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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

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...)
- bnjms 7y ago
  Bots don’t meme. Yet.
  - Communitivity 7y ago
    I've seen proof of concepts that could be strung together to do that, using a combination of Generative Adversarial Networks, style transfer, and rule-based semantic reasoner.
lasagnaphil 7y ago
The twitteraudit service says they determine if an account is fake or real as: “Each audit takes a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.” It seems that the service would determine a lot of plain lurker accounts as fake. (And I’m a lurker on Twitter who almost never tweets and has a really low followed/follower ratio, so I would probably get flagged as a bot. Actually I think Twitter flagged me as one before, because my account got suspended once even when I didn’t really post anything at all, and I heard someone being unable to see one of my comments) Most bots have probably evolved a lot from simply lurking and following, so I don’t think the service provides an accurate picture of bots on Twitter.

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...)

bnjms 7y ago
Bots don’t meme. Yet.
- Communitivity 7y ago
  I've seen proof of concepts that could be strung together to do that, using a combination of Generative Adversarial Networks, style transfer, and rule-based semantic reasoner.

lasagnaphil 7y ago

The twitteraudit service says they determine if an account is fake or real as: “Each audit takes a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.” It seems that the service would determine a lot of plain lurker accounts as fake. (And I’m a lurker on Twitter who almost never tweets and has a really low followed/follower ratio, so I would probably get flagged as a bot. Actually I think Twitter flagged me as one before, because my account got suspended once even when I didn’t really post anything at all, and I heard someone being unable to see one of my comments) Most bots have probably evolved a lot from simply lurking and following, so I don’t think the service provides an accurate picture of bots on Twitter.