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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 prove

by 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.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Yang's campaign has been consistently growing and growing as other campaigns have dropped out. His support is consistently enough nonzero across multiple polls that you can say he has some support, but it's often within the margin of error of zero on individual polls. He's not gaining enough to have a welk's chance in a supernova of winning. On the other hand, he generally leads NY Times-endorsed Klobuchar (and yet, pollsters are less likely to include him in their polls), so there's that.
  - ilaksh 7y ago
    Most recent poll has Yang at 8% nationally, beating Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. And Yang has been left of several polling questions entirely (whereas Klobuchar and Buttgieg always included) and left out of several graphics on TV. Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Most recent poll has Yang at 8% nationally, beating Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. Paying attention to individual polls produces more noise than useful information; you get more value (though less cherry-picking opportunities) from a poll aggregator like 538s. But if you want to play that game, the most recent national primary poll I can find that includes Yang has him at 3%, the best recent polling was at 5% in a couple of polls about two weeks ago. [0] The only 8% for him I can find is a poll of voters under 30. [1] > Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively. No, Bloomberg—who started much later and actually is polling in the neighborhood of 8% now—is gaining massively. Yang's been bouncing around between 2-5% with no real trend since October; he's not gaining or losing anything that isn't small enough to be obscured by noise. [0] see the list of polls here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-d/national/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary... [1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-danger-younger-voters-not-jazzed-about-democrats-yang-8-buttigieg-3 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-da...
danShumway 7y ago
I think there's a little bit of dismissal on both sides here, because people want very clear narratives about what happened. Some people feel good saying, "Trump won because people wanted him." Some people feel good saying, "Trump won because the system was hacked." Both of those claims are simple. Either the election was a farce, or nothing is wrong and all the criticism is fearmongering. That kind of simplicity feels good. It doesn't feel as good to say, "Trump won in part because the system was hacked, but if a bunch of people hadn't also genuinely wanted him, hacking the system would not have been enough to make him win." People are hardwired to look for clear, easy-to-reason-about patterns or rules that they can just universally apply to every situation. Real patterns like that are rare, usually uncommon events have multiple causes. Usually reality is more complicated than we expect. I don't think that bots/plants are as big of an issue as people say. I certainly don't think they're an existential threat to democracy. I also don't think we should ignore them, I do think they have an impact. They're one element of many that can influence an election.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  I'm half convinced that the thing that broke everyone's brains is Trump handily winning the electoral college but also clearly losing the popular vote.
  - ben509 7y ago
    Part of the cognitive breakage was that he won the electoral college by taking states that had been traditional Democratic strongholds.
    - godelski 7y ago
      A lot of people still don't understand that a lot of pro Bernie people ended up voting for Trump. After the DNC stuff people went even harder for Trump. People also don't get that Trump supporters are jumping ship to support Bernie and Yang in this election (e.g. this article suggesting connection to MAGA bots is evidence that Yang Gangers are bots).
EdSharkey 7y ago
The candidate straight outta Google is struggling? Too bad, Google. You could use more friends in high places the way things are headed.
- bnjms 7y ago
  Yang is often referred to as a “tech entrepreneur” but it’s practically a smear to insinuate he’s some billionaire (a common assumption). It’s more accurate to say he’s a nonprofit entrepreneur given his dot-com was a charity organizing company and his nonprofit works with startups in underserved markets.
  - EdSharkey 7y ago
    https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/19/20701175/andrew-yang-2020-presidential-race-google-breakup-tech-warren-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/19/20701175/andrew-yang-20... Read between the lines.
baddox 7y ago
It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to. The fact that using Twitter bots hasn't caused one candidate to become the most popular doesn't seem like sufficient evidence. Perhaps he would be even less popular without the Twitter bots. And perhaps many of the other candidates are doing the same thing, but better or at a larger scale.
- retsibsi 7y ago
  It's also possible (and plausible to me) that negative messages tend to be more effective than positive ones, and that sowing doubt is easier than positively convincing people. In which case it would be very hard to elevate a random candidate into a winning position, but significantly easier to harm the reputation of a rival, or to muddy the waters on issues unfavourable to your candidate.
- ipsum2 7y ago
  > It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to. Why? When people measure how ads perform, the null hypothesis is that the ad has no effect on the behavior of the viewer. Bots are sort of like ads that look like native content. That being said, I don't think a single data point (Yang) is enough to be conclusive, but it does change my beliefs a little bit on the effectiveness of bots.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    Individual ads, sure. But an equivalent null hypothesis would be "social media advertising has no effect on people," which would seem pretty strange.
    - retsibsi 7y ago
      Also, the null hypothesis is just a starting point from which you gather and analyse the data that may disprove it. There's no reason that 'X has no effect on Y' should have a privileged position in messy real-world epistemology; we don't assume that nothing causes anything in the absence of conclusive proof, we keep an open mind and make our best guess based on whatever information we have.
ConsiderCrying 7y ago
I don't think we should be looking for a candidate who wins on the strength of Twitter bots, that's pretty much impossible (and that's a good thing.) Instead, we should consider the fact that all these bots make a lot of information noise and that's a problem to how we view candidates. With enough bots spamming fake articles or posting links that favor the candidate/smear his opponents, they muddy the waters and make it harder to find real information. This alone won't win anybody elections but it brings prominence to smaller candidates, makes it harder to find legitimate dirt on others (bring certain links as evidence and people dismiss them, saying 'Oh, those are part of the bot campaign'), and makes any political discussion on Twitter a horrible idea. (Whether or not I think Twitter is already a horrible place for political discussion is another matter entirely.)
retsibsi 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. This is not logical. "This kind of thing poisons the political process" does not come close to implying 'any candidate who engages in this kind of thing is likely to become wildly popular'. That would be an obviously crazy position, and refuting it is only useful as a way to avoid engaging with non-strawmanned concerns about social media manipulation.
ilaksh 7y ago
$16.5 million raised last quarter and steadily rising polls. Dave Chappelle is doing a fundraising show at/near Iowa State in a few days. Oprah's "spiritual advisor" is helping Yang campaign. Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit. "Struggling" is not accurate.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  why isn’t he doing well in the polls then?
  - turtlecloud 7y ago
    Polls have outdated models that don’t accurately reflect the age of social media. Prior polling models don’t work with the changing environment. For example most the people they poll are in landlines and 65+ yrs old. Also polls are politicized now.
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      Let's not forget the media gives him dramatically less coverage, he receives less than proportional speaking time at debates, and it seems the amount of times the mess up facts about him is too high to be accidental, not to mention not even getting his picture correct and instead showing an image of some other asian.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      I'm convinced that the outdated nature of polling entirely explains Biden's numbers. He appeals to clueless old people, and polling as practiced today over-samples that demographic.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > $16.5 million raised last quarter and steadily rising polls. He's been bouncing around between 2-5% in the polls since October; he's not steadily rising, he's stuck in one place. > Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit. A number of the candidates that have dropped out have been consistently polling above Yang. They haven't dropped out sooner because they were doing worse, they've dropped out sooner because they have a different calculus about the value of staying in the race. Yang isn't still going strong, he's still stuck in neutral.
dba7dba 7y ago
I would not say Yang's campaign is struggling. He literally was an unknown guy right before this election cycle, who made a low millions from selling a test prep company and then ran a non-profit for 7 years. Never even ran for a political office before this. And he's outlasted many senators/governors. About twitter and Yang, I created a twitter account just to follow him. Did not create any bot. And I also donated to his campaign multiple times. And I'm over 40 yrs old.
turtlecloud 7y ago
Yang campaign is actually seeing exponential growth. Thus the increase in smear articles. The establishment is running through mental gymnastic excercise to rationalize these results. Thus them calling all supporters bots
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Yang campaign is actually seeing exponential growth. In what? His polling position has been bouncing around within the margin of error with no progress for months. Yang's got some good ideas, and he's certainly one of the most interesting candidates of the cycle. But he's got no momentum.
  - schuke 7y ago
    Fundraising numbers. Others dropping out would count as progress too I guess. Although polling is still in single digit but 5-6% is certainly progress from 2-3%.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Fundraising numbers. Fundraising is just a means to get money to spend (often, ineffectively) building/maintaining support. If you are raising and spending more money and not moving the needle in the polls, that's not progress. > Others dropping out would count as progress too I guess. No, if the field is narrowing and you aren't getting any of the support (and your remaining competitors are) that's also the opposite of progress. > Although polling is still in single digit but 5-6% is certainly progress from 2-3%. It would be, if he was consistently polling at the former and previously polling at the latter. But that's not what's happened to Yang. His national polling in January has ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in December ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in November ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in October ranged from 2-5%. And the margin of error on most of the polls is in the neighborhood of ±5%.
  - shiftpgdn 7y ago
    Yang is polling at 8% nationally now. That's more than margin of error.
aww_dang 7y ago
>It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. If an army of Twitter bots could change voter's minds, why is it suddenly an illegitimate tactic? How is it different than any other form of political speech? Are politicians and political campaigns only dishonest when presented through new mediums? Is this a problem with Twitter, free speech or just a timeless flaw within democracy which has been known since antiquity? I would suggest that it is the latter. Misunderstanding the underlying principles results in the alarmist blaming of social media. This is nothing new, aside from a new opportunity to opine for regulation.

by aazaa 7y ago

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.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Yang's campaign has been consistently growing and growing as other campaigns have dropped out. His support is consistently enough nonzero across multiple polls that you can say he has some support, but it's often within the margin of error of zero on individual polls. He's not gaining enough to have a welk's chance in a supernova of winning. On the other hand, he generally leads NY Times-endorsed Klobuchar (and yet, pollsters are less likely to include him in their polls), so there's that.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Most recent poll has Yang at 8% nationally, beating Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. And Yang has been left of several polling questions entirely (whereas Klobuchar and Buttgieg always included) and left out of several graphics on TV. Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Most recent poll has Yang at 8% nationally, beating Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. Paying attention to individual polls produces more noise than useful information; you get more value (though less cherry-picking opportunities) from a poll aggregator like 538s. But if you want to play that game, the most recent national primary poll I can find that includes Yang has him at 3%, the best recent polling was at 5% in a couple of polls about two weeks ago. [0] The only 8% for him I can find is a poll of voters under 30. [1] > Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively. No, Bloomberg—who started much later and actually is polling in the neighborhood of 8% now—is gaining massively. Yang's been bouncing around between 2-5% with no real trend since October; he's not gaining or losing anything that isn't small enough to be obscured by noise. [0] see the list of polls here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-d/national/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary... [1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-danger-younger-voters-not-jazzed-about-democrats-yang-8-buttigieg-3 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-da...

danShumway 7y ago

I think there's a little bit of dismissal on both sides here, because people want very clear narratives about what happened. Some people feel good saying, "Trump won because people wanted him." Some people feel good saying, "Trump won because the system was hacked." Both of those claims are simple. Either the election was a farce, or nothing is wrong and all the criticism is fearmongering. That kind of simplicity feels good. It doesn't feel as good to say, "Trump won in part because the system was hacked, but if a bunch of people hadn't also genuinely wanted him, hacking the system would not have been enough to make him win." People are hardwired to look for clear, easy-to-reason-about patterns or rules that they can just universally apply to every situation. Real patterns like that are rare, usually uncommon events have multiple causes. Usually reality is more complicated than we expect. I don't think that bots/plants are as big of an issue as people say. I certainly don't think they're an existential threat to democracy. I also don't think we should ignore them, I do think they have an impact. They're one element of many that can influence an election.

roywiggins 7y ago
I'm half convinced that the thing that broke everyone's brains is Trump handily winning the electoral college but also clearly losing the popular vote.
- ben509 7y ago
  Part of the cognitive breakage was that he won the electoral college by taking states that had been traditional Democratic strongholds.
  - godelski 7y ago
    A lot of people still don't understand that a lot of pro Bernie people ended up voting for Trump. After the DNC stuff people went even harder for Trump. People also don't get that Trump supporters are jumping ship to support Bernie and Yang in this election (e.g. this article suggesting connection to MAGA bots is evidence that Yang Gangers are bots).

EdSharkey 7y ago

The candidate straight outta Google is struggling? Too bad, Google. You could use more friends in high places the way things are headed.

bnjms 7y ago
Yang is often referred to as a “tech entrepreneur” but it’s practically a smear to insinuate he’s some billionaire (a common assumption). It’s more accurate to say he’s a nonprofit entrepreneur given his dot-com was a charity organizing company and his nonprofit works with startups in underserved markets.
- EdSharkey 7y ago
  https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/19/20701175/andrew-yang-2020-presidential-race-google-breakup-tech-warren-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/19/20701175/andrew-yang-20... Read between the lines.

baddox 7y ago

It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to. The fact that using Twitter bots hasn't caused one candidate to become the most popular doesn't seem like sufficient evidence. Perhaps he would be even less popular without the Twitter bots. And perhaps many of the other candidates are doing the same thing, but better or at a larger scale.

retsibsi 7y ago
It's also possible (and plausible to me) that negative messages tend to be more effective than positive ones, and that sowing doubt is easier than positively convincing people. In which case it would be very hard to elevate a random candidate into a winning position, but significantly easier to harm the reputation of a rival, or to muddy the waters on issues unfavourable to your candidate.
ipsum2 7y ago
> It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to. Why? When people measure how ads perform, the null hypothesis is that the ad has no effect on the behavior of the viewer. Bots are sort of like ads that look like native content. That being said, I don't think a single data point (Yang) is enough to be conclusive, but it does change my beliefs a little bit on the effectiveness of bots.
- scarmig 7y ago
  Individual ads, sure. But an equivalent null hypothesis would be "social media advertising has no effect on people," which would seem pretty strange.
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    Also, the null hypothesis is just a starting point from which you gather and analyse the data that may disprove it. There's no reason that 'X has no effect on Y' should have a privileged position in messy real-world epistemology; we don't assume that nothing causes anything in the absence of conclusive proof, we keep an open mind and make our best guess based on whatever information we have.

ConsiderCrying 7y ago

I don't think we should be looking for a candidate who wins on the strength of Twitter bots, that's pretty much impossible (and that's a good thing.) Instead, we should consider the fact that all these bots make a lot of information noise and that's a problem to how we view candidates. With enough bots spamming fake articles or posting links that favor the candidate/smear his opponents, they muddy the waters and make it harder to find real information. This alone won't win anybody elections but it brings prominence to smaller candidates, makes it harder to find legitimate dirt on others (bring certain links as evidence and people dismiss them, saying 'Oh, those are part of the bot campaign'), and makes any political discussion on Twitter a horrible idea. (Whether or not I think Twitter is already a horrible place for political discussion is another matter entirely.)

retsibsi 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. This is not logical. "This kind of thing poisons the political process" does not come close to implying 'any candidate who engages in this kind of thing is likely to become wildly popular'. That would be an obviously crazy position, and refuting it is only useful as a way to avoid engaging with non-strawmanned concerns about social media manipulation.

ilaksh 7y ago

$16.5 million raised last quarter and steadily rising polls. Dave Chappelle is doing a fundraising show at/near Iowa State in a few days. Oprah's "spiritual advisor" is helping Yang campaign. Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit. "Struggling" is not accurate.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
why isn’t he doing well in the polls then?
- turtlecloud 7y ago
  Polls have outdated models that don’t accurately reflect the age of social media. Prior polling models don’t work with the changing environment. For example most the people they poll are in landlines and 65+ yrs old. Also polls are politicized now.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    Let's not forget the media gives him dramatically less coverage, he receives less than proportional speaking time at debates, and it seems the amount of times the mess up facts about him is too high to be accidental, not to mention not even getting his picture correct and instead showing an image of some other asian.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    I'm convinced that the outdated nature of polling entirely explains Biden's numbers. He appeals to clueless old people, and polling as practiced today over-samples that demographic.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> $16.5 million raised last quarter and steadily rising polls. He's been bouncing around between 2-5% in the polls since October; he's not steadily rising, he's stuck in one place. > Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit. A number of the candidates that have dropped out have been consistently polling above Yang. They haven't dropped out sooner because they were doing worse, they've dropped out sooner because they have a different calculus about the value of staying in the race. Yang isn't still going strong, he's still stuck in neutral.

dba7dba 7y ago

I would not say Yang's campaign is struggling. He literally was an unknown guy right before this election cycle, who made a low millions from selling a test prep company and then ran a non-profit for 7 years. Never even ran for a political office before this. And he's outlasted many senators/governors. About twitter and Yang, I created a twitter account just to follow him. Did not create any bot. And I also donated to his campaign multiple times. And I'm over 40 yrs old.

turtlecloud 7y ago

Yang campaign is actually seeing exponential growth. Thus the increase in smear articles. The establishment is running through mental gymnastic excercise to rationalize these results. Thus them calling all supporters bots

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Yang campaign is actually seeing exponential growth. In what? His polling position has been bouncing around within the margin of error with no progress for months. Yang's got some good ideas, and he's certainly one of the most interesting candidates of the cycle. But he's got no momentum.
- schuke 7y ago
  Fundraising numbers. Others dropping out would count as progress too I guess. Although polling is still in single digit but 5-6% is certainly progress from 2-3%.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Fundraising numbers. Fundraising is just a means to get money to spend (often, ineffectively) building/maintaining support. If you are raising and spending more money and not moving the needle in the polls, that's not progress. > Others dropping out would count as progress too I guess. No, if the field is narrowing and you aren't getting any of the support (and your remaining competitors are) that's also the opposite of progress. > Although polling is still in single digit but 5-6% is certainly progress from 2-3%. It would be, if he was consistently polling at the former and previously polling at the latter. But that's not what's happened to Yang. His national polling in January has ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in December ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in November ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in October ranged from 2-5%. And the margin of error on most of the polls is in the neighborhood of ±5%.
- shiftpgdn 7y ago
  Yang is polling at 8% nationally now. That's more than margin of error.

aww_dang 7y ago

>It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. If an army of Twitter bots could change voter's minds, why is it suddenly an illegitimate tactic? How is it different than any other form of political speech? Are politicians and political campaigns only dishonest when presented through new mediums? Is this a problem with Twitter, free speech or just a timeless flaw within democracy which has been known since antiquity? I would suggest that it is the latter. Misunderstanding the underlying principles results in the alarmist blaming of social media. This is nothing new, aside from a new opportunity to opine for regulation.