6 ms·

Social Media Analysis Toolkit: Open-Source Tool for Tracking Disinformation

149 points by rapnie 6y ago

s9w 6y ago
And another political tool. Doesn't seem to going too bad for Mozilla. > Bevensee’s host org is the Anti-Defamation League wow
cmroanirgo 6y ago
> , a researcher looking into COVID conspiracies can determine when the conspiracy began, who is leading the conversation, and which news stories, blog posts, and other links are appearing most frequently in the online conversation. Considering what's been happening in Melbourne, where people are being arrested for suggesting a peaceful protest, i think software such as this will only help speed up the polarisation process. The end result will be more police leaning on the necks of people who are only "political" criminals. I also noticed the word "disinformation" which in itself these days is rather politically polarising. What's wrong in the world where open and balanced conversation must not be allowed?
- glial 6y ago
  'Balanced' is a red herring and useless in-and-of itself. Conversation should be a collaboration to find the truth, not a 'balanced' battle between two opponents. Bullshit on the internet doesn't further the goal of finding the truth or arriving at consensus.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    One complication might be that "bullshit" and various other rhetorical techniques are often used to dismiss truths that one has no interest in pondering, and this may not always be a conscious and intentional action. Of course there are obvious problems with this as well ("it takes 10x as much energy to refute bullshit than it does to spew it, etc"), but I think there is value in acknowledging the possibility that all humans aren't nearly as good at discerning truth as they perceive. Most people seem to get agitated rather quickly even at a topic-agnostic abstract discussion about our ability to discern truth.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      Most of the bullshit that is circulating on the internet at the moment, for example as it relates to the pandemic say is balls to the wall craziness along the lines of bill gates inserting microchips in your brain or 5G infecting you with a virus, or you suffocating from wearing a mask. It's not like we're talking about any sophisticated philosophizing here, the real danger from misinformation on the internet at the moment is the lowest of lowbrow garbage spread at extremely high velocity at virtually no cost.
      - mistermann 6y ago
        > Most of the bullshit... Bullshit according to who (which is my point)? > along the lines of bill gates inserting microchips in your brain or 5G infecting you with a virus, or you suffocating from wearing a mask There is some of this, yes. But then there are also questions regarding financial motives behind vaccines, and the unusual manner in which statistics are reported, and why certain portions of reality shall not be discussed, and so forth and so on. Lots of people assert that these ideas are also "bullshit", but if you ask for evidence substantiating that assertion, they often behave as if the notion that assertions should require evidence is absurd (while simultaneously criticizing conspiracy theorists for asserting things without evidence). > It's not like we're talking about any sophisticated philosophizing here I don't think philosophers would agree that epistemology is simple - that it often seems to invoke such strong emotions in people suggests that it is anything but. It has a dependency on human cognition, which is fairly well known to be a less than perfect platform in many ways. > the real danger from misinformation on the internet at the moment is the lowest of lowbrow garbage spread at extremely high velocity at virtually no cost. This is surely "a" danger, but whether it is "the" (main) danger is necessarily speculative, as it has a dependency on the future, which is unknown.
        Barrin92 6y ago
        >Bullshit according to who (which is my point)? Really anyone with five braincells. Can someone explain to me why Hackernews and much of the rest of the internet, has descended into this nihilistic relativism where acknowleding even basic, empirical reality has apparently become impossible? Viral diseases aren't spread through radiowaves. That's not a matter of opinion, that's a fact. Of course a significant portion of people might be so scientifically illiterate they cannot figure that out, that doesn't change the fact that it's not true. This constant childish "hey but how do you know that this is true buddy" talk around misinformation and information is really driving me nuts.
  - apostacy 6y ago
    Telling people to buy a mask last February was dangerous misinformation that threatened to cause a panic. Facebook expat groups in China were trying to get the word out, and were deleted with extreme prejudice. Obviously, they were right, and Facebook was wrong. Stuff that was labeled as fake news bullshit was actually the truth. After all of this, how can you ever trust these companies to decide for you what the truth is? How can you ever trust Facebook again?
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Declaring "bullshit on the internet" to be an existential danger is bullshit. We would all be dead already.
    - glial 6y ago
      That’s not what I said.
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  > "I also noticed the word "disinformation" which in itself these days is rather politically polarising. What's wrong in the world where open and balanced conversation must not be allowed?" Weaponized Social Media has become a very real, powerful, dangerous and global force. I'm sure there are other materials I could cite, but the recent Netfix film "The Social Dilemma" (esp the 2nd half) paints the picture very clearly.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I don't think fact checkers were in any way successful. They have immediately been abused for partisan issues. Not by outright lies, but careful framing evading truth like champions. The COVID disinformation craze is just embarrassing.
disown 6y ago
Just in time for the election. What a coincidence. Strange how every "disinformation" tool or "fact checker" seems like tools of disinformation itself. Also, shouldn't mozilla be working towards becoming independent from google's cash for survival and building a better browser to gain market share? Seems like every time I hear of mozilla, it's for a social issue or political issue. And why just social media? What about all the disinformation in traditional media? From the pro-trump and anti-trump press, the last four years have been entirely disinformation on both sides. What about tech focuses on tech and stop playing politics? I guess it's too much to ask of anybody these days.
- christiansakai 6y ago
  There is nothing in the article that mentions anything related to politics. Why don't you read the article first? I guess it's too much to ask of anybody these days.
  - disown 6y ago
    > There is nothing in the article that mentions anything related to politics. The title itself is political. > Why don't you read the article first? I have. Have you? > I guess it's too much to ask of anybody these days. Yes it is. But not for me. I did waste my time to read the article. Unfortunately you haven't or are intentionally being blind. Other than the topic itself having nothing to do with mozilla... "More than ever, we need a movement to ensure the internet remains a force for good. Mozilla Fellows are web activists..." The topic is political. The people involved are political, But it has nothing to do with politics. That's some great logic.
    - christiansakai 6y ago
      Oh sorry if I offended you. My logic dictated that the article had nothing to do with politics and more about tech. This is not /r/politics Maybe you are projecting.
  - dx87 6y ago
    Since you apparently didn't read the article either, here's an excerpt. > The SMAT team is also developing publicly-accessible tools for monitoring the U.S. elections, such as interactive network graphs of politicians that help to map things like spheres of influence and partisanship.
renewiltord 6y ago
100% no one commenting at the time of this comment has tried the tool. It's pretty much Google Trends for Twitter+Reddit+4chan+8kun, which makes it very useful to just see when an idea became popular, etc. Tools like this democratize access to large scale queries. That's an unalloyed good. More people can know when something started being a thing. I'm glad this exists, and I hope it is spun off so it survives Mozilla's search to preserve revenue¹. ¹ If The Googlords won't just keep them alive the way MSFT kept AAPL alive.
- auganov 6y ago
  I don't think anybody is criticizing the tool itself. The authors are trying to pitch this as an anti disinformation tool. Which makes it look like one of these Twitter "bot" detection sites used to harass legitimate users. I don't think anybody would have a problem with this if it was marketed as a simple trend tracking tool.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
So can I drill down into the individual tweets or posts? I would find that useful - and would love to get to the firehose for some NLP style analysis. I just don't have the bandwidth to download all of reddit and make it searchable ... EDIT: weirdly searching for "Hacker news" leads to a really odd trend on Twitter - between 2010 and 2013 lots of activity, then a massive drought till 2019 and back up again. Very odd - I cannot think of a cause
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  As far as Twitter goes, the Twitter streaming importer on Gephi is very powerful, and the software is moderately interoperable; unfortunately the project as a whole is lacking funding/development except for specific modules. You should also look into pushift.io which archives/indexes huge amounts of publicly accessible social media data, and which I think supplies some of the backend infrastructure for this project.
mysterEFrank 6y ago
This is a great start but I'd want to visualize/analyze transmission across the social graph
DSingularity 6y ago
Where is the source code?
- zamadatix 6y ago
  From the about link: https://gitlab.com/smat-project https://gitlab.com/smat-project
- kbrosnan 6y ago
  Three clicks from the blogpost. First to the site https://www.smat-app.com https://www.smat-app.com. Then about https://www.smat-app.com/about https://www.smat-app.com/about and finally https://gitlab.com/smat-project https://gitlab.com/smat-project
- sk2020 6y ago
  The server code is viewable, but the source data, which is the only part that actually matters, appears to be some elasticsearch server with a url hidden in some environment variables, which I'm not seeing anywhere. So there isn't actually a way to audit if the source data can be reproduced. Open-ish source, I suppose. Correct me if I'm wrong.
christiansakai 6y ago
Wow this is amazing!
justapassenger 6y ago
Is Firefox doomed? Mozilla is slashing work on core technologies around browsers and seems to be focusing more and more on social activism tooling.
- luizfzs 6y ago
  There's Mozilla Corporation (for-profit) and Mozilla Foundation (non-profit). The URL links to Mozilla Foundation, so I don't think it's safe to state that the platform is a product of Mozilla Corporation.
  - rapnie 6y ago
    And furthermore: > As a Mozilla Fellow, Bevensee’s host org is the Anti-Defamation League. Bevensee created SMAT alongside a team of five other researchers and technologists. SMAT was created in collaboration with NCRI, Pushshift, Open Collective, and iDramaLab, which provide advisory, tooling, funding, and other resources.
nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
I really think this tool is pretty powerful, but to sniff out botted topics for an active disinformation campaign, won't bots be mostly unverified? I've used a tool before to view full twitter before for SM analysis, and I bet it cost like $xxxx for the subscription per month or year or whatever the contract was. This is free. So I appreciate the bang/buck a little extra. I would like to add that I tried / wanted to use this to track the bot campaign for the fires in Estacada. I feel like I was watching misinformation live on twitter for 'Estacada' and people advocating for the 'antifa starting fires' being led on by some initial spread of F.U.D..

149 points by rapnie 6y ago

s9w 6y ago

And another political tool. Doesn't seem to going too bad for Mozilla. > Bevensee’s host org is the Anti-Defamation League wow

cmroanirgo 6y ago

> , a researcher looking into COVID conspiracies can determine when the conspiracy began, who is leading the conversation, and which news stories, blog posts, and other links are appearing most frequently in the online conversation. Considering what's been happening in Melbourne, where people are being arrested for suggesting a peaceful protest, i think software such as this will only help speed up the polarisation process. The end result will be more police leaning on the necks of people who are only "political" criminals. I also noticed the word "disinformation" which in itself these days is rather politically polarising. What's wrong in the world where open and balanced conversation must not be allowed?

glial 6y ago
'Balanced' is a red herring and useless in-and-of itself. Conversation should be a collaboration to find the truth, not a 'balanced' battle between two opponents. Bullshit on the internet doesn't further the goal of finding the truth or arriving at consensus.
- mistermann 6y ago
  One complication might be that "bullshit" and various other rhetorical techniques are often used to dismiss truths that one has no interest in pondering, and this may not always be a conscious and intentional action. Of course there are obvious problems with this as well ("it takes 10x as much energy to refute bullshit than it does to spew it, etc"), but I think there is value in acknowledging the possibility that all humans aren't nearly as good at discerning truth as they perceive. Most people seem to get agitated rather quickly even at a topic-agnostic abstract discussion about our ability to discern truth.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    Most of the bullshit that is circulating on the internet at the moment, for example as it relates to the pandemic say is balls to the wall craziness along the lines of bill gates inserting microchips in your brain or 5G infecting you with a virus, or you suffocating from wearing a mask. It's not like we're talking about any sophisticated philosophizing here, the real danger from misinformation on the internet at the moment is the lowest of lowbrow garbage spread at extremely high velocity at virtually no cost.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      > Most of the bullshit... Bullshit according to who (which is my point)? > along the lines of bill gates inserting microchips in your brain or 5G infecting you with a virus, or you suffocating from wearing a mask There is some of this, yes. But then there are also questions regarding financial motives behind vaccines, and the unusual manner in which statistics are reported, and why certain portions of reality shall not be discussed, and so forth and so on. Lots of people assert that these ideas are also "bullshit", but if you ask for evidence substantiating that assertion, they often behave as if the notion that assertions should require evidence is absurd (while simultaneously criticizing conspiracy theorists for asserting things without evidence). > It's not like we're talking about any sophisticated philosophizing here I don't think philosophers would agree that epistemology is simple - that it often seems to invoke such strong emotions in people suggests that it is anything but. It has a dependency on human cognition, which is fairly well known to be a less than perfect platform in many ways. > the real danger from misinformation on the internet at the moment is the lowest of lowbrow garbage spread at extremely high velocity at virtually no cost. This is surely "a" danger, but whether it is "the" (main) danger is necessarily speculative, as it has a dependency on the future, which is unknown.
      - Barrin92 6y ago
        >Bullshit according to who (which is my point)? Really anyone with five braincells. Can someone explain to me why Hackernews and much of the rest of the internet, has descended into this nihilistic relativism where acknowleding even basic, empirical reality has apparently become impossible? Viral diseases aren't spread through radiowaves. That's not a matter of opinion, that's a fact. Of course a significant portion of people might be so scientifically illiterate they cannot figure that out, that doesn't change the fact that it's not true. This constant childish "hey but how do you know that this is true buddy" talk around misinformation and information is really driving me nuts.
- apostacy 6y ago
  Telling people to buy a mask last February was dangerous misinformation that threatened to cause a panic. Facebook expat groups in China were trying to get the word out, and were deleted with extreme prejudice. Obviously, they were right, and Facebook was wrong. Stuff that was labeled as fake news bullshit was actually the truth. After all of this, how can you ever trust these companies to decide for you what the truth is? How can you ever trust Facebook again?
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Declaring "bullshit on the internet" to be an existential danger is bullshit. We would all be dead already.
  - glial 6y ago
    That’s not what I said.
chrisweekly 6y ago
> "I also noticed the word "disinformation" which in itself these days is rather politically polarising. What's wrong in the world where open and balanced conversation must not be allowed?" Weaponized Social Media has become a very real, powerful, dangerous and global force. I'm sure there are other materials I could cite, but the recent Netfix film "The Social Dilemma" (esp the 2nd half) paints the picture very clearly.
raxxorrax 6y ago
I don't think fact checkers were in any way successful. They have immediately been abused for partisan issues. Not by outright lies, but careful framing evading truth like champions. The COVID disinformation craze is just embarrassing.

disown 6y ago

Just in time for the election. What a coincidence. Strange how every "disinformation" tool or "fact checker" seems like tools of disinformation itself. Also, shouldn't mozilla be working towards becoming independent from google's cash for survival and building a better browser to gain market share? Seems like every time I hear of mozilla, it's for a social issue or political issue. And why just social media? What about all the disinformation in traditional media? From the pro-trump and anti-trump press, the last four years have been entirely disinformation on both sides. What about tech focuses on tech and stop playing politics? I guess it's too much to ask of anybody these days.

christiansakai 6y ago
There is nothing in the article that mentions anything related to politics. Why don't you read the article first? I guess it's too much to ask of anybody these days.
- disown 6y ago
  > There is nothing in the article that mentions anything related to politics. The title itself is political. > Why don't you read the article first? I have. Have you? > I guess it's too much to ask of anybody these days. Yes it is. But not for me. I did waste my time to read the article. Unfortunately you haven't or are intentionally being blind. Other than the topic itself having nothing to do with mozilla... "More than ever, we need a movement to ensure the internet remains a force for good. Mozilla Fellows are web activists..." The topic is political. The people involved are political, But it has nothing to do with politics. That's some great logic.
  - christiansakai 6y ago
    Oh sorry if I offended you. My logic dictated that the article had nothing to do with politics and more about tech. This is not /r/politics Maybe you are projecting.
- dx87 6y ago
  Since you apparently didn't read the article either, here's an excerpt. > The SMAT team is also developing publicly-accessible tools for monitoring the U.S. elections, such as interactive network graphs of politicians that help to map things like spheres of influence and partisanship.

renewiltord 6y ago

100% no one commenting at the time of this comment has tried the tool. It's pretty much Google Trends for Twitter+Reddit+4chan+8kun, which makes it very useful to just see when an idea became popular, etc. Tools like this democratize access to large scale queries. That's an unalloyed good. More people can know when something started being a thing. I'm glad this exists, and I hope it is spun off so it survives Mozilla's search to preserve revenue¹. ¹ If The Googlords won't just keep them alive the way MSFT kept AAPL alive.

auganov 6y ago
I don't think anybody is criticizing the tool itself. The authors are trying to pitch this as an anti disinformation tool. Which makes it look like one of these Twitter "bot" detection sites used to harass legitimate users. I don't think anybody would have a problem with this if it was marketed as a simple trend tracking tool.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

So can I drill down into the individual tweets or posts? I would find that useful - and would love to get to the firehose for some NLP style analysis. I just don't have the bandwidth to download all of reddit and make it searchable ... EDIT: weirdly searching for "Hacker news" leads to a really odd trend on Twitter - between 2010 and 2013 lots of activity, then a massive drought till 2019 and back up again. Very odd - I cannot think of a cause

anigbrowl 6y ago
As far as Twitter goes, the Twitter streaming importer on Gephi is very powerful, and the software is moderately interoperable; unfortunately the project as a whole is lacking funding/development except for specific modules. You should also look into pushift.io which archives/indexes huge amounts of publicly accessible social media data, and which I think supplies some of the backend infrastructure for this project.

mysterEFrank 6y ago

This is a great start but I'd want to visualize/analyze transmission across the social graph

DSingularity 6y ago

Where is the source code?

zamadatix 6y ago
From the about link: https://gitlab.com/smat-project https://gitlab.com/smat-project
kbrosnan 6y ago
Three clicks from the blogpost. First to the site https://www.smat-app.com https://www.smat-app.com. Then about https://www.smat-app.com/about https://www.smat-app.com/about and finally https://gitlab.com/smat-project https://gitlab.com/smat-project
sk2020 6y ago
The server code is viewable, but the source data, which is the only part that actually matters, appears to be some elasticsearch server with a url hidden in some environment variables, which I'm not seeing anywhere. So there isn't actually a way to audit if the source data can be reproduced. Open-ish source, I suppose. Correct me if I'm wrong.

christiansakai 6y ago

Wow this is amazing!

justapassenger 6y ago

Is Firefox doomed? Mozilla is slashing work on core technologies around browsers and seems to be focusing more and more on social activism tooling.

luizfzs 6y ago
There's Mozilla Corporation (for-profit) and Mozilla Foundation (non-profit). The URL links to Mozilla Foundation, so I don't think it's safe to state that the platform is a product of Mozilla Corporation.
- rapnie 6y ago
  And furthermore: > As a Mozilla Fellow, Bevensee’s host org is the Anti-Defamation League. Bevensee created SMAT alongside a team of five other researchers and technologists. SMAT was created in collaboration with NCRI, Pushshift, Open Collective, and iDramaLab, which provide advisory, tooling, funding, and other resources.

nosmokewhereiam 6y ago

I really think this tool is pretty powerful, but to sniff out botted topics for an active disinformation campaign, won't bots be mostly unverified? I've used a tool before to view full twitter before for SM analysis, and I bet it cost like $xxxx for the subscription per month or year or whatever the contract was. This is free. So I appreciate the bang/buck a little extra. I would like to add that I tried / wanted to use this to track the bot campaign for the fires in Estacada. I feel like I was watching misinformation live on twitter for 'Estacada' and people advocating for the 'antifa starting fires' being led on by some initial spread of F.U.D..