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I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. They are contributing both to group psychosis and the destructio

I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. They are contributing both to group psychosis and the destruction of democracy through the spread of disinformation.

wombat-man 7y ago
Gotta keep those MAU counts up!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
osrec 7y ago
How else will the populist cults survive?! /s
deminature 7y ago
They have conflicting incentives, it's the same problem all social networks have. Bot accounts qualitatively detract from the real user experience, but substantially inflate quantitative activity metrics, if artificially. Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick to optimize the latter rather than the former.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- inetknght 7y ago
  > but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. If the growth is largely from bots, then perhaps Elliot Management is right even if you disagree with the business dealings.
  - deminature 7y ago
    There's a good argument to be made that Elliot Management is right simply based on absence of stock growth over the past few years. Facebook has grown 200% while Twitter has had incredibly modest gains. That much of Twitter's little growth might be bot-related just compounds the validity of their argument. Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this (hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
- pax 7y ago
  it might be awesome, if the signature is somewhat obvious, to have an independent entity flagging / creating a suspected bots database? _maybe_ that would put some pressure on Twitter? https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/botslayer https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.pdf https://sparktoro.com/tools/sparkscore
atemerev 7y ago
And how exactly do you propose to stop this on scale? The problem is harder than it looks.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- FillardMillmore 7y ago
  I wouldn't begin to claim I have a solution, but I think there's steps Twitter can take to show they are acting in good faith. I believe often times, Twitter flags accounts for suspicious activity - for accounts to be reactivated, a phone number has to be provided. If Twitter wanted to, are they not capable of deploying an algorithm that serves as a dragnet to catch accounts that tick off multiple check-boxes for bot activity and flag them? This would not mean that the account would immediately be banned or shadow-banned, but they could provide some kind of visual indicator to other users that the account in question has recently been flagged for bot-like activity (on the account's comments, retweets, etc.).
  - nradov 7y ago
    There are many real humans who have no phone number.
    - retox 7y ago
      Or would never give it to Twitter.
Balgair 7y ago
Likely, they don't really care to stop it. Real people still use it enough that the advertisers don't really mind. I'd suppose that they cannot really tell the difference between a bot and a real person, at least at scale. I follow a few non-English speaking hashtags that act as local news sources for their areas. These hashtags have been active for a few years. Though Twitter has a lot of policies for English twitter, these languages really have no policies. By that I mean they live-stream executions, have drug sales, solicit sex-work, etc. Illegal isn't really a thing in these places to begin with. That said, these cases are somewhat rare and these hashtags are mostly used as genuine news sources. Granted, these are 'edge case' languages, but still, it's a free for all that Twitter doesn't care to dive into. Based on the 'extreme' cases and their long lived incoherence to Twitter policy, it's not hard to conclude that Twitter really does not care to enforce policies unless forced to.
xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago
It's insane to demand somebody should be given the authority to determine what is disinformation and what is not. That is a totalitarian approach. Those few Twitter bots don't hurt anybody, because nobody listens to them anyway. And if people do listen to them, they will eventually catch on and their information immune system will have been strengthened.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Available evidence doesn't support your claims.
  - krtong 7y ago
    I cant say I agree with this. Every person should be able to to discern a fact from an opinion, know how to pick an argument apart and identify logical fallacies, and if people can't then getting rid of bots doesn't solve twitter's disinformation problem if people are just as good at propagating nonsense as bots.
  - xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago
    Such as??? Please point to the evidence, I am genuinely interested.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      It's a big topic and I am reluctant to invest a great deal of time trying to persuade a new arrival. Try following the links in this article for an overview of recent research. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-twitter-bots-help-fuel-political-feuds/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-twitter-bots-...
      - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
        New account, seemingly randomly generated username, only ever posts in defense of botting. Seems like we need a "Signs you're arguing with a fake hnews account" article.
bcoates 7y ago
The point of these bots isn't to spread disinformation or to amplify political content (the article is wrong about this). The point of these bots is to build up an account with credible behavior that you can use to make money (usually by scamming advertisers into buying paid tweets/followers, or by directly promoting scam products). Political twitter is so formulaic and high volume that bot/sweatshop posts don't seem out of place compared to the usual traffic from real accounts. If there were no politics on twitter they'd just send formulaic messages about pop culture or sports or something.
- dobleboble 7y ago
  You make a bold claim, do you have any supporting evidence?
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Wasn't this somewhat well documented during 2016 where most of it wasn't some coordinated attack from St. Petersburg but teens from south-eastern Europe making money from ads and therefore driving clickbait to its limit because they literally just wanted clicks?
    - chance_state 7y ago
      >most of it wasn't some coordinated attack from St. Petersburg This is completely false. A cursory search will yield results explaining Russia's massive effort on social media (and Twitter in particular) to interfere in the election. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-elec... https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Russian-Interference-in-2016--Election-Bots-and-Misinformation.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Ru... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-admits-far-more-russian-bots-posted-on-election-than-it-had-disclosed https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a... etc....
      - bronipstid 7y ago
Brain_Thief 7y ago
I understand your frustration and share it, but I personally believe that we are at the point where this behavior (i.e., failure to act) should be expected of tech companies. The economic incentives of the companies who run the most popular social networks seem to be negatively aligned against robust responses to the propagation of bots and disinformation, and that doesn't appear likely to change. I also wonder whether the mitigation strategy for this type of societal threat is not to be found via strictly technological means anyway since the line between bot and human actor appears to be blurring more and more as time passes and technology improves (artificial face generation, improved NLP, statistically-informed posting and behavioral modeling, etc.). Imagine how complicated the process of discriminating between automated and human-controlled accounts might become in ten or twenty years from now; it seems as though there will have to be some sort of public education component to reduce the credulity of human users in online environments - an adjustment of weights in the network of information sources among the general population, if you will, in a direction that de-emphasizes online content.
rezeroed 7y ago
Because number of users is a nice pr metric. Just pretend the 15% which are bots are real, and pretend the 15% of suspended and abandoned accounts are active.
bronipstid 7y ago
I guess we should smash all the printing presses which are used to print books containing disinformation too. Should probably just burn all the books with disinformation already printed while we're at it. There are probably Russians spreading disinformation via the snail mail. Better let the government start reading everyone's mail too, lest they be spreading any disinformation through it.
salimmadjd 7y ago
Geoff Goldberg has been analyzing and writing about this a lot[0], he is worth following on Medium, ironically Twitter suspending him from Twitter [1]. [0] https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg [1] https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/your-twitter-account-has-been-suspended-c73511401b39 https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/your-twitter-account-has-be...
- auganov 7y ago
  He was harassing users over his dubious research. Suspecting someone to be a "bot" doesn't justify demeaning and dehumanizing these people.
tinktank 7y ago
But they're making money from it. And that's all they (and their shareholders) care about. Same reason FakeBook won't ban false political advertising on their platform even though it's really obvious it's destructive to society.
catacombs 7y ago
> I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. If it doesn't impact shareholders' profits, it goes to the bottom of the to-do list.

wombat-man 7y ago

Gotta keep those MAU counts up!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

osrec 7y ago

How else will the populist cults survive?! /s

deminature 7y ago

They have conflicting incentives, it's the same problem all social networks have. Bot accounts qualitatively detract from the real user experience, but substantially inflate quantitative activity metrics, if artificially. Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick to optimize the latter rather than the former.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
inetknght 7y ago
> but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. If the growth is largely from bots, then perhaps Elliot Management is right even if you disagree with the business dealings.
- deminature 7y ago
  There's a good argument to be made that Elliot Management is right simply based on absence of stock growth over the past few years. Facebook has grown 200% while Twitter has had incredibly modest gains. That much of Twitter's little growth might be bot-related just compounds the validity of their argument. Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this (hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
pax 7y ago
it might be awesome, if the signature is somewhat obvious, to have an independent entity flagging / creating a suspected bots database? _maybe_ that would put some pressure on Twitter? https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/botslayer https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.pdf https://sparktoro.com/tools/sparkscore

atemerev 7y ago

And how exactly do you propose to stop this on scale? The problem is harder than it looks.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
FillardMillmore 7y ago
I wouldn't begin to claim I have a solution, but I think there's steps Twitter can take to show they are acting in good faith. I believe often times, Twitter flags accounts for suspicious activity - for accounts to be reactivated, a phone number has to be provided. If Twitter wanted to, are they not capable of deploying an algorithm that serves as a dragnet to catch accounts that tick off multiple check-boxes for bot activity and flag them? This would not mean that the account would immediately be banned or shadow-banned, but they could provide some kind of visual indicator to other users that the account in question has recently been flagged for bot-like activity (on the account's comments, retweets, etc.).
- nradov 7y ago
  There are many real humans who have no phone number.
  - retox 7y ago
    Or would never give it to Twitter.

Balgair 7y ago

Likely, they don't really care to stop it. Real people still use it enough that the advertisers don't really mind. I'd suppose that they cannot really tell the difference between a bot and a real person, at least at scale. I follow a few non-English speaking hashtags that act as local news sources for their areas. These hashtags have been active for a few years. Though Twitter has a lot of policies for English twitter, these languages really have no policies. By that I mean they live-stream executions, have drug sales, solicit sex-work, etc. Illegal isn't really a thing in these places to begin with. That said, these cases are somewhat rare and these hashtags are mostly used as genuine news sources. Granted, these are 'edge case' languages, but still, it's a free for all that Twitter doesn't care to dive into. Based on the 'extreme' cases and their long lived incoherence to Twitter policy, it's not hard to conclude that Twitter really does not care to enforce policies unless forced to.

xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago

It's insane to demand somebody should be given the authority to determine what is disinformation and what is not. That is a totalitarian approach. Those few Twitter bots don't hurt anybody, because nobody listens to them anyway. And if people do listen to them, they will eventually catch on and their information immune system will have been strengthened.

anigbrowl 7y ago
Available evidence doesn't support your claims.
- krtong 7y ago
  I cant say I agree with this. Every person should be able to to discern a fact from an opinion, know how to pick an argument apart and identify logical fallacies, and if people can't then getting rid of bots doesn't solve twitter's disinformation problem if people are just as good at propagating nonsense as bots.
- xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago
  Such as??? Please point to the evidence, I am genuinely interested.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    It's a big topic and I am reluctant to invest a great deal of time trying to persuade a new arrival. Try following the links in this article for an overview of recent research. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-twitter-bots-help-fuel-political-feuds/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-twitter-bots-...
    - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
      New account, seemingly randomly generated username, only ever posts in defense of botting. Seems like we need a "Signs you're arguing with a fake hnews account" article.

bcoates 7y ago

The point of these bots isn't to spread disinformation or to amplify political content (the article is wrong about this). The point of these bots is to build up an account with credible behavior that you can use to make money (usually by scamming advertisers into buying paid tweets/followers, or by directly promoting scam products). Political twitter is so formulaic and high volume that bot/sweatshop posts don't seem out of place compared to the usual traffic from real accounts. If there were no politics on twitter they'd just send formulaic messages about pop culture or sports or something.

dobleboble 7y ago
You make a bold claim, do you have any supporting evidence?
- luckylion 7y ago
  Wasn't this somewhat well documented during 2016 where most of it wasn't some coordinated attack from St. Petersburg but teens from south-eastern Europe making money from ads and therefore driving clickbait to its limit because they literally just wanted clicks?
  - chance_state 7y ago
    >most of it wasn't some coordinated attack from St. Petersburg This is completely false. A cursory search will yield results explaining Russia's massive effort on social media (and Twitter in particular) to interfere in the election. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-elec... https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Russian-Interference-in-2016--Election-Bots-and-Misinformation.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Ru... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-admits-far-more-russian-bots-posted-on-election-than-it-had-disclosed https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a... etc....
    - bronipstid 7y ago

Brain_Thief 7y ago

I understand your frustration and share it, but I personally believe that we are at the point where this behavior (i.e., failure to act) should be expected of tech companies. The economic incentives of the companies who run the most popular social networks seem to be negatively aligned against robust responses to the propagation of bots and disinformation, and that doesn't appear likely to change. I also wonder whether the mitigation strategy for this type of societal threat is not to be found via strictly technological means anyway since the line between bot and human actor appears to be blurring more and more as time passes and technology improves (artificial face generation, improved NLP, statistically-informed posting and behavioral modeling, etc.). Imagine how complicated the process of discriminating between automated and human-controlled accounts might become in ten or twenty years from now; it seems as though there will have to be some sort of public education component to reduce the credulity of human users in online environments - an adjustment of weights in the network of information sources among the general population, if you will, in a direction that de-emphasizes online content.

rezeroed 7y ago

Because number of users is a nice pr metric. Just pretend the 15% which are bots are real, and pretend the 15% of suspended and abandoned accounts are active.

bronipstid 7y ago

I guess we should smash all the printing presses which are used to print books containing disinformation too. Should probably just burn all the books with disinformation already printed while we're at it. There are probably Russians spreading disinformation via the snail mail. Better let the government start reading everyone's mail too, lest they be spreading any disinformation through it.

salimmadjd 7y ago

Geoff Goldberg has been analyzing and writing about this a lot[0], he is worth following on Medium, ironically Twitter suspending him from Twitter [1]. [0] https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg [1] https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/your-twitter-account-has-been-suspended-c73511401b39 https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/your-twitter-account-has-be...

auganov 7y ago
He was harassing users over his dubious research. Suspecting someone to be a "bot" doesn't justify demeaning and dehumanizing these people.

tinktank 7y ago

But they're making money from it. And that's all they (and their shareholders) care about. Same reason FakeBook won't ban false political advertising on their platform even though it's really obvious it's destructive to society.

catacombs 7y ago

> I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. If it doesn't impact shareholders' profits, it goes to the bottom of the to-do list.