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Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
- reddotX 6y agoyoutube is infested with bots
- jjbinx007 6y agoI've long suspected there are vast bot networks like this all over social media. YouTube comment sections on videos related to covid are an absolute cess pit of covid deniers, misinformation spreading and conspiracy theory peddling. I would like to think these are bots and not a very vocal but significant section of society but given recent world events I am not sure at all.
- jjcon 6y ago> given recent world events I am not sure at all. Have recent events involved significant sections of society?
- BelenusMordred 6y agoYou don't need some exclusive GPT-3 access for this. A simple Markov bot is enough to fool nearly everyone they perform fairly well when given specific domains, quite poorly in general online forums though. Give that bot a foreign name and virtually every native English speaking person will assume it's simply bad grammar.
- notahacker 6y agoIt's Twitter, you don't even need to generate original text: likes, comment-free retweets, reaction gifs and posting the same text as replies to everything are all actions that will boost whatever sentiment or link it is you want to boost.
- simias 6y agoI genuinely wonder what's the real number. It is easy to find accounts that look like they could be bots, but I wonder what portions of those are just very dedicated individuals. I don't use social media a lot but I do regularly post on HN for instance. I don't know what my average message rate is but it's probably around 1 message/day. Now if I just wanted to spam my political agenda on the site (and the site let me do it) I could very easily copy/paste the same bullshit a hundred times a day on every story on the frontpage. If like 20 other people did the same thing the amount of noise we'd generate is pretty large Look at random fan wikis to see the amount of free work some dedicated individuals can achieve. I'm certain that many of these super active troll accounts are just that, dedicated individuals who feel very strongly about something and just spend 10 hours every day spamming and harassing and copy-pasting. If your output is like 100x that of a normal user (and you know how to game the algorithms to amplify your message) you don't need a huge number of accounts or automation to become a real nuisance.
- lmeyerov 6y agoWe research this stuff - a lot of nation-state and financed activity is farms of low-paid people assisted by software running multiple and shared accounts. Misinfo analysts (including ML tools) can suspect this bc the accounts clock in & clock out and follow a talking points script. Except bc a low paid person is adding a human touch, account abuse teams see it and do nothing due to uncertainty, despite being against TOS. Sometimes it is more obvious. People had MAGA campaign apps that lets Trump's team remotely activate otherwise-legit social media accounts. So the account is real, but popular messages were bot behavior. Twitter is even less likely to want to take down such an account, despite the prohibited behavior.
- Balgair 6y agoI'm reminded of the quote: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" - Ascribed to an unnamed Yosemite Park Ranger. The quote may never really have happened, but I think it fits here. If the people are intentionally acting as bots per the direction of other people, then what does that make the people acting as bots?
- therockspush 6y agoI used to run a twitter bot. It didn't create any content. Just liked, retweeted or followed based on keywords. Then my tweets would get liked and followed. 95% of that was just bots. Every now and then I would unfollow a real person and my account, which was clearly a bot, would get some hate mail telling me to re-follow them. It was pretty surreal.
- heidar 6y ago100%. I find this incredibly interesting and I'd love to understand more about what topics they post about. I bet many hot topics, especially ones about politics, have a fair share of bots commenting. I think their purpose is equally interesting. I'd guess a lot of them are there to polarise discussions and drive people apart, but there are probably ones that have an agenda to drive a specific opinion as well. I think this isn't just on Twitter, but other platforms as well.
- imiric 6y agoNot just YouTube comments, but videos as well have become automated or semi-automated to produce the most engaging content and maximize ad revenue. There are companies making millions by gaming the system. See the Elsagate scandal and TheSoul Publishing[1], the company behind those 5-minute craft videos and occasional Russian propaganda. And of course similar things are happening on all social media platforms. It's deeply ironic that the West built all these tools with the intention of "connecting" people, something that's still Facebook's main mission statement, yet its biggest effects have been exactly the opposite, causing division and distrust between people, and contributing to real world conflicts and toppling of governments. Social media today is weaponized by political agents to spread misinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale and the platforms are paying them to do it. The current political climate in the US is no surprise. It was a coordinated psyops attack and its enemies are laughing at how easy and inexpensive it was to destabilize a nation compared to traditional warfare. I fear that we still haven't seen the worst of it, and frankly I'm not sure what the solution is. [1]: https://www.lawfareblog.com/biggest-social-media-operation-youve-never-heard-run-out-cyprus-russians https://www.lawfareblog.com/biggest-social-media-operation-y...
- krona 6y agoI just ran my own Twitter account through the so called 'Botometer' used to form the conclusion of the article. Apparently I'm 4.7/5 bot. Needless to say I didn't finish reading the article.
- jhardy54 6y agoWhat kinds of things do you post about?
- ratsmack 6y agoI have never had a Twitter account, so unfortunately I cannot do the same. I'm hoping more people here do the same as you so we can get a cross section of the accuracy for that specific bot detector. I have problems with articles on both sides of the issue using all kinds of speculation and innuendo to try and discredit the opposite side. I would rather just read articles that cover studies explaining results (data) and methods used to support their position.
- secondcoming 6y agoJust uninstall Twitter. Easy.
- Helloworldboy 6y agoThis
- chapium 6y agoThis just tips the discourse more in favor of those running the bots. Also, since most of the world is governed by democracy, a key requirement is to have informed citizens so they don't vote for policies based on misinformation. One may not wish to use twitter (myself included), but a significant amount of the world population does.
- phtrivier 6y agoYes, but imagine how brilliant it would be for twitter to be only full of bots spewing disinformation at each other (and the few human conspiracy theorist who would be lost for the cause anyway), while concerned citizens are... Getting their disinformation from somewhere else. Never mind. Still, all this puts "prevent bit usage by design" on the feature list for the next generation of social media (that and "prevent sharing without human moderation beyond a certain virality point", "clever shadow banning" ,and an eliza mode for those times you juste want to yell at the clouds...
- DFHippie 6y agoRight. And I suspect the people most likely to delete their accounts are the ones least likely to be influenced by bots.
- rvz 6y ago> Easy. Yes. it's that Easy and the most obvious solution to getting out of that echo chamber. I know it's hard for many to actually uninstall and 'delete their accounts' but perhaps this sounds like a great new years resolution plan to stick to. This time, you can do it.
- zionic 6y ago
- emphatizer2000 6y agoFor the millionth time: the number of bots tweeting about something doesn't imply a lot of people are actually seeing the tweets. Also, afaik all the botometers are crap, so studies based on them are also crap.
- Zuider 6y agoThe bot detectors are not very sophisticated, and they definitely have categorised several individuals whom I know to be real humans as 'bots,' apparently based on their political persuasion. It is ironic that human beings can fail a Turing test carried out by scripts, and disturbing that those peoples voices should be silenced based on such shallow criteria.
- ihsw 6y agoThat criteria was always meant to be political in nature.
- hntrader 6y agoThe problem of addressing global warming is very much one about persuasion. That means getting beyond people's tribal defences, which are a big part of climate change denial. Disinformation campaigns play a significant role, but the reason the disinformation is so effective is it plays into people's confirmation bias which is driven by perceived threats to their status in society. They see this liberalism as threatening, of which anthropogenic global warming is a part, and reject it outright, willing to accept any information that confirms their prior emotional decision. I believe that we need a Greta Thunberg-like figure who is conservative-leaning on literally every major topic of political contention, except believes that anthropogenic climate change is real and we should take significant action to mitigate it, and then we need the media and entertainment industries to prop them up as virtuous. People's instinctive defences will be lowered and we will be surprised at how easily people's minds can be changed.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoNo offense, but it’s clear you’ve never spent enough real time with people who are “deniers” to really understand anything, especially if you think what’s missing is a celebrity. I would say the bulk of the resistance I see comes largely from distrust of institutions and people who are very pro climate change, and then secondary worry about the financial impact of decarbonization on them personally as well as losing competitiveness to countries like China who are huge polluters and honestly dgaf.
- hntrader 6y agoThe deniers I know are conservatives who reject it outright simply because it's what the liberals believe (or perhaps, to find some common ground, it's what liberal institutions believe). They've read little about it and assume that it's hysteria. Maybe my idea of a conservative celebrity is a silly idea and won't work, but I believe the root cause is one of tribal conflict (combined with cynical disinformation campaigns), and to change their mind requires getting around these tribal defenses in some way. According to Pew, 84% of Liberal Democrats think that humans significantly contribute to global warming, whereas 14% of Conservative Republicans do. I think this helps to confirm that there's a pretty important tribal dimension at play here (although we also can't rule out that financially self-interested people have self-selected themselves into the latter category).
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThe Botometer is a non-explainable ML model, not a scale or a photodetector, so I'm not convinced it's actually valid to use it for this kind of study. Did the researchers verify that "spreads climate disinformation" is not itself a factor in the Botometer classification?
- twirlock 6y agoIf similar political "studies" have been any indication, no. They didn't.
- callamdelaney 6y agoYes, people labeling real people as bots so that they can disregard their viewpoints. Mostly it's democrats / liberals who do this. Oh, you support republican policies? You must be a Russian bot! Oh, you are skeptical of climate change? You're a bot!
- guscost 6y agoNah you’re not a bot, you would know. It’s your friends who are bots! You are a member of a tiny cultish minority, living in a fantasy world, foolishly believing a con while the woke right-thinkers (who have a lot of real friends) laugh at you.
- callamdelaney 6y agoCan't tell if you're pro or anti my viewpoint but take an upvote. Are you hiring at density?
- guscost 6y agoAll views expressed on this forum are entirely my own. That aside, you can find open positions at Density listed here: density.io/jobs
- cblconfederate 6y agoWhy do we trust twitter etc? We seem to have forgot how newsgroups died. The problem is not solved yet, probably never will be solved with machine learning. ML just moves the goalposts for trusting the algorithm to trusting the employees of each company.
- dragontamer 6y ago> We seem to have forgot how newsgroups died. When Digg, MySpace, and Slashdot became more convenient sources of disinformation?
- cblconfederate 6y agoi mean earlier when it became overtaken by spam
- dragontamer 6y agoThere were moderated newsgroups for years. There were some people who preferred to hang out in the spam-filled, unmoderated areas. But there were plenty of newsgroup users who preferred the tightly moderated newsgroups.
- emphatizer2000 6y agoWe don't trust Twitter. That is just what sensationalist papers claim.
- barney54 6y agoWith articles like these, I wish they would provide examples of what they they are talking about. As in, examples of likely bots, and examples of the problematic tweets. It's not too hard to provide the evidence to really make their case.
- Shivetya 6y agoThey won't and they don't have to because for the most part articles like this just appeal to people who believe it to be true anyway. They don't need to read further than the headline to have their beliefs verified. Hell, you want climate denial, just go publish old stories about lack of ice in certain port cities in the early 1900s and lack of snow or increasing strong storms. What is fun about perusing old news is how that much of the same claims made then are no different than today. Make your own decision but never blindly trust even stories you agree with.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago> lack of ice in certain port cities in the early 1900s and lack of snow or increasing strong storms. speaking of people whose mind is made up...
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoHere are the training sets used for the bot detection tool: https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/bot-repository/datasets.html https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/bot-repository/datasets.html
- admiralspoo 6y agoAnyone remember the late 90s when Scientific American didn't publish clickbait?
- superflit 6y agoI choose 4 of my followers that I did not agree ideological and surely their Botometer score was higher than 4.0 Maybe people I disagree they have same arguments and are considered bots? Or they just parrot same things?
- spikels 6y agoAnd Scientific American is a major source of politicized science.
- spoonjim 6y ago“Bot” is the new “square” — just a generic insult for people you don’t like. I, a meatspace human, have been called a “Russian bot” when I disagreed with liberals and “Leftist bot” or similar when I disagreed with Trumpists.
- daxfohl 6y agoProbably by real bots. Wish there was a study on what percentage of bot accusations are bot to meat, bot to bot, etc.
- twirlock 6y agoOh no better make the SPLC in charge of banning people for wrongthink now.
- Dem_Boys 6y agoIf these findings are true, this should be no surprise. If I had to guess, it's big oil that is backing the bot propaganda efforts. I assume if there is large amounts of money or power to be made, then there are most likely some type of digital propaganda efforts ongoing. This includes oil, big tech, and political parties just to name a few. If a semi competent programmer can make a simple twitter bot in 4 hours, imagine what a well funded organization like a multi-billion dollar company can accomplish. People are very easy to manipulate with propaganda, especially when most of the public are not aware that their social news feeds are likely filled with disingenuous information likely from, or influenced by, carefully crafted digital propaganda campaigns
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago"Big oil" is not a person. These companies are made up of people, who are motivated differently than the entity (entities) as a whole would be. Specifically, any change in public sentiment would be rather small and only accrue over the long term. It would therefore be of little use to, say, some PR executive at Shell. "Big oil" is also made up of a number of companies. Any benefits would be spread out among all of them, while any costs would fall to just the one doing it. As for costs: the big one would be the damage to your reputation, as an individual, company, and industry, that would follow if the public found out. I'm having trouble imaging a scenario where you run such an operation, certainly involving a dozen people or so, without ever pissing one of them off sufficiently to see them calling a reporter. I don't know what's going on here. The tobacco industry comes to mind as one that engaged in such tactics even though a lot of the above was true for them as well. But "big oil" seems more diverse, including foreign firms and governments, companies that embrace the future such as Shell as well as more "conservative" donate-to-republicans-and-hope-this-will-blow-over kingdoms of darkness such as Exxon. Tobacco was a far more like-minded, sometimes family-owned community that would have been easier to co-ordinate in such conspiracies.
- tw04 6y ago> Specifically, any change in public sentiment would be rather small and only accrue over the long term. It would therefore be of little use to, say, some PR executive at Shell. I'd argue that's pretty easy to refute. Just look how quickly the Q-Anon nonsense has spread. And they weren't even trying to pretend to be legitimate, they just kept making up crazier and crazier statements "for the lulz". > As for costs: the big one would be the damage to your reputation, as an individual, company, and industry, that would follow if the public found out. I'm having trouble imaging a scenario where you run such an operation, certainly involving a dozen people or so, without ever pissing one of them off sufficiently to see them calling a reporter. They were already caught funding the climate science denial reports despite knowing what was really going on. There was almost no backlash, why do you presume it would be any different this time? https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate-scientist-oil-company-23022015/ https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate-scientist-oil-com...
- ihsw 6y agoOr the current cohort of climate-change policies are deeply unpopular, including among the educated and well-informed. There are climate-change policies that are not deeply unpopular but it seems the powers that be are not interested in them.
- raarts 6y agoI tried to read the paper but I need to pay €45 for it. Thanks but no thanks.
- rdtwo 6y agoHonestly a lot of what I use Twitter for is stock alerts and giveaways. It’s a crap platform for anything else
- bhawks 6y agoNot to be snarky - but remove the words Bot and Climate from the title - it's cleaner. Twitter as a platform promotes toxic social interaction, tribalism, hot takes, low effort & low impact feel good activism and rage driven mobs. It is literally a hack on human neurochemistry that hurts individuals and society as a whole. People should be connecting with others in a rich, high context, cooperative and supportive environment - like we often have in our physical communities. That is by definition healthy and productive. I wish social platforms were the virtual version of what we have in the real world - not this twisted and broken imitation. Twitter is the worst but that doesn't mean any of the other forums are much better. HN is often ok - but has its flaws too. Tldr everyone thinks everyone is a bot AND there actually are bots too. That's because twitter is virtual heroin and it is hurting us by design. :(
- dfilppi 6y agoOnce you call climate change an 'existential crisis', you've pretty much lost your sane audience.
- godmode2019 6y agoHow could someone possibly label posts correctly if they don't actually know what accounts are bots. Seems like the training data was selected to aid the answer they were looking for. You have to remember people that believe their point if view is correct tend to share more and comment more so other people know they are misinformed.