3 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoIndividual ads, sure. But an equivalent null hypothesis would be "social media advertising has no effect on people," which would seem pretty strange.
- retsibsi 7y agoAlso, 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.