real person, they could get some first amendment lawsuits.

knodi123 7y ago
I wish the local elementary school would do something about the yang gangers who draw lengthy screeds in shoepolish on the side of their van and park it in front of the doors every day. There's a rule against political ads on the property, but apparently not against cars parking there. I like a lot of Yang's proposals. I just wish the enthusiasm of his supporters could be a little more... judiciously focused?
zachrose 7y ago
> On the other hand, if they banned an account and it turned out to be a real person, they could get some first amendment lawsuits. Access to post on Twitter is not a 1st Amendment right!
- hadtodoit 7y ago
  Some Senator who's name I can't recall was arguing otherwise. He said something to the affect of, if social media companies, or websites in general want protection under the law from content generated by their users, then they should not be able to dictate what their users can and cannot post barring illegal content. It's an interesting argument regardless of what you believe, but certainly your first amendment rights don't currently extend to Twitter.
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    Are you referring to platform/publisher? If so, it has no legal basis for many reasons, including Twitter's first amendment rights to choose what they show. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-not-require-platforms-be-neutral https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... Also, isn't the whole reason we're on HN the moderation?
    - hadtodoit 7y ago
      He wasn't arguing the current interpretation of the law as much as proposing an amendment. I don't think that HN, nor the community at large does as much as say twitter or reddit to stifle opposing points of view. Relegating extremist to their own echo-chambers is a good way of proliferating their beliefs. Were their ideas exposed to the world where they would have to defend them, they may be dissuaded from holding such extreme beliefs, or a passerby may see the flaws in their argument.
      - iudqnolq 7y ago
        > He wasn't arguing the current interpretation of the law as much as proposing an amendment I wanted to point out it would require radical changes to our current laws and maybe the Constitution. I wasn't sure if he was aware of that. (Stronger versions of this argument, including ones deployed by members of Congress, have said it described current law) > Were their ideas exposed to the world where they would have to defend them, they may be dissuaded from holding such extreme beliefs, or a passerby may see the flaws in their argument. This is a popular position in a popular argument, and it's been debated to death better than we can. Here's an summary I found useful https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-gl... One interesting study mentioned in that summation found that temporary internet outages in Germany reduced hate crimes against refugees. > This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in major Facebook and internet outages, which fully undo the correlation between social media and hate crime. We further find that the effect decreases with distracting news events; increases with user network interactions; and does not hold for posts unrelated to refugees. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online messages and violent crime. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082972 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082972
- harimau777 7y ago
  When the president is using Twitter as his primary means of communicating with the public, it becomes a 1st Amendment right. Granted, this may be more an issue of the president using a private system to communicate with the public.
dawnerd 7y ago
They're loving it though. Bots push something to trending, real people end up talking and sharing like crazy. Their KPIs since this last election must be insane.
ngokevin2 7y ago
I think they do what they can. But it's not really as prevalent in the Yang Gang as the article suggests.
hanniabu 7y ago
What really pisses me off about bot accounts isn't the fake info simply because I analyze things based off my own opinions and research, although I understand how this is an issue for the general majority. My issue is that if I happen to retweet somebody opposite of that running a bot farm, then the bots are trigger to all report me and then I need to verify my account again the next time I'm on. And the sad thing is that it works, because I'll stop retweeting that person's tweets just to avoid that verification process since it happens consistently. Whether there's other criteria that qualifies me for attack, such as the retweeting in combination with following that person, I'm not sure as I haven't tested that.
- EGreg 7y ago
  Bots will slowly come to control Twitter discourse
- jshevek 7y ago
  That is unfortunate. Sadly, it also happens without bots. Some communities self righteously abuse Twitter's reporting system just to silence or censor views they disagree with.

save_ferris 7y ago

It’s terrifying how cheap and easy it is to masquerade as hundreds of thousands to millions of people on social media using automation, and how little social media companies are doing to stop it. Regardless of the numbers, the stress it’s placing on discourse is devastating, and there seem to be few serious, market-driven solutions to this problem. The growth-at-all-costs mentality has put companies like Twitter in a position where they must choose between profits and responsible community development and moderation. It’s clear which path they’ve chosen.

ngokevin2 7y ago
It's also terrifying that headlines and articles can be taken as valid. Smear articles and misleading information are troubling as well in the upcoming years.
- backupcavalry 7y ago
  Oh, the irony of an account created specifically to defend Yang in the discussion about bots created to defend Yang. If you're truly looking to support him this probably isn't a good way to help his case.
  - proximitysauce 7y ago
    An anonymous account is not the same thing as a bot. As acrimonious as the current state of politics is, I wouldn't blame anyone for using a pseudonym online to voice their opinion.
    - backupcavalry 7y ago
      Touche. But you'll have to pardon me for being distrustful of anyone that walks in just to defend a politician of any kind (without hard proof, anyway).
      - godelski 7y ago

tonydiv 7y ago

If any journalists are writing about this in a serious capacity, contact me. I will trade info :)

proximitysauce 7y ago

That's a lot of narrative overlaid on the data. The author even says this about Democratic politician accounts: > All of them had bot activity of some kind. Given enough time to collect the data, bot networks would eventually appear for all of them. I think the analysis could be very interesting but they're injecting too much personal spin on the motivations of everyone involved. Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too? I think it would be interesting to study bots and how they intersect with media and politics in a less biased manner.

rdtsc 7y ago
I found it was a good intro to the world of Twitter bots. I don’t use Twitter but like to read about its influence and how others are using it. But yeah I did get the same tinge of condescension about the “sad” and “lonely” teenager Mike because he works at Taco Bell, doesn’t want to go into $100k worth of debt going to college and is following bots from campaigns she doesn’t agree with. > He seemed lonely. Eager to please. His last video blog he announced he wasn’t going to college after all… Like you said, what if he followed Bloomberg bots, would he be described as “sad” too. However at the same I would have to concede that writing an unbiased article about political bots in this day and age is probably not gonna happen, either.
waisbrot 7y ago
> Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too? Which party do you think Yang is running for? Anyway, the article was clearly describing as "sad" that the teenager is trying to build an online following but his "following" is just bots using him to look less like bots.
- godelski 7y ago
  One of Yang's pitches is that he is pulling from the MAGA group. Just scroll down the subreddit [0] and you'll see tons of posts about MAGA/Republicans switching sides for Yang. If anything I'd __expect__ a real person to be more likely to be connected to both MAGA and Yang (compared to the average democratic voter). But that also makes it difficult to tell real people from bots, which is what this story is really about. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/

aazaa 7y ago

The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process. It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills. The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those who still can't accept that the US elected the current president, is that things like Twitter bots and fake Facebook ads are just sideshows.

Barrin92 7y ago
even assuming that's true and all other things being equal, people passing bots off as natural users rather than clearly marking that they're bots is simply lying and detrimental to discourse if for the sole reason that these bots are being mistaken for authentic users. Given the crude tactics outlined in this article, with accounts making 400 tweets per day in regular intervals, duplicate accounts of the same alleged person and so on I think it's pretty bad that platforms like Twitter do not pursue the issue much more agressively.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I agree and bots should be banned... Now that we're passed the perfect being the enemy of the good, I'm also quite concerned about, instead of bots, just paying some people to have your opinion - that's also a problem we're definitely going to need to address since if you subsidize the cost of living of someone who agrees with you then you can basically turn them into a 24/7 advocate for your point of view. If that person happens to live in a remote part of the third world then the actual out of pocket cost to subsidize them could be a negligible portion of your earnings.
ngokevin2 7y ago
Yang's campaign has been consistently growing and growing as other campaigns have dropped out. He raised $16.5M last quarter. Polls show him at 5%+ with an up arrow attached to it. And that's not counting that polls don't capture his base (first-time voters, independents, disaffected conservatives). As for the article, I'll address it in another comment.

ngokevin 7y ago

It deems accounts as bots if they post and retweet a lot and are newly created? Being familiar with the Yang Gang, people are extremely passionate almost to an addiction of supporting Yang. They follow his every move, his surrogates words, and engage with any tiny bit of content they can. Many are new accounts because few have ever followed politics and want to keep separate from their main accounts. Yang has one of the strongest audit scores with 95% of followers being real. Contrasted with Bernie Sanders at only 69%. https://www.twitteraudit.com/andrewyang https://www.twitteraudit.com/andrewyang | https://www.twitteraudit.com/berniesanders https://www.twitteraudit.com/berniesanders While there may be a few bad actors, it is definitely not representative of those that engage with Yang and his campaign. It shows up on the ground as well where Yang's following shows up in biggest numbers. At least in Iowa, there were hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that flew in to canvass in the snow, outnumbering most campaign ground forces. In San Francisco, weekly hangouts have been growing to 30 people, and volunteer events turn out 15+ people regularly. I believe this is nationwide as well, there aren't many campaigns that have been matching the grassroots volunteer forces.

elfexec 7y ago
> While there may be a few bad actors The question is are these bad actors acting in support of Yang or to undermine Yang? If you were against Yang, imagine how easy it would be to set up bots to "support Yang" and then have fellow operatives/journalists who are against Yang write about Yang "bots". It's just as easy for Yang's detractors to set up bots as it is for his supporters. There seems to be a concerted effort by certain operatives/journalists/etc to undermine certain political candidates by tainting them with "russian asset" or "bot" labels. Without a doubt, there have been bot activity starting with obama/ron paul/etc in 2008 and everyone since in political life. If the author ( who also submitted her own article here ) wanted to find bots, there are far better candidates to focus on. Why the focus on Yang? As with bots, journalists, media and everything, we have to understand the context and agenda. Since the author also has an account here, I would love to know what her political leanings are and who she is supporting. Has she work for any political candidate before?
comnetxr 7y ago
how do you know the passionate to the point of addiction Yang supporters are real? I think its likely that many are, but that there are also many passionate supporters of the other candidates who just lurk on Twitter without posting due to social norms about how often you should chime in and how forcefully. The social norms around Yang supporters on twitter have changed by bots posting often and loudly, breaking the bubble and giving permission to people to do it too. If you then turn the bots off, the YangGang effect would last. (I'm sure this applies to not just Yang...)

comnetxr 7y ago

Someone should make a Twitter-like that verifies posters at various levels based on humanness/geographic locale and other characteristics. Then posters could limit conversations to those with >90% human score (with score going up when twitter has more certainty that you are a human) located in the US (for US political conversations), etc. I'd certainly pay a few bucks to be verified and contribute much more often to conversations than I do now, as now it just seems like screaming into the bot void.

trhway 7y ago
that would destroy the main principle of the Web2.x - "on Internet, nobody knows you're a human"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

naveen99 7y ago

Yang supporters believe expats should also get the freedom dividend. It would be funny if yang just declares a United States of earth and distributes the freedom dividend to every human on the entire planet...

aianus 7y ago
If American expats pay US income tax, why shouldn’t they qualify? Maybe the US should stop taxing people that don’t even live in America like every other civilized country.
bnjms 7y ago
Not really. Yang is unequivocal that expats should not receive the dividend while they are abroad. And they deserve their part given we tax them as if they were present.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > Yang is unequivocal that expats should not receive the dividend while they are abroad. What is the moral basis for this? Pretty much every other U.S. right and rule is grounded on U.S. citizenship, not where you're currently residing. Basing rights on where you live (rather than citizenship) also leads to some weird results. If you deny expats some right because they don't live in the country, then shouldn't you grant non-citizens who are indeed living in the country those same rights? After all, the standard is where you live rather than citizenship.
speedplane 7y ago
> Yang supporters believe expats should also get the freedom dividend. Well, this is what Trump believes. A solid 30% of the U.S. stock market is owned by foreigners, and so when U.S. corporations used their Trump tax break to increase their market value, 30% of that effectively gave foreigners a bump. His tax plan effectively increased taxes in expensive "blue" states and gave that money to foreign investors.
- naveen99 7y ago

thrower123 7y ago

It's always bots and foreign influences when an organic populist movement that doesn't fit the blessed agenda grows. The machine is showing it's rust more and more, and the more it flails the more credibility it loses.

xrd 7y ago

My favorite part was the link to the article where Newt Gingrich's Twitter account with 1.6M followers was shown to be only 8% real people.

Communitivity 7y ago

I encountered this myself after responding to someone's comment about the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept, and got spammed with negative replies. I figured it was just ardent supporters, bots make sense though given the speed of the responses. Sadly, I think this may be the new normal of politics in the 2020s.

SuoDuanDao 7y ago
I had the same experience. I wonder what's behind it and how well organised the group is.
jshevek 7y ago
From what I have seen of Yang Gangers, that could very well have been the result of real people. A high proportion of them are always online, highly vigilant, eager to participate in online activism.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > From what I have seen of Yang Gangers, that could very well have been the result of real people. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The very fact that people are questioning whether political support is real or not the significant problem.
speedplane 7y ago
> after responding to someone's comment about the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept, and got spammed with negative replies. I figured it was just ardent supporters, bots make sense though given the speed of the responses. Ardent non-supporter of UBI here! Not a bot!! The nefarious issue with UBI is that it threatens our existing social safety nets. The social goal is not to give everyone a single basic income, it's to give everyone a single basic standard of living. It's far more fair and moral to give folks access to basic standards of human decency (e.g., healthcare, education, housing, food, air), than writing them a check and letting them fend on their own. The moral underpinning of social safety nets is not to increase the total or average, but to increase the lowest.

KhoomeiK 7y ago

Kind of ironic that the candidate aiming to solve issues created by AI is being propelled forward by AI-driven bots

ilaksh 7y ago
I think that one article doesn't prove that Yang's campaign is driven by bots. I'm a 42 year old programmer who has never voted before. I am voting for Yang because his policies are superior and the other candidates have outdated policies or worldviews. I have contributed around $400 or $500 and if there is something we are "trying to trend" I will retweet it (even though I never really used Twitter before now). By the way, Yang has received endorsements from people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dave Chappelle, Donald Glover, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, James Gunn. Saying the campaign is driven by bots is an unsubstantiated smear.
- jshevek 7y ago
  I am most definitely not a Yang support, I am critic, and yet I strongly agree with your last sentence. Saying the campaign is driven by bots, based on the 'evidence' presented so far, is an unsubstantiated smear.
- KhoomeiK 7y ago
  I'm not for Yang nor do I hate Yang, just noting the irony of the article. Unrelated, do you speak Ithkuil?

fc_barnes 7y ago

Wasn’t it “low orbit ion cannon”?

godelski 7y ago

This is an interesting post if you also follow the subreddit for Yang[0]. There are a lot of people there that created Twitter accounts just to follow Yang and participate in those polls about who is more popular. So when the author mentions the creation of new accounts when Yang started, it actually doesn't surprise me. The campaign is very technocentric after all. Also, these people (a lot of them "true believers" types) do post A LOT on Twitter and get involved in any mention of Yang (go check any YouTube video about Yang). You have to "yang" everyone that you can. It is a really weird community to be honest. But one where they are actively telling one another to create social media accounts to promote Yang. What this post really tells me is that it is hard to distinguish real people from bots. Here's a post even about YouTube comments[1]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/esycun/the_daily_show_reposted_their_getting_to_know/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/esycun/...

ci5er 7y ago
Seems (to me) to be similar to the Ron Paul bots (fanatics, I should say, because they certainly weren't mechanical war-bots; They seemed like what the right calls NPCs these days, but they were just so ... into it! 24/7! It's actually kind of nice to see groups of new/young people get excited about politics - I think they might learn a lot through the process (maybe)) all over Reddit in 2008 (not just /r/politics, but they were everywhere), esp. since that also included all of the influx of rapidly migrating Diggers. Maybe it's not the same, but those folks were all in on the Paul Train (or whatever they called it). They were eggcited!
- kevitivity 7y ago
  So true, the "Paulestinians" as I called them were the first thing that came to my mind while reading this. There is too little detail of methodology in this article to take it too seriously, but still interesting.
  - ci5er 7y ago
    > "Paulestinians" Ha! Never heard that one. It is by far more clever than any of the half-dozen or so that I did.

ilaksh 7y ago

I'm a 42 year old Yang supporter. I never voted before and only used Twitter for a week or so many years ago. A few Yang posts are the only things I have ever retweeted. In particular when he was excluded from the debates I was retweeting everything with #AmericaNeedsYang or whatever. I am not a bot. But my activity then might have seemed bot-like. Anyway if anyone hasn't 100% made up their mind on Yang maybe watch a few YouTube videos of him.

godelski 7y ago
This is an interesting comment from multiple directions. 1) because I could see someone calling __this__ comment a bot comment, but you're much more active here and so it seems like you aren't. 2) Because if you are real, it really shows the idea (I suggested this in another comment too) that Yang Gangers come off as bots. (I also found the statement about Yang accounts being linked to MAGA accounts as evidence as funny).
- ilaksh 7y ago
  WTF makes you think I'm a bot? Because I took the time to write a full paragraph and tried to promote the presidential campaign I have invested my time and money into?
  - godelski 7y ago
    I don't think you are. The comment doesn't come across to me as one. But using the same analysis that the author of this post did, I think they'd characterize you as one. It was more a critique on the post. I think the author has never visited the subreddit.
  - crgt 7y ago
    Rick Deckard feels your pain. Kinda makes you wonder about the usefulness of the Turing Test too, if humans can’t pass it anymore..
    - EGreg 7y ago

vegcel 7y ago

I wonder how many people are more of the author's mistaken bots, like Mike mentioned in the article? If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior. Activities the author describes as bot-like to me seem like activities a noob on twitter would engage in. Twitter itself does a lot to self-create these node clusters, with a circle jerk of recommended followers based on your activity. If you have a bunch of twitter noobs, all liking and retweeting Yang and his surrogates, they will inevitably get clustered together via twitter's own algorithms. I think it's a mistake to assume that politically disengaged folks who would like to stay anonymous online, and are only joining a social media platform to promote their candidate or two, would behave like "real" users. I say this as someone who converted an old twitter account from 2011 I used when I was a teenager for spam purposes, to become a Yang account. I'm sure I'm considered a bot by the author's software.

godelski 7y ago
> If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior. To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate. It is definitely an agenda that is pushed. Lots of new Twitter accounts that are pro Yang is not surprising if you visit the subreddit. It also shouldn't be surprising that these accounts would be associated with MAGA bots and supporters. After all, Andrew is targeting the same demographic as Trump. There's several posts a day on the yang subreddit about ex-Trump supporters turning. All of this makes me think that it is very hard to distinguish bots from real people who are excited by the campaign. So I fully agree with this > I think it's a mistake to assume that politically disengaged folks who would like to stay anonymous online, and are only joining a social media platform to promote their candidate or two, would behave like "real" users.
- DalekBaldwin 7y ago
  > To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate. Not only that, Yang ran a couple of UBI-themed contests offering a chance to win money for following and retweeting him. What better use is there for acquiring an army of fake accounts?

olivermarks 7y ago

Twitter in 2020 seems to be a seething mass of agenda driven automation. I am a Tulsi Gabbard for president supporter and am aware that 'like' counts on pro Gabbard posts appear to be regularly culled, presumably by Twitter themselves. Gabbard's team have complained loudly about this on Twitter (@CullenYossarian for example, Gabbard's press assistant). I recently started reusing Twitter, partially to explore this election cycle and am struck by the number of dissenting tweets appended to pro Gabbard posts (Russian asset etc etc) from obviously recently created accounts with very low 'followers'. (These posters almost never create an original post but retweet other posts 'as themselves' on their main account). If you challenge a comment, asking for proof that Gabbard is a Russian asset for example, the effect is similar to responding to a robocall, with the account suddenly being manned by a human for a few hours. There is typically a hail of abuse and denegration of the candidate, then the poster falls silent again, presumably going off duty. Regardless of who you are rooting for in the election I find this alarming. It is very difficult to know how to go about investigating these networks and who the actors are.

np_tedious 7y ago

Has anyone considered that bot operators might be latching onto movements, anything will do, simply to grow their audiences and networks? Simplest explanation is probably that they don't care about election outcome, they just want to leach off of whatever's hot at the moment.

systematical 7y ago

The Yang Gang is very active online and offline. Source: I'm Yang Gang

raz32dust 7y ago

The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. She makes that inference very quickly, and from then on, they are just referred to as "bots". I am 100% sure there are bots, but I am highly skeptical that Yang Gang is the worst offender here or stands out in any way compared to other campaigns. In fact a quick check on twitteraudit.com tells that he might be better than others, although I don't know how good their fake follower detection works. I have been following this campaign since a few months, and I can attest that it has pulled in a large number of voters who were not politically inclined, the members are very passionate, and also that Yang Gang is quite cliquey and live in an echo chamber. Given those facts, I won't be surprised if those accounts were mostly real people. Full disclosure: I like Yang.

shiftpgdn 7y ago
The whole time I was reading this I was thinking that she almost certainly has my account flagged as a bot. I only use Twitter for infosec and politics and lately about all I do is RT Yang (and Zach) tweets.
- vjeux 7y ago
  > “ For example, my bot tracker focuses on bots that post on average 70 times a day or more. While a human being can certainly post to Twitter a hundred times in a day, it’s unlikely that a real human being would post a hundred times a day every day without some kind of automation helping out.” If that sentence is correct, you’re unlikely going to get flagged by the bot.
speedplane 7y ago
> The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. The sad truth is that the vast majority of bots are extremely unsophisticated, they don't even try to hide their IP address through a proxy server, and basic tools like Google Analytics can identify this. In Google Analytics, just find the "Network" section, and see how much of your traffic is from "amazon web services", and just block all of it. It may not block sophisticated scrapers, and it could potentially harm legitimate users (e.g., amazon based VPN services), but it's amazing how much "bot" traffic is identifiable. The only real bot traffic that's hard to identify are actual people with machines that have been compromised.

turtlecloud 7y ago

How many startup people have actually read “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel? Yang has gone from 0 to 1 and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. All these articles are people who have a distorted views of reality and chalk up his support as bots in order to fit their world view. The most likely reason from my observation is bias against Asian American men in leadership positions.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Yang has gone from 0 to 1 Yang hasn't gone anywhere, he's been bouncing around in the same range for months with no systematic progress. > and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. If he did something radical like doubling his support in Iowa in the, what, 10 days remaining, and the sources of support he gained were optimally distributed for him to move up positions, that would still only get him to fifth from his current sixth in Iowa, and he'd only be a little over half the support of #4.
- turtlecloud 7y ago
  According to the latest national Emerson poll today, Yang is in #4 with 8% support. The thing with exponential growth is that by the time you realize it, it is too late
jshevek 7y ago
I am opposed to Yang and his agenda, but I am sympathetic to his (and Yang Gangs) mistreatment. I agree that Yang's passionate supporters grew quickly, and part of this 'bots' narrative is due to cognitive dissonance. But the 'bot' narrative is also a tactic to discredit Yang and his supporters. Bias against Asian men may play a role, but there is much more going on here. The leadership of the DNC do not like to see people like Yang gain too much momentum.

zweep 7y ago

People exhibit such bot-like behavior in certain circumstances that the burden of proof for calling something a bot is extremely high. If you saw sports fans in a stadium you’d think they were bots authored by the team’s robotics division — the same behaviors manifest in online discussions of politics. It's like how CAPTCHAs today are virtually unsolvable for humans -- we meatbags are more bot than the bots.

DaniloDias 7y ago

Pretty graphs. No data. Qualitative analysis. No source code.

busymom0 7y ago

Slightly related - Twitter still hasn't done anything about those bot accounts with fake crypto scams. Elon Musks tweets for example always have these fake crypto scam tweets at the very top often using account names of popular people. I think it's been going on for almost 2 years now if I remember right. This should be such a simply thing to take care of but for some reason, Twitter hasn't bothered.

thrwaway69 7y ago
I would love to know how many people actually fell for that. People who own bitcoin isn't your normal crowd but recent surges in the scams and hype, may have created a lot of people who are oblivious as to what bitcoin technically is but talk and broadcast it everywhere along with having invested a lot.

buboard 7y ago

ah another russian asset is born. good job

blackrock 7y ago

What I don’t understand about Yang and his UBI push, is that he doesn’t mention anything about the housing crisis. It’s not really the people that have homes that are at risk. It’s the people who are renters, and are under the whims of landlords raising the rents to match expensive mortgages. There’s no mention from him, about socializing the cost of housing. This is the primary source of inequality. I am not a fan of socializing anything, but it’s clear to see, that rampant capitalism has run amok, and distorted the housing cost for everyone. Is his he expecting that people will take the $12,000/year UBI, and move out to podunk Iowa somewhere, and buy a small plot of land, and farm the earth and raise chickens to be self subsistent? Like, what happens after you receive this monthly UBI check? Clearly, this isn’t enough to pay the rent. Will these people work part time driving for Uber, or delivering for DoorDash?

godelski 7y ago
> There’s no mention from him, about socializing the cost of housing. This is the primary source of inequality. It isn't well mentioned on his website[0], but he has talked about it in more details before (sorry, I forgot which videos he specifically addresses this in. There are a lot and they are long). But the tldr is he wants to do better zoning, encourage high rise apartments, and throw in government incentives for affordable housing. If you post this question in the subreddit I know it'll get answered quickly, with many links, and will likely be updated on the website (that's the usual pattern). > Is his he expecting that people will take the $12,000/year UBI, and move out to podunk Iowa somewhere, and buy a small plot of land, and farm the earth and raise chickens to be self subsistent? In part UBI, but in part he wants the IRS to refund some moving costs[1] > that rampant capitalism has run amok, This is actually at the forefront of his campaign: "Human Centered Capitalism"[2] That the rules need to be rewritten and we need to make the economy human centric, not money first. > Clearly, [UBI] isn’t enough to pay the rent. Will these people work part time driving for Uber, or delivering for DoorDash? There's no way you can pass a living wage UBI in this political climate. But $1k/mo does more than $15/hr (presuming hours are stagnant and you can get full time work. Most states already pay above federal minimum) and it is something that Republicans are on board with (because it simplifies welfare and enables more choice). I know it isn't a complete win, but it is an obtainable win. People are already asking how you pay for UBI, now imagine if he doubled the amount. Let's not let perfection get in the way of good. Think of it as a step in the right direction, not a full solution. [0] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/zoning/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/zoning/ [1] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/get-america-moving/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/get-america-moving/ [2] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/human-capitalism/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/human-capitalism/

dfsegoat 7y ago

Tangential thought: There is an biting element of dehumanization when you call someone a “bot” (who is actually a real person). I see this term thrown around a lot in political threads when the account in question is quite obviously human. In short, It’s become a term du jour for compromising and silencing those with whom you disagree.

jshevek 7y ago
Yes, this is a good and important point. There are many people who declare NPC a vile, dehumanizing term...who hypocritically call everyone who disagrees with them a bot.