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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 tur

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
        hadtodoit 7y ago
- 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.

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
      - hadtodoit 7y ago
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.