12 ms·
Analysis of 200M tweets discussing coronavirus suggests 45%-60% come from bots
- lukeholder 6y agoOne thing I considered with bots like these is that it doesn't matter which side of an issue they are pushing, the end result is just to further divide the 2 sides. So I think that's the goal. The issue they push with the bots may not be, and likely isn't, their actual position on the issue.
- guerrilla 6y agoWhat do you base that on? Division may just be an emergent phenomenon or one rooted in the reality of opposing interests.
- crazygringo 6y agoIt's part of the Russian/Putin playbook. Their mission isn't to promote any particular interests within America or other countries, as much as to maximize divisiveness and weaken democracy as much as possible so that Russia is stronger and less threatened in comparison.
- 082349872349872 6y ago... and over on RUnet, I saw memes about US botting. Too bad we can't have a Geneva Convention on botnets or something. (I would write "couldn't", but don't believe it's technically feasible)
- oknaj 6y agoYou are being divided internally by a domestic force. BlackLivesMatter vs everyone, putting male against female, isolating individual by destroying nuclear family. Putin should be last of your concerns.
- takeda 6y agoDon't know about OP, but this[1] is very apparent on Reddit and other social media. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#Content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#Con...
- guerrilla 6y agoYes, everyone's heard of the book. That establishes nothing.
- takeda 6y agoyes, it does not, but over last 4 years a lot of things happened that aligned with the content. Look at even the latest riots. Either the author is some kind of fortuneteller or there is an active effort toward is and unfortunately our leadership is helping it happen. I don't believe in coincidences.
- diablo1 6y agoTwitter is so easy to game. I once wrote a script that auto-likes everything on the page and ran into no throttling by Twitter - It simply let me rack up an enormous like count nearing 1 million random likes. I got lots of followers as a result because they thought my like was a genuine human interaction and I 'cared' for them in some way. Far from it. I think Twitter needs to add an option which marks an account as a bot or non-human account so that people can gauge instantly what the account's real motivations are. Most actual bots will ignore that setting and pretend to be human however, so the responsibility is on Twitter to weed out automated accounts that are obvious attempts to game the platform.
- dorkwood 6y agoI wouldn't be surprised if the people that chose to follow you based purely on receiving a like were also bots.
- ovi256 6y agoSo ? What fraction of the accounts calling for further lockdown are bots ?
- tobylane 6y agoProbably some, and I’d also welcome the research. But when 80-90% of the population support lockdown there’s less need for bots. Apple pie is less popular than ‘continue lockdown for as long as necessary’. https://xkcd.com/2305/ https://xkcd.com/2305/ As for twitter bots, I have one running by ifttt, another by script, and three more in planning. I welcome the human/bot accounts being made clear.
- leereeves 6y agoThat xkcd is quite old. Support for the lockdown is down to about 60% now. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/29/coronavirus-poll-divided-over-economy-americans-worry-health/5264864002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/29/corona...
- randylahey 6y agoWhy don't you organize a study and let us know?
- happytoexplain 6y agoStarting a sentence with "so?" implies that you don't care that X position has a lot of bots behind it. But then your followup question implies that you would care if position Y has a lot of bots behind it. Shouldn't this be a "that's bad, I wonder how bad it is on the other side" kind of situation? Why are you defending this?
- scrollaway 6y agoSeeing the space before the question mark, it sounds like the person you are replying to is French. It's not unlikely the "So?" is meant as an "alright then, can we now have the answer to ...". I've made that exact mistake.
- taeric 6y agoI'm cynical enough to think you can almost certainly say the same of the reverse, too. :( That said, with reading this, if you are thinking of skipping it. Does somewhat confirm that most of the not posts are on conspiracy theories. Which, I guess is not that surprising. Even if the conspiracies are.
- bluedays 6y agoThis article is basically a summary of this article. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/21/1002105/covid-bot-twitter-accounts-push-to-reopen-america/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/21/1002105/covid-bo... I often wonder when we are going to see more left wing reactions to this sort of behavior. Seems the right, based on my limited information, seems to be more aggressive about these disinformation campaigns. Also it stands to reason that this particular misinformation campaign is being sponsored by a foreign state. I think that this would be an effective weapon to use against the United States. Sort of like biological warfare by proxy of disinformation.
- abduhl 6y agoWhy would the use of bots to push a narrative be restricted to “the right”? Isn’t it more likely that 50% of all posts on divisive topics are made by bots? The talking points for both sides seem imminently scriptable. Perhaps we should all step back and evaluate whether our internal thought processes are being shaped by bad actors via an appeal to our innate tribalism? Notice how easily you fall into the script: 1) it’s the other team only 2) my team should do something to fight back 3) maybe it’s sponsored by a foreign state.
- sokoloff 6y agoI have quite a “purple feed” on FB. I have to say that I see a lot of utterly ridiculous content created ostensibly supporting both blue and red causes/topics. If you primarily think one side is crafting ridiculously bad content and it’s therefore a misinformation campaign from a foreign state, I think it’s wise to consider how much of that is personal bias and if you’re perhaps “giving a pass” to stupid content that at least aligns with your views. “Well, they meant well, so it’s probably just a right-minded American who made a simple off-by-factor-of-a-million arithmetic error and no one spent 50ms doing a basic sanity check. No one’s perfect.” Or “Look, maybe I think Obama did an Ok job, but I saw all that content about he wasn’t born here, and there has to be something to it if so many people are talking about it. The government hides things; the truth is out there, ya know? Oh, and Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
- bluedays 6y ago
- Simulacra 6y agoThe script bots are rampant on Twitter, as they are on HN.
- runawaybottle 6y agoBots are promoting things on HN?
- umvi 6y agoNot necessarily promoting things, but I'm 100% sure there are bots crawling the comments for keywords (product/project mentions) so that the creators/employees of said product/project can show up in the comments to answer questions if need be. Also, from time to time I see accusations that anti-CCP comments/articles are flagged to death by bots, but I've never witnessed this first-hand.
- BubRoss 6y agoThe voting and posting activity on threads heavily critical of the chinese government have seemed very suspect to me as well. Many of the names defending the government having post histories of only government defense and "what about other country" while votes end up going through cycles of rising gradually and being downvoted all at once.
- yorwba 6y agoIf you spend enough time in those threads to notice patterns, and even look through people's posting history, you're essentially acting like a bot crawling the site. If you then downvote those posters you disagree with, it creates a very suspicious voting pattern on their end. Could you distinguish your own behavior from that of a bot (or a bot-assisted human) if you didn't know it was just you in front of your screen?
- BubRoss 6y agoThat makes zero sense. I'm not dropping comments that have already been upvoted into negatives in seconds and I don't have a user name of random letters a few months old with only 4 or 5 comments, all defending the chinese government in heavily commented threads about a story critical of the chinese government.
- xrd 6y agoIt's pretty crazy that a few researchers can identify this in a short month or two of work. It's even crazier that Twitter can't do that research themselves and remove those bots. Obviously the big debate is censorship. It feels like there could be a tech solution to this, where conversations aren't shaped by volume, but I guess that is what Twitter is anyway.
- brianwawok 6y agoHow many real people is it OK to squash when squashing bots? How confident can you be when banning accounts? It’s a lot harder problem then it might sound on the surface. And realize if you find bots 100%, they will change for round 2 and the game starts over.
- rtpg 6y agoIt's twitter, not people's healthcare. Just put in a super basic unlock process that is costly to game for "non-real" people
- naasking 6y ago> Just put in a super basic arbitration process that is costly to game for "non-real" people I think your "just" is hand-waving away a lot of complexity. A person deployed these bots, and if a bot account gets put into an arbitration process, that person can go through the process themselves to pass the arbitration, then set the bot running again.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- domsom 6y agoAdding an option to verify accounts by linking them to social security numbers or corporate registrations and marking them accordingly (without necessarily making the details visible publicly) could at least direct trust to accounts that can be traced to real entities.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThat just provides a massive amount of data that can be compromised in a data breach while making hacking real people's accounts much more worthwhile.
- isoskeles 6y agoThis is an awful idea considering data breaches happen. Unless they figure out a way to store the SSN hashed so it cannot be reused, but SSN seems so fundamental that I’m not sure I’d trust any hashing algorithm for it. Especially considering the inputs are so limited.
- dathinab 6y agoThe problem is that the US has no proper/well working ID systems. A large amount of social security numbers had been compromised through leakage and are hardly reliably usable for identification anymore. Through there are many countries in which this can be indeed done reliably sand effectively. Through the main problem is still this networks are global, so bots will just register with origins where IDs can be easily faked/stolen etc. But it might still help a lot for local discussions if you would make it clearly visible if a person had a no or a non local real person identification. If such a system is done cleverly it could also help law enforcement while it still upholds privacy. Through it's will always be someway prone to abuse by police and similar if not done perfectly transparent but you can be sure that certain lobbies will invest insane amounts of money into making it non transparent over time. Which makes such systems potential dangerous to have.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago> Adding an option to verify accounts by linking them to social security Not sure if you’re joking, but this would be a completely awful privacy situation. Why would you ever give your social security number to a social media site?
- Drybones 6y agoThese articles are as misinformation themselves as the tweets they're talking about
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoFound the bot... Kidding, but there's a real point. 40% of tweets are from bots? OK, how many "studies" are from bots? (I believe that's in the neighborhood of Drybones' point.) But how many comments responding to the studies are from bots? Way back in the day, I remember reading the Cluetrain Manifesto. It said that corporate-speak sounded literally inhuman. Well, the bots have gotten better over the years. But also, it seems to me that the humans have gotten worse. They are less able to say "Wait, that doesn't make sense." They are even less able to say "Wait, that doesn't sound like the way humans talk." And that's bad. As the bots get better, the humans need to be developing better filters, not regressing.
- dorkwood 6y agoI think there's a sci-fi story buried in here. In the future, when humans die out, online conversation somehow continues at the usual pace.
- isoskeles 6y agoI’m not sure why Twitter bots matter, and I assume the only point is to discredit the argument of people against lockdowns. Real people have also been out protesting the lockdowns, in the real world, not on Twitter. People were legitimately upset, rightfully so, when protestors were showing up with guns in Michigan.
- dathinab 6y agoIt matters if it means that much less people then believed do protest. I don't know if it does mean it, it could, but it also could not. It also matters because it means some people try to manipulate what is perceived as the "Twitter public" opinion.
- 082349872349872 6y agoThat's why one never counts "twitter public", but real protestors. A small silver lining to coronavirus is that crowd size estimation is much easier when the crowd is on a 2m lattice. Edit: not very useful these days, but still of possible interest: http://www.gkstill.com/Support/crowd-density/100sm/Density1.html http://www.gkstill.com/Support/crowd-density/100sm/Density1....
- Simulacra 6y agoI use to hear a lot they in customer service one angry customer might represent only one person, but more than one on an issue could possibly point to an exponentially larger dissatisfied group. People who complain versus people who do not, people who call versus email, etc. I do not know if this is still accurate.
- 082349872349872 6y agoI'd agree in general. On the other hand, astroturfing is much older that TWTR (or even AstroTurf), eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claque Somewhere I'd read a book on propaganda by a fellow who produced it in ww2 and finished his introduction with biblical examples of the main techniques.
- Simulacra 6y agoI think we have to except that there are bots everywhere, here, Wikipedia, read it, Twitter, etc. It doesn’t appear to be slowing down but instead increasing in growing in magnitude, if this article is to be believed it doesn’t appear to be slowing down but instead increasing and growing in magnitude, if this article is to be believed.
- 12xo 6y agoHow many of Trump's well touted 80m followers are bots? I'm willing to bet its probably the same 45-60%...
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI bet 40% of all famous people’s followers are bots.
- zaxm 6y agoBunch of threads on twitter from expert researchers on how this study is bogus. The main point is that there is zero paper or even a blog post that can be referenced to see if this statistic is true. * https://twitter.com/ngleicher/status/1264614994475315200 https://twitter.com/ngleicher/status/1264614994475315200 * https://twitter.com/benimmo/status/1265329734705197056 https://twitter.com/benimmo/status/1265329734705197056 * https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1264643202293751808 https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1264643202293751808 * https://twitter.com/3r1nG/status/1264567090742206464 https://twitter.com/3r1nG/status/1264567090742206464 (edit to add more examples of counterclaims to this "research")
- drtillberg 6y agoMy takeaway is that "news" from commercial outlets like MarketWatch (the publisher here) largely is not fact-based. Compare to reports in February about waves of anti-Asia discrimination, correspondeding to a major and ill-advised Democratic information initiative. I don't know if Twitter has bots or how they tilt. What I do know is post-coronavirus commerical "news" outlets have lost my trust, as has much of the political establishment, red or blue.
- mch82 6y agoWhat about COVID-19 coverage led you to your conclusion? Can you please share examples of specific news reports that we’re non-factual?
- drtillberg 6y agoFor example, MarketWatch has been pushing articles for months about discrimination relative to public health measures to generate a narrative critical of the U.S. travel ban earlier this year affecting flights to and from China.[1] Closer to home, you can look to the steady diet of fear-based public health reporting that the "news" outlet finally has explicitly disclaimed as non-factual (but always was defective) -- "Due to the rapidly changing nature of the coronavirus public health crisis, some of the recommendations included in this article may eventually become out-of-date."[2]. It's ok to be wrong, but the "news" consistently has been "wrong" in a manner that has generated support for particular political policies, even particlar drugs have become political lightning rods whose efficacy is not being investigated or reported in a fair and reliable manner.[3] One can explain this, and explain that, but when the sum result is being locked inside for months on end, unemployed, blocked from major life events with a media wrongly cheeleading those policies with wrong and unsupported information, this leads to a loss of trust. I'm not saying the media outlets are on a lark; I'm saying they haven't done their jobs of reporting facts outside the filter of propaganda and political bias which has infected so much policy dialog. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-chinese-allowed-racism-and-fear-are-now-spreading-along-with-the-coronavirus-2020-01-29 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-chinese-allowed-racism-... [2] https://www.boston.com/culture/lifestyle/2020/04/16/is-it-safe-to-run-outside-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic https://www.boston.com/culture/lifestyle/2020/04/16/is-it-sa... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/28/questions-raised-over-hydroxychloroquine-study-which-caused-who-to-halt-trials-for-covid-19 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/28/questions-ra...
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoSeems like an easy way to discredit any idea or person. Just hire bot farms to promote it. * 50% of positive posts for candidate x are bots! * Most people who support X online are bots! Easy and cheap, and the message carries well.
- dorkwood 6y agoThat seems like a dangerous strategy, since you're also promoting the idea or person you seek to destroy.
- nixtaken 6y agoThe idea that half of Twitter's accounts are bots is not new: https://gizmodo.com/how-many-social-media-users-are-real-people-1826447042 https://gizmodo.com/how-many-social-media-users-are-real-peo... (written in 2018) Another older article puts the issue into a larger social context and makes some sloppy estimates: "Since Twitter’s yearly revenue is between 2 and 3 billion dollars — that is as much as 50 dollars per potential customer on average and that doesn’t count what people are spending to purchase fake followers and bots. If only English speaking customers are targeted by Twitter ads, that means 150 dollars is being spent to grab the attention of each customer." https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/08/05/the-fake-economies-of-the-internet/ https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/08/05/the-fake-econ...
- nixtaken 6y agoPersonally, I watched a guy who was promoting his crappy, plagiarized book go from 25k followers to 90k followers over the course of a week. They were all clearly fake since he rarely got more than a single like on everything he Tweeted.
- nixtaken 6y agoThey could get rid of bots with Captchas, but they don't. That suggests to me that the people funding Twitter want to be able to use bots.
- yalogin 6y agoWhy does Twitter allow bots to tweet? If a researcher can determine that a tweet came from a bot, can twitter not do that?
- missedthecue 6y agoI'd like to know what "bot" means. Is it the new word for internet troll or do these Twitter accounts really have better AI than Microsoft or Facebook.
- esmi 6y ago> If a researcher can determine that a tweet came from a bot That condition is the key. Are you sure they can do that? It’s very tough to do with certainty.
- mch82 6y agoBots can be used for many purposes. Many (maybe most?) are constructive. There have been a number of DIY tutorial for beginners about how to use Arduino or Raspberry Pi to let plants tweet when they need water. Here’s one (old) example: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/houseplants-wil/ https://www.wired.com/2008/02/houseplants-wil/.
- ta1234567890 6y agoNot surprising at all. From my experience with Twitter, I would say 45-50% of all tweets come from bots. I feel like there are 4 types of Twitter users: 1) bots, 2) influencers that heavily use automation to the point where they are almost the same as a bot, 3) famous/popular that are somewhat to mostly real, but have someone else managing their account for them, 4) real people who think 1-3 are all real that gained their followers organically. Probably most users fall on categories 1 and 4 above, although most of Twitter traffic is probably generated by tweets of 2 and 3.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ta6382936526 6y agoFrom my experience with the full graph, it's closer to 80% bots (both tweets and users). My knowledge may be dated, though.
- klysm 6y agoYou mean both 80% of the users are bots and 80% of the tweets are from bots? I would find that fairly surprising that bots and users work out to be the same proportion in both of those.
- rozab 6y agoWell if a bot wanted to mimic normal user behaviour, the first step would be tweeting the same amount
- ta1234567890 6y agoYou are right, guess I meant to say at least 45-60% are bots. It almost feels like playing a video game where most other characters are NPCs pretending to be real users.
- dependenttypes 6y agoSure, there are indeed bots on twitter, mostly for advertisements, but I kinda doubt that there are bots operated by states. That being said, even if such bots existed, what would be the point? The only effect seems to be that you have people from both camps accusing each other of being bots. In addition to quote the user repolfx from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776752 > Namely, their rationale was something like this: the world is dominated by people whose opinions are fundamentally shaped by what others are saying, and moreover, by how frequently other people seem to be saying it. They don't really think about things or rely on their own experience: they're just mimics. > In such a world being able to auto-generate fake messages of support for some political position or another at scale would give you immense power, because the population would automatically swing behind you based merely on the perception that everyone was swinging behind you. > So that's their fear. But is it realistic? > Well, this is where we get into the polarisation. "You aren't smart enough to have an opinion" is the sort of viewpoint that leads to an elitist vs populist conflict. There have been reams of analysis about this and it's not really AI specific - e.g. did people vote for Brexit because of Twitter, or because of things they saw in the press, or did they vote based on their own experiences, or what their close friends/family thought, or what mix of "all of the above" is the truest mix?"
- brandonmenc 6y agoI just assume 45%-60% of tweets in general come from bots.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoMany previous submissions, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261815.