12 ms·

Almost half of local Twitter trending topics in Turkey are fake – study

485 points by FridayoLeary 5y ago

ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Title should mention Turkey
thrower123 5y ago
An easy way to never see Twitter trends is to open up the settings and change it from showing personalized or current location trends, to showing trends for a country that does not have many Twitter users. This can be interesting in it's own sake. Learn what's going on in Bhutan or Burkina Faso.
mrdoornbos 5y ago
I try to pretend to be shocked, but it just comes out as "well duh"
strict9 5y ago
Since the information-dense redesign I've been using the minimal twitter plugin (discovered on HN) which removes fluff like trending topics. Experience has been great and highly recommend: - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/min-twitter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/min-twitter/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimal-twitter/pobhoodpcipjmedfenaigbeloiidbflp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimal-twitter/po...
- mdm_ 5y ago
  Can anyone recommend an Android/iOS app that does the same thing?
  - pcardoso 5y ago
    I use Tweetbot on iOS.
Ensorceled 5y ago
If I check twitter in the morning, almost any "trending in Canada" topic that is political in nature is full of "firstnamebunchofnumbers" type accounts pushing the trend. They are all very supportive of our right leaning political party...
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Strange. I always get all far left-wing stuff, and it's not even high-quality left-wing argumentation but just the absolute sewer of left-wing rhetoric. I'm very curious whether Twitter's algorithm is designed (or exploited) to show us things that it thinks we'll agree with (I'm a moderate liberal, so maybe it thinks I'm a partisan and I'll just love extreme left-wing stuff?) or stuff it thinks we'll be angry about? Or maybe it shows everyone the same far-left drivel?
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    >I'm very curious whether Twitter's algorithm is designed (or exploited) to show us things that it thinks we'll agree with (I'm a moderate liberal, so maybe it thinks I'm a partisan and I'll just love extreme left-wing stuff?) or stuff it thinks we'll be angry about? Or maybe it shows everyone the same far-left drivel? My theory: There is no coherent theory of operations like "Show the leftists to the leftists"; rather, it's doing constant A/B-test-style optimization between drivel varieties to see which one best inspires the cohort matching your doomscrolling patterns to continue to scroll.
    - Fellshard 5y ago
      It's anecdotal, but my trending pane is usually filled with mostly hard left trends, the occasional right wing trend, with the left trends being frequently selected to be sloppily editorialized by Twitter staff. I'm certainly on the right wing. More likely, it'll show you what's likely to make you engage, and there's no quicker way than to show you things which make you angry.
      - 5y ago
telchar 5y ago
I suspect this rather obvious flaw (from the article: not taking deletion into account when calculating trends) is due to it being easier to create a data pipeline that is purely additive at the scale they're operating at. Not having to consider deletions and updates simplifies development. This is too much of a vulnerability not to fix, though. It amazes me Twitter somehow manages to remain relevant with how broken it is in various ways.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Deletion is easy if you're using ML based on feature vectors to extract "trends", because you can just add one of the opposite vector and the system is still purely "additive" at scale.
  - a1sabau 5y ago
    Not if you're using probabilistic data structures like Count-Min[0]. You don't care about the exact count. You just want an estimate with a certain probability. Such structures only support addition, not removal. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch
blocked_again 5y ago
> We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. Between June 2015 and September 2019, we uncovered 108,000 bot accounts involved, the biggest bot dataset reported in a single paper. Our research is the first to uncover the manipulation of Twitter Trends at this scale. It can be some complex crypto puzzle that can be only solved by real users. We need to find a solution. I think democracies should introduce regulations that ensures that. * Bots cannot be created in large scale like this in social media platforms. Basically you have to be a real perso to create an account and there should be a limit on nunber of accounts one can create. Who is a real human? Twitter verified users can be one solution. Airbnb verified hosts seems to be another example. Anything is better than the current model. * Complex Ml models for generating the time lines should be replaced with simple algorithms like sort on basis of upvotes/time. Also the users should be able to easily access what is the algorithm behind the news feed.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  Ironically, asking for an ID for internet access is usually a telltale of not-so-democratic regime.
  - Zigurd 5y ago
    Asking for a method of payment, and using methods of payment as a factor in enforcing bans, is an entirely private sector market-based mitigation of bots and badly behaved humans. Subscriptions are the future of worthwhile social media.
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    Democracy and privacy are separate.
    - thechao 5y ago
      That only works in a well-functioning non-authoritarian state. I would suspect that every major Western democracy began in secret.
    - 5y ago
shrikant 5y ago
The original source is much better written and explains the core of what the paper actually uncovers: > [...] found a vulnerability in the algorithm that decides Twitter Trending Topics: it does not take deletions into account. This allows attackers to push the trends they want to the top of Twitter Trends despite deleting their tweets which contain the candidate trend shortly afterwards. Source: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/mass-scale-manipulation-of-twitter-trends-discov-2/ https://actu.epfl.ch/news/mass-scale-manipulation-of-twitter... Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07783.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07783.pdf
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  Thanks. I just tried to change the URL to the one you suggested but i don't seem to be able to. Oh well. I guess i will just have to appeal to dang and sit back and let him sort it out.
  - ChrisArchitect 5y ago
    or just submit the real one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27369315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27369315
- Natsu 5y ago
  Thanks for that. When I read the headline, I wondered if they were talking about Twitter's own manipulation of what trends or not.
ratww 5y ago
The only reason the automated Twitter Trends exist is to keep Twitter itself relevant, as it generates lazy pseudo-journalism articles such as "such and such was a trend". It's merely a tool that reacts to spam. Even when it's for a good cause it's just people manipulating an algorithm by saying absolutely nothing of value. Nothing of value to the humanity will be lost if they nuke this feature tomorrow.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  What I didn't understand was why this is even a problem, but they explain it in the article: > Broader media outlets report on trends, which are used as a proxy for what people are talking about Fair enough that Twitter doesn't want to be manipulated, I can understand that. Still it should not have a real world impact in my mind. Except that you're right in that "lazy pseudo-journalism" picks this stuff up and report on it, as if it was real news, without doing any fact finding of their own. It's a silly "what's trending" box, it's not actually a source you can use, because we don't know what the criteria Twitter uses to generate it. News media is moving to fast, and there's a desire to provide 24/7 news coverage, on a budget, so they resort to using whatever silly online gadget is available. Journalist should be WAY more critical about using Twitter and tweets as actual sources of news.
  - starkd 5y ago
    Exactly. You have to wonder if this is what's responsible for cancel culture. Issues being called out that have only become an issue recently. It could explain how it's out of control it has become.
    - mrweasel 5y ago
      I certainly think that's one reason. There are way to many stupid posts from Twitter, and Facebook, which are blown completely out of proportion and taken to level of conflict which wouldn't have happened previously. Sure there are absolutely some issues from social media that are worth highlighting in the news media, but all shit storms and online controversies aren't created equally. To often one or two posts are taken out of context, especially on Twitter where people try to cram their message into as few words as possible. That is then elevated to "This person is horrible" or "All people in this group are bad". The reality is that some people are just assholes, and while annoying and terrible, it's simply not worth writing about.
TonyTrapp 5y ago
Twitter is so much more peaceful if you set the location to use for trends to some country whose language you cannot read, or a region for which there simply exist no twitter trends (e.g. Åland Islands).
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Better yet install the Calm Twitter chromium extension and you'll never have to look at them again.
- strangattractor 5y ago
  Better yet do like me and don't have an account. My days are bliss. No trolls. No discussion/arguments about NOTHING. The definition of Peace is not having a Twitter or Facebook account.
  - swiley 5y ago
    I knew a guy in college who was always angry about something. One day he gave up twitter and it turns out he was really intelligent and pleasant to be around.
  - can16358p 5y ago
    This. I've quit using Twitter (and almost every other social media platform afterwards except Instagram which is basically my portfolio) and my level of frustration went down by an order of magnitude since then.
- pelorat 5y ago
  I just follow a bunch of people, I never click on trends or hashtags.
ziml77 5y ago
I suggest to anyone using twitter to either add rules to your ad blocker to remove the trends section or use an extension like Tweak New Twitter to remove it. It makes Twitter so much nicer to visit when you don't have those stupid trends shoved in your face making it seem like you should constantly be anxious or depressed about the state of the world.
- RpFLCL 5y ago
  Two years ago I changed my trends location to a county whose language I can't read (Japan). The trends box still exists, but I can't read it and can't care about any so-called trends.
  - j6 5y ago
    I personally have the trends country set to one that doesn't usually have a very big (or any) presence on Twitter (e.g. British Indian Ocean Territory, Falkland Islands, ...). This makes the "Trends for you" part of the page empty.
    - Jiocus 5y ago
      Thanks for this hack. I found it hilarious (and useful).
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      I wonder if it'll start filling up if enough users do this
      - jaywalk 5y ago
        No, that's not how it works. The only way it would start getting content is if users actually started tweeting from those remote locations, which seems unlikely.
        MauranKilom 5y ago
        ...or someone figures out that appearing to tweet from that location suddenly puts their tweets in front of a lot of eyeballs.
hirundo 5y ago
I quit Twitter in disgust last year, frequently triggered by the trending topics. Now when I sometimes follow a Twitter link, I avert my eyes from trending topic, like I also often do with commercials and ads. I know that such manipulation works on me to some extent, so I make some effort not to consume it. I hope some day sophisticated AI "ad blockers" can be easily extended to such non-advertising manipulative content. But I suspect that their adversary AIs will keep up with that arms race.
- detaro 5y ago
  You can change the location you see trending topics for. Set it to some tiny country and there' wont be anything trending. (or use an adblocker to remove the trending box, but the other thing syncs with the account to everywhere)
  - amatecha 5y ago
    Yeah, I used to set mine to Japan, so I literally can't even read the trending topics. Works pretty well, except a bunch of English-text trends still get in there. :\
cout 5y ago
Is there any way to see your own deleted posts, or otherwise know if your account is being used in this way?
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
"Relevance" is not the signal that people think it is. It can be trusted when it is coming from people we've already vetted, but at a mass scale, it is easily weaponized to manufacture and manipulate public opinion. An algorithm that decides relevance can be gamed, as we see here. These features won't go away, however. Twitter and the media at large rely on the veneer of relevance to ensure they retain an audience.
______- 5y ago
Twitter cracked down on bots recently[0]. Last time I checked you need to verify your account with a phone number. However this is a trivial hurdle to overcome since dedicated bot farmers would use Twilio or some similar service to register Twitter accounts en-masse [0] https://www.dawn.com/news/1391001/twitter-sets-crackdown-on-automated-bot-accounts https://www.dawn.com/news/1391001/twitter-sets-crackdown-on-... [0] https://www.cultofmac.com/530455/twitter-crackdown-on-bots/ https://www.cultofmac.com/530455/twitter-crackdown-on-bots/
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  How many phone numbers are there? How many phone numbers does twilio have access to? Seems like it would at least put a cap on the number of problematic accounts.
  - ______- 5y ago
    That becomes problematic, since often numbers are 'recycled' by the likes of Twilio, and the number has some history or previous use, probably used before to register social media accounts. The trick is to find a brand new fresh number that hasn't been used ;)
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Twitter keeps saying they’ve “cracked down” on bots and yet the bots are still just as much of a problem as they’ve ever been. I’d been on twitter for over decade — back when you tweeted via SMS — and deleted my account in the run up to the US election because it was impossible to discern real content from the content designed to churn the outrage machine. Whoever uses the term “crack down” to describe Twitter’s periodic deletion of only the most egregious bot accounts deserves an auto-reply meme bot featuring Inigo Montoya.
davesque 5y ago
I think this must be happening on every social media platform in some way. The fact is that people seem to love being afraid and anxious. Bad news spreads like wild fire. All that X bad actor has to do is just figure out any worrying take on a topic of choice and then just sit back and watch the mayhem. I also think the most likely originators of this content are state actors. If they can pay a group of people to drop intellectual bombs in the public spheres of their enemies all day, I'm sure they see that as an overall (and very cheap) win. Honestly, it's more a question of why they wouldn't do this than why would they.
- wmeredith 5y ago
  > The fact is that people seem to love being afraid and anxious They don't love it, but it does compel them to engage with the content. Engagement = growth. Social media is basically a cancer. There are good pockets here and there if curated carefully, but overall it seems like it's a drain on society.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    web 2.0 makes one miss pubs
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - slivanes 5y ago
    I read someones comment that put this into perspective, here was the basic take: In repressive regimes, social media is a boon for the general public to organize and resist. In established democracies, social media has slow insidious negative effect on the general population, typically propaganda supplied by the disillusioned and said repressive regimes.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Social media triggered the Arab Spring which destroyed nations.
    - 5y ago
mschuster91 5y ago
Can someone please inspect the German Twitter trends, too? It's an almost daily occurence that far-right vocabulary ends up trending, and the utter garbage that gets spewed there is toxic and dangerous.
villgax 5y ago
Both the major political parties are to be investigated in India as well for seemingly banal hastags which individual IT cells in the hinterland want to propagate. You'd be hard pressed to find someone from the city or towns being so pressed to tweet about a political party & nothing else on Twitter of all places & content
- blueblisters 5y ago
  Twitter India is a cesspool. Political parties spend so much energy asking tweeting against each other, you would think Indians have a large presence on Twitter and would care about such things. But the reality is that Twitter has the smallest footprint in India among the major social networks. I wouldn't be surprised if a double digit percentage of Twitter India users were affiliated to one of the political parties.
ohmanjjj 5y ago
Twitter manipulates the trending topics themselves to fit whatever agenda is needed
jb775 5y ago
Twitter allows bot networks like these to operate as long as they're pushing Leftist propaganda (i.e. Twitter's political stance), or suppressing non-Leftist discussion. That's why they didn't respond to the researchers...because they selectively look the other way. It's amazing how fast millions of "legitimate" Twitter accounts of Korean teenager K-Pop fanatics all of a sudden become violently interested in suppressing non-Leftist-narrative hashtags. Edit: Here's a url for a recent blatant use of a bot network (with Twitter obviously looking the other way). The same or similar networks were used throughout the election cycle, especially when there was any mention of election fraud. https://www.insider.com/aoc-lied-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-k-pop-animal-stans-hashtag-2021-2 https://www.insider.com/aoc-lied-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-k-...
- souldeux 5y ago
  [citation needed]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ibrahimsow1 5y ago
  Bot networks aren't really needed, they can just be real people. Young people disproportionately use social media, young women especially so. The intersection of those two groups happen to be left leaning [0], and more socially connected which I'm using as a proxy for political awareness [1]. Plus in my general experience people are just really vocal about identity politics. It wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption that the primary demographic of a website are not a fan of content that challenges their world-views. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/... [1]: https://psyarxiv.com/72w58/download/?format=pdf#:~:text=The%20participants%20were%20K%2DPop,%3D%2018%20%2D%2055%20years https://psyarxiv.com/72w58/download/?format=pdf#:~:text=The%...).
- blincoln 5y ago
  The research paper this article is based on covers a pretty broad spectrum of political (pro- and anti-Erdoğan), and non-political topics in Turkey. I always assume that probably 95% or more of accounts on Twitter are fake, based on my experience. Back in 2017 or so, when QAnon was being heavily pushed by botnets, there was what looked (to me) like a leftist analogue of it[1] being pushed in the same manner, and it just didn't catch on the way QAnon did. I figured it was probably being promoted by the same people, to inflame tensions in the US. Basically, I think if you go looking for evidence that Twitter is helping people you disagree with, you'll find it, regardless of your political beliefs. [1] No, not BLM/Antifa. It was an actual conspiracy theory with a token figurehead like "Q". I don't want to include too many details here because it seems like it died off, and I'd rather not help revive it.
sumo89 5y ago
It alway has been manipulated https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/the-social-chain https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/the-social-chain
motohagiography 5y ago
Interesting, but is it news? This is what ad-tech does, and what every political party hires advertising and PR agencies and influencers to do. I thought the deal was those trends were talking points for people for whom spending on this is worth it, and that's what made it interesting. It's "what some people will pay to have you to believe," it never occurred to me that social media trends were organic functions of real aggregated human desire. I think (at least young people) have a sense of what is real or not. Do people not already know that their passive understanding of the world is very tightly managed and orchestrated by people whose job is to be good at it? > The researchers contacted Twitter twice, with the company acknowledging in both cases the vulnerability in its Trends algorithm. In the first case Twitter declined to make any changes, in the second case the company did not respond to the researchers' follow-up emails. Treating this issue as a technical "vulnerability," mainly reinforces the idea that Twitter's narrative orchestration is somehow more real.
- lawwantsin17 5y ago
  The main stream media and most people definitely act and talk like it's real. So, maybe just not news to people who hate twitter, but someone should really hire a bot to trend this paper over there.
- websites420 5y ago
  People outside of tech have no concept of what the algorithm does and in general take what’s on their feed at face value. How could they not? The news very often runs stories about tweets and Twitter trends as if they represent the real organic sentiments of the citizens.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- lepervier 5y ago
  It's news. Advertising and using PR agencies might not be news but using hacked accounts as bots to push whatever slogan you want to on top of Twitter (like hate speech "Syrians Get Out" as stated in the article) easily should be news.
spinny 5y ago
Interesting ... big tech oligarchs manipulating social media is ok, somebody hacking the trends algo is bad ...
dominotw 5y ago
I never went back to twitter after their team put #uncletim on trending topic. Added twitter to my /etc/hosts block. Not missing anything.
allochthon 5y ago
I've noticed that online influence campaigns are starting to really kick into gear. Any comments in news articles posted to the r/worldnews subreddit about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang that do not defend the status quo there will be downvoted to -15 or more, and if you take note of commenters, it soon becomes clear that there's a lot of brigading. Many of the comments conflate criticism of the situation with racism or a desire to start a war.
- iratic0 5y ago
  I have noticed that too, which is why I don't trust what's trending on reddit anymore. I have noticed influencers on youtube and elsewhere, who never usually talk about political issues, making out of place comments about various issues. I can't tell if the uncomfortable look on their faces or the awkward way they deliver the message that gives away the fact that they've been paid to take a side.
kordlessagain 5y ago
Twitter is a cesspool. Thanks Jack.
rvz 5y ago
What a surprise! /s Almost everything you see on Twitter is manipulated. Bad actors, the users and even Twitter themselves do it. If it's not them on a Sunday it's the bots doing it. The daily drama on Twitter starts with a user spreading some unverified accusations of another user which that goes viral and someone's life is destroyed. Originating from Twitter and ends up in the newspapers and on some rare cases on TV (When it is slow news day). Don't worry though, at least we know that Twitter is so heavily manipulated, even its users would STILL pay for the lies that spread so easily on there.
sandworm101 5y ago
What is the "fake" rate for twitter normally? I don't know whether the fact that half in one area are fake means anything. If someone tole me that 90+% of all twitter traffic came from bots or other "fake" sources I would believe it. >> "We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. How am I meant to read that? By 'trend' do they mean trending posts? Does 'fake' mean created from scratch by bots? Are these AI bots generating their own content? If a russian operative is feeding stories to a bot, does that material qualify as fake? What if a bot picks up a non-fake but incorrect story and spreads it to a billion people? Is is fakery if a Microsoft bot finds and retweets a customer review of Windows 10? What about fake stories that are promoted by real people?
cblconfederate 5y ago
Twitter and other media are abused by authoritarian governments, and this abuse is dangerous. Unfortunately despite the manipulation on FB , twitter etc, because the problem does not affect 'rich and important' countries it gets little attention. All of their algorithms are being manipulated by sneaky actors, and their own systems lag behind them significantly to matter. Social media should switch back to how it started, i.e. a replacement for RSS in chronological mode.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  It doesn't affect rich and important countries? Have you watched politics over the last several years?
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Not in that way https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-azerbaijan-ilham-aliyev https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-...
iratic0 5y ago
I imagine these are being manipulated significantly in many places.
williesleg 5y ago
All everywhere not just turkey.
m00dy 5y ago
looks like Twitter's tech is not enough to catch these bots
JSavageOne 5y ago
My Twitter trending section in Ukraine last week consisted entirely of porn related hashtags (pic: https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1397429733126721543/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1397429733126721543...)
munk-a 5y ago
Since social media is sorta supplanting traditional news I wonder if that's level of inaccuracy is actually that surprising. How many potential articles come across an editors desk - or as pushed out by a company's PR department - that are just BS? Social media has democratized editorializing so these topics get put in front of a lot more faces - in the process we are dodging some of the worst components of censorship, but it is a tradeoff and I think which approach is better (centralized or decentralized editorialship) is still an open question.
- OminousWeapons 5y ago
  > Since social media is sorta supplanting traditional news I wonder if that's level of inaccuracy is actually that surprising. How many potential articles come across an editors desk - or as pushed out by a company's PR department - that are just BS? You make a fair point; a lot of news is either poorly researched or biased. That being said, at least MOST news outlets are trying to get to the truth. They may be lazy, uninformed, or incapable of viewing the world objectively instead of through a specific ideological lens, but they are trying. Truth seeking is not the goal for many people posting to social media. You call the content "editorialized" but it's more like fiction and deliberate disinformation.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I don't disagree with any of that but I wanted to clarify my point - it's that social media is our way of (mostly) removing the editorial filter from the process - so we're essentially reading all the news - as opposed to "all the news that's fit to print". I'd imagine that twitter's trending section doesn't look all too different from an editor's desk with random unsolicited story submissions along with press releases from companies all flooding in with a good portion of them being just entirely false and a larger portion being exceedingly misleading. Instead of relying on a professional to filter those down and potentially remove some stories we'd really like to see (i.e. some stories critical of the War in Iraq that countered the yellow cake and WMD narrative pushed by the administration) we now have to sort through all the crap - aided somewhat by the decisions of others who have expressed their opinion on whether a thing is a real story or not by engaging with it. Part of my interest in the story also comes from the fact that 50% is probably far higher a proportion of "true news" than what would actually reach the desk on the editor. And, I'd like to reiterate that I'm still very much on the fence about which system is better.
amatecha 5y ago
Centralized communication platforms with engagement-incentivization built into the experience are an excellent tool for mass manipulation and propaganda.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
strangattractor 5y ago
Only half. They gotta be miscounting. %75 minimum.
RGamma 5y ago
Popular and trending have long lost their meaning in my mind. I automatically assume there's some commercial/political/whatever actor manufacturing these things. Organic popularity is basically dead at this point.
narrator 5y ago
This jives with "The Dead Internet Theory" which says that most of the internet is AI bots.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  I thought it was generally accepted that 40-50% of all traffic was bots[1]? Though since most of them are mindlessly scanning for WP vulns calling them "AI" is probably over-generous... 1: https://www.techradar.com/news/bot-traffic-reached-a-new-high-in-2020 https://www.techradar.com/news/bot-traffic-reached-a-new-hig...
xster 5y ago
On the flip side, is Twitter itself not "fake"? Specifically, Twitter is selective in the types of content it chooses to censor. And they're pretty open in stating that accounts "undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability" are not "real" accounts. Seems like they're just a belligerent party in the west vs south conflict.
known 5y ago
"If you don't read newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed" --Mark Twain (b. 1835) https://archive.is/76OMW https://archive.is/76OMW

485 points by FridayoLeary 5y ago

Title should mention Turkey

An easy way to never see Twitter trends is to open up the settings and change it from showing personalized or current location trends, to showing trends for a country that does not have many Twitter users. This can be interesting in it's own sake. Learn what's going on in Bhutan or Burkina Faso.

mrdoornbos 5y ago

I try to pretend to be shocked, but it just comes out as "well duh"

strict9 5y ago

Since the information-dense redesign I've been using the minimal twitter plugin (discovered on HN) which removes fluff like trending topics. Experience has been great and highly recommend: - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/min-twitter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/min-twitter/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimal-twitter/pobhoodpcipjmedfenaigbeloiidbflp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimal-twitter/po...

mdm_ 5y ago
Can anyone recommend an Android/iOS app that does the same thing?
- pcardoso 5y ago
  I use Tweetbot on iOS.

Ensorceled 5y ago

If I check twitter in the morning, almost any "trending in Canada" topic that is political in nature is full of "firstnamebunchofnumbers" type accounts pushing the trend. They are all very supportive of our right leaning political party...

throwaway894345 5y ago
Strange. I always get all far left-wing stuff, and it's not even high-quality left-wing argumentation but just the absolute sewer of left-wing rhetoric. I'm very curious whether Twitter's algorithm is designed (or exploited) to show us things that it thinks we'll agree with (I'm a moderate liberal, so maybe it thinks I'm a partisan and I'll just love extreme left-wing stuff?) or stuff it thinks we'll be angry about? Or maybe it shows everyone the same far-left drivel?
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  >I'm very curious whether Twitter's algorithm is designed (or exploited) to show us things that it thinks we'll agree with (I'm a moderate liberal, so maybe it thinks I'm a partisan and I'll just love extreme left-wing stuff?) or stuff it thinks we'll be angry about? Or maybe it shows everyone the same far-left drivel? My theory: There is no coherent theory of operations like "Show the leftists to the leftists"; rather, it's doing constant A/B-test-style optimization between drivel varieties to see which one best inspires the cohort matching your doomscrolling patterns to continue to scroll.
  - Fellshard 5y ago
    It's anecdotal, but my trending pane is usually filled with mostly hard left trends, the occasional right wing trend, with the left trends being frequently selected to be sloppily editorialized by Twitter staff. I'm certainly on the right wing. More likely, it'll show you what's likely to make you engage, and there's no quicker way than to show you things which make you angry.
    - 5y ago

telchar 5y ago

I suspect this rather obvious flaw (from the article: not taking deletion into account when calculating trends) is due to it being easier to create a data pipeline that is purely additive at the scale they're operating at. Not having to consider deletions and updates simplifies development. This is too much of a vulnerability not to fix, though. It amazes me Twitter somehow manages to remain relevant with how broken it is in various ways.

zozbot234 5y ago
Deletion is easy if you're using ML based on feature vectors to extract "trends", because you can just add one of the opposite vector and the system is still purely "additive" at scale.
- a1sabau 5y ago
  Not if you're using probabilistic data structures like Count-Min[0]. You don't care about the exact count. You just want an estimate with a certain probability. Such structures only support addition, not removal. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch

blocked_again 5y ago

> We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. Between June 2015 and September 2019, we uncovered 108,000 bot accounts involved, the biggest bot dataset reported in a single paper. Our research is the first to uncover the manipulation of Twitter Trends at this scale. It can be some complex crypto puzzle that can be only solved by real users. We need to find a solution. I think democracies should introduce regulations that ensures that. * Bots cannot be created in large scale like this in social media platforms. Basically you have to be a real perso to create an account and there should be a limit on nunber of accounts one can create. Who is a real human? Twitter verified users can be one solution. Airbnb verified hosts seems to be another example. Anything is better than the current model. * Complex Ml models for generating the time lines should be replaced with simple algorithms like sort on basis of upvotes/time. Also the users should be able to easily access what is the algorithm behind the news feed.

AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
Ironically, asking for an ID for internet access is usually a telltale of not-so-democratic regime.
- Zigurd 5y ago
  Asking for a method of payment, and using methods of payment as a factor in enforcing bans, is an entirely private sector market-based mitigation of bots and badly behaved humans. Subscriptions are the future of worthwhile social media.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  Democracy and privacy are separate.
  - thechao 5y ago
    That only works in a well-functioning non-authoritarian state. I would suspect that every major Western democracy began in secret.
  - 5y ago

shrikant 5y ago

The original source is much better written and explains the core of what the paper actually uncovers: > [...] found a vulnerability in the algorithm that decides Twitter Trending Topics: it does not take deletions into account. This allows attackers to push the trends they want to the top of Twitter Trends despite deleting their tweets which contain the candidate trend shortly afterwards. Source: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/mass-scale-manipulation-of-twitter-trends-discov-2/ https://actu.epfl.ch/news/mass-scale-manipulation-of-twitter... Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07783.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07783.pdf

FridayoLeary 5y ago
Thanks. I just tried to change the URL to the one you suggested but i don't seem to be able to. Oh well. I guess i will just have to appeal to dang and sit back and let him sort it out.
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  or just submit the real one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27369315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27369315
Natsu 5y ago
Thanks for that. When I read the headline, I wondered if they were talking about Twitter's own manipulation of what trends or not.

ratww 5y ago

The only reason the automated Twitter Trends exist is to keep Twitter itself relevant, as it generates lazy pseudo-journalism articles such as "such and such was a trend". It's merely a tool that reacts to spam. Even when it's for a good cause it's just people manipulating an algorithm by saying absolutely nothing of value. Nothing of value to the humanity will be lost if they nuke this feature tomorrow.

mrweasel 5y ago
What I didn't understand was why this is even a problem, but they explain it in the article: > Broader media outlets report on trends, which are used as a proxy for what people are talking about Fair enough that Twitter doesn't want to be manipulated, I can understand that. Still it should not have a real world impact in my mind. Except that you're right in that "lazy pseudo-journalism" picks this stuff up and report on it, as if it was real news, without doing any fact finding of their own. It's a silly "what's trending" box, it's not actually a source you can use, because we don't know what the criteria Twitter uses to generate it. News media is moving to fast, and there's a desire to provide 24/7 news coverage, on a budget, so they resort to using whatever silly online gadget is available. Journalist should be WAY more critical about using Twitter and tweets as actual sources of news.
- starkd 5y ago
  Exactly. You have to wonder if this is what's responsible for cancel culture. Issues being called out that have only become an issue recently. It could explain how it's out of control it has become.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    I certainly think that's one reason. There are way to many stupid posts from Twitter, and Facebook, which are blown completely out of proportion and taken to level of conflict which wouldn't have happened previously. Sure there are absolutely some issues from social media that are worth highlighting in the news media, but all shit storms and online controversies aren't created equally. To often one or two posts are taken out of context, especially on Twitter where people try to cram their message into as few words as possible. That is then elevated to "This person is horrible" or "All people in this group are bad". The reality is that some people are just assholes, and while annoying and terrible, it's simply not worth writing about.

TonyTrapp 5y ago

Twitter is so much more peaceful if you set the location to use for trends to some country whose language you cannot read, or a region for which there simply exist no twitter trends (e.g. Åland Islands).

chrisco255 5y ago
Better yet install the Calm Twitter chromium extension and you'll never have to look at them again.
strangattractor 5y ago
Better yet do like me and don't have an account. My days are bliss. No trolls. No discussion/arguments about NOTHING. The definition of Peace is not having a Twitter or Facebook account.
- swiley 5y ago
  I knew a guy in college who was always angry about something. One day he gave up twitter and it turns out he was really intelligent and pleasant to be around.
- can16358p 5y ago
  This. I've quit using Twitter (and almost every other social media platform afterwards except Instagram which is basically my portfolio) and my level of frustration went down by an order of magnitude since then.
pelorat 5y ago
I just follow a bunch of people, I never click on trends or hashtags.

ziml77 5y ago

I suggest to anyone using twitter to either add rules to your ad blocker to remove the trends section or use an extension like Tweak New Twitter to remove it. It makes Twitter so much nicer to visit when you don't have those stupid trends shoved in your face making it seem like you should constantly be anxious or depressed about the state of the world.

RpFLCL 5y ago
Two years ago I changed my trends location to a county whose language I can't read (Japan). The trends box still exists, but I can't read it and can't care about any so-called trends.
- j6 5y ago
  I personally have the trends country set to one that doesn't usually have a very big (or any) presence on Twitter (e.g. British Indian Ocean Territory, Falkland Islands, ...). This makes the "Trends for you" part of the page empty.
  - Jiocus 5y ago
    Thanks for this hack. I found it hilarious (and useful).
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    I wonder if it'll start filling up if enough users do this
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      No, that's not how it works. The only way it would start getting content is if users actually started tweeting from those remote locations, which seems unlikely.
      - MauranKilom 5y ago
        ...or someone figures out that appearing to tweet from that location suddenly puts their tweets in front of a lot of eyeballs.

hirundo 5y ago

I quit Twitter in disgust last year, frequently triggered by the trending topics. Now when I sometimes follow a Twitter link, I avert my eyes from trending topic, like I also often do with commercials and ads. I know that such manipulation works on me to some extent, so I make some effort not to consume it. I hope some day sophisticated AI "ad blockers" can be easily extended to such non-advertising manipulative content. But I suspect that their adversary AIs will keep up with that arms race.

detaro 5y ago
You can change the location you see trending topics for. Set it to some tiny country and there' wont be anything trending. (or use an adblocker to remove the trending box, but the other thing syncs with the account to everywhere)
- amatecha 5y ago
  Yeah, I used to set mine to Japan, so I literally can't even read the trending topics. Works pretty well, except a bunch of English-text trends still get in there. :\

cout 5y ago

Is there any way to see your own deleted posts, or otherwise know if your account is being used in this way?

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

"Relevance" is not the signal that people think it is. It can be trusted when it is coming from people we've already vetted, but at a mass scale, it is easily weaponized to manufacture and manipulate public opinion. An algorithm that decides relevance can be gamed, as we see here. These features won't go away, however. Twitter and the media at large rely on the veneer of relevance to ensure they retain an audience.

______- 5y ago

Twitter cracked down on bots recently[0]. Last time I checked you need to verify your account with a phone number. However this is a trivial hurdle to overcome since dedicated bot farmers would use Twilio or some similar service to register Twitter accounts en-masse [0] https://www.dawn.com/news/1391001/twitter-sets-crackdown-on-automated-bot-accounts https://www.dawn.com/news/1391001/twitter-sets-crackdown-on-... [0] https://www.cultofmac.com/530455/twitter-crackdown-on-bots/ https://www.cultofmac.com/530455/twitter-crackdown-on-bots/

lotsofpulp 5y ago
How many phone numbers are there? How many phone numbers does twilio have access to? Seems like it would at least put a cap on the number of problematic accounts.
- ______- 5y ago
  That becomes problematic, since often numbers are 'recycled' by the likes of Twilio, and the number has some history or previous use, probably used before to register social media accounts. The trick is to find a brand new fresh number that hasn't been used ;)
elliekelly 5y ago
Twitter keeps saying they’ve “cracked down” on bots and yet the bots are still just as much of a problem as they’ve ever been. I’d been on twitter for over decade — back when you tweeted via SMS — and deleted my account in the run up to the US election because it was impossible to discern real content from the content designed to churn the outrage machine. Whoever uses the term “crack down” to describe Twitter’s periodic deletion of only the most egregious bot accounts deserves an auto-reply meme bot featuring Inigo Montoya.

davesque 5y ago

I think this must be happening on every social media platform in some way. The fact is that people seem to love being afraid and anxious. Bad news spreads like wild fire. All that X bad actor has to do is just figure out any worrying take on a topic of choice and then just sit back and watch the mayhem. I also think the most likely originators of this content are state actors. If they can pay a group of people to drop intellectual bombs in the public spheres of their enemies all day, I'm sure they see that as an overall (and very cheap) win. Honestly, it's more a question of why they wouldn't do this than why would they.

wmeredith 5y ago
> The fact is that people seem to love being afraid and anxious They don't love it, but it does compel them to engage with the content. Engagement = growth. Social media is basically a cancer. There are good pockets here and there if curated carefully, but overall it seems like it's a drain on society.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  web 2.0 makes one miss pubs
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- slivanes 5y ago
  I read someones comment that put this into perspective, here was the basic take: In repressive regimes, social media is a boon for the general public to organize and resist. In established democracies, social media has slow insidious negative effect on the general population, typically propaganda supplied by the disillusioned and said repressive regimes.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Social media triggered the Arab Spring which destroyed nations.
  - 5y ago

mschuster91 5y ago

Can someone please inspect the German Twitter trends, too? It's an almost daily occurence that far-right vocabulary ends up trending, and the utter garbage that gets spewed there is toxic and dangerous.

villgax 5y ago

Both the major political parties are to be investigated in India as well for seemingly banal hastags which individual IT cells in the hinterland want to propagate. You'd be hard pressed to find someone from the city or towns being so pressed to tweet about a political party & nothing else on Twitter of all places & content

blueblisters 5y ago
Twitter India is a cesspool. Political parties spend so much energy asking tweeting against each other, you would think Indians have a large presence on Twitter and would care about such things. But the reality is that Twitter has the smallest footprint in India among the major social networks. I wouldn't be surprised if a double digit percentage of Twitter India users were affiliated to one of the political parties.

ohmanjjj 5y ago

Twitter manipulates the trending topics themselves to fit whatever agenda is needed

jb775 5y ago

Twitter allows bot networks like these to operate as long as they're pushing Leftist propaganda (i.e. Twitter's political stance), or suppressing non-Leftist discussion. That's why they didn't respond to the researchers...because they selectively look the other way. It's amazing how fast millions of "legitimate" Twitter accounts of Korean teenager K-Pop fanatics all of a sudden become violently interested in suppressing non-Leftist-narrative hashtags. Edit: Here's a url for a recent blatant use of a bot network (with Twitter obviously looking the other way). The same or similar networks were used throughout the election cycle, especially when there was any mention of election fraud. https://www.insider.com/aoc-lied-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-k-pop-animal-stans-hashtag-2021-2 https://www.insider.com/aoc-lied-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-k-...

souldeux 5y ago
[citation needed]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ibrahimsow1 5y ago
Bot networks aren't really needed, they can just be real people. Young people disproportionately use social media, young women especially so. The intersection of those two groups happen to be left leaning [0], and more socially connected which I'm using as a proxy for political awareness [1]. Plus in my general experience people are just really vocal about identity politics. It wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption that the primary demographic of a website are not a fan of content that challenges their world-views. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/... [1]: https://psyarxiv.com/72w58/download/?format=pdf#:~:text=The%20participants%20were%20K%2DPop,%3D%2018%20%2D%2055%20years https://psyarxiv.com/72w58/download/?format=pdf#:~:text=The%...).
blincoln 5y ago
The research paper this article is based on covers a pretty broad spectrum of political (pro- and anti-Erdoğan), and non-political topics in Turkey. I always assume that probably 95% or more of accounts on Twitter are fake, based on my experience. Back in 2017 or so, when QAnon was being heavily pushed by botnets, there was what looked (to me) like a leftist analogue of it[1] being pushed in the same manner, and it just didn't catch on the way QAnon did. I figured it was probably being promoted by the same people, to inflame tensions in the US. Basically, I think if you go looking for evidence that Twitter is helping people you disagree with, you'll find it, regardless of your political beliefs. [1] No, not BLM/Antifa. It was an actual conspiracy theory with a token figurehead like "Q". I don't want to include too many details here because it seems like it died off, and I'd rather not help revive it.

sumo89 5y ago

It alway has been manipulated https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/the-social-chain https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/the-social-chain

motohagiography 5y ago

Interesting, but is it news? This is what ad-tech does, and what every political party hires advertising and PR agencies and influencers to do. I thought the deal was those trends were talking points for people for whom spending on this is worth it, and that's what made it interesting. It's "what some people will pay to have you to believe," it never occurred to me that social media trends were organic functions of real aggregated human desire. I think (at least young people) have a sense of what is real or not. Do people not already know that their passive understanding of the world is very tightly managed and orchestrated by people whose job is to be good at it? > The researchers contacted Twitter twice, with the company acknowledging in both cases the vulnerability in its Trends algorithm. In the first case Twitter declined to make any changes, in the second case the company did not respond to the researchers' follow-up emails. Treating this issue as a technical "vulnerability," mainly reinforces the idea that Twitter's narrative orchestration is somehow more real.

lawwantsin17 5y ago
The main stream media and most people definitely act and talk like it's real. So, maybe just not news to people who hate twitter, but someone should really hire a bot to trend this paper over there.
websites420 5y ago
People outside of tech have no concept of what the algorithm does and in general take what’s on their feed at face value. How could they not? The news very often runs stories about tweets and Twitter trends as if they represent the real organic sentiments of the citizens.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lepervier 5y ago
It's news. Advertising and using PR agencies might not be news but using hacked accounts as bots to push whatever slogan you want to on top of Twitter (like hate speech "Syrians Get Out" as stated in the article) easily should be news.

spinny 5y ago

Interesting ... big tech oligarchs manipulating social media is ok, somebody hacking the trends algo is bad ...

dominotw 5y ago

I never went back to twitter after their team put #uncletim on trending topic. Added twitter to my /etc/hosts block. Not missing anything.

allochthon 5y ago

I've noticed that online influence campaigns are starting to really kick into gear. Any comments in news articles posted to the r/worldnews subreddit about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang that do not defend the status quo there will be downvoted to -15 or more, and if you take note of commenters, it soon becomes clear that there's a lot of brigading. Many of the comments conflate criticism of the situation with racism or a desire to start a war.

iratic0 5y ago
I have noticed that too, which is why I don't trust what's trending on reddit anymore. I have noticed influencers on youtube and elsewhere, who never usually talk about political issues, making out of place comments about various issues. I can't tell if the uncomfortable look on their faces or the awkward way they deliver the message that gives away the fact that they've been paid to take a side.

kordlessagain 5y ago

Twitter is a cesspool. Thanks Jack.

rvz 5y ago

What a surprise! /s Almost everything you see on Twitter is manipulated. Bad actors, the users and even Twitter themselves do it. If it's not them on a Sunday it's the bots doing it. The daily drama on Twitter starts with a user spreading some unverified accusations of another user which that goes viral and someone's life is destroyed. Originating from Twitter and ends up in the newspapers and on some rare cases on TV (When it is slow news day). Don't worry though, at least we know that Twitter is so heavily manipulated, even its users would STILL pay for the lies that spread so easily on there.

sandworm101 5y ago

What is the "fake" rate for twitter normally? I don't know whether the fact that half in one area are fake means anything. If someone tole me that 90+% of all twitter traffic came from bots or other "fake" sources I would believe it. >> "We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. How am I meant to read that? By 'trend' do they mean trending posts? Does 'fake' mean created from scratch by bots? Are these AI bots generating their own content? If a russian operative is feeding stories to a bot, does that material qualify as fake? What if a bot picks up a non-fake but incorrect story and spreads it to a billion people? Is is fakery if a Microsoft bot finds and retweets a customer review of Windows 10? What about fake stories that are promoted by real people?

cblconfederate 5y ago

Twitter and other media are abused by authoritarian governments, and this abuse is dangerous. Unfortunately despite the manipulation on FB , twitter etc, because the problem does not affect 'rich and important' countries it gets little attention. All of their algorithms are being manipulated by sneaky actors, and their own systems lag behind them significantly to matter. Social media should switch back to how it started, i.e. a replacement for RSS in chronological mode.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
It doesn't affect rich and important countries? Have you watched politics over the last several years?
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Not in that way https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-azerbaijan-ilham-aliyev https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-...

iratic0 5y ago

I imagine these are being manipulated significantly in many places.

williesleg 5y ago

All everywhere not just turkey.

m00dy 5y ago

looks like Twitter's tech is not enough to catch these bots

JSavageOne 5y ago

My Twitter trending section in Ukraine last week consisted entirely of porn related hashtags (pic: https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1397429733126721543/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1397429733126721543...)

munk-a 5y ago

Since social media is sorta supplanting traditional news I wonder if that's level of inaccuracy is actually that surprising. How many potential articles come across an editors desk - or as pushed out by a company's PR department - that are just BS? Social media has democratized editorializing so these topics get put in front of a lot more faces - in the process we are dodging some of the worst components of censorship, but it is a tradeoff and I think which approach is better (centralized or decentralized editorialship) is still an open question.

OminousWeapons 5y ago
> Since social media is sorta supplanting traditional news I wonder if that's level of inaccuracy is actually that surprising. How many potential articles come across an editors desk - or as pushed out by a company's PR department - that are just BS? You make a fair point; a lot of news is either poorly researched or biased. That being said, at least MOST news outlets are trying to get to the truth. They may be lazy, uninformed, or incapable of viewing the world objectively instead of through a specific ideological lens, but they are trying. Truth seeking is not the goal for many people posting to social media. You call the content "editorialized" but it's more like fiction and deliberate disinformation.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I don't disagree with any of that but I wanted to clarify my point - it's that social media is our way of (mostly) removing the editorial filter from the process - so we're essentially reading all the news - as opposed to "all the news that's fit to print". I'd imagine that twitter's trending section doesn't look all too different from an editor's desk with random unsolicited story submissions along with press releases from companies all flooding in with a good portion of them being just entirely false and a larger portion being exceedingly misleading. Instead of relying on a professional to filter those down and potentially remove some stories we'd really like to see (i.e. some stories critical of the War in Iraq that countered the yellow cake and WMD narrative pushed by the administration) we now have to sort through all the crap - aided somewhat by the decisions of others who have expressed their opinion on whether a thing is a real story or not by engaging with it. Part of my interest in the story also comes from the fact that 50% is probably far higher a proportion of "true news" than what would actually reach the desk on the editor. And, I'd like to reiterate that I'm still very much on the fence about which system is better.

amatecha 5y ago

Centralized communication platforms with engagement-incentivization built into the experience are an excellent tool for mass manipulation and propaganda.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

strangattractor 5y ago

Only half. They gotta be miscounting. %75 minimum.

RGamma 5y ago

Popular and trending have long lost their meaning in my mind. I automatically assume there's some commercial/political/whatever actor manufacturing these things. Organic popularity is basically dead at this point.

narrator 5y ago

This jives with "The Dead Internet Theory" which says that most of the internet is AI bots.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
I thought it was generally accepted that 40-50% of all traffic was bots[1]? Though since most of them are mindlessly scanning for WP vulns calling them "AI" is probably over-generous... 1: https://www.techradar.com/news/bot-traffic-reached-a-new-high-in-2020 https://www.techradar.com/news/bot-traffic-reached-a-new-hig...

xster 5y ago

On the flip side, is Twitter itself not "fake"? Specifically, Twitter is selective in the types of content it chooses to censor. And they're pretty open in stating that accounts "undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability" are not "real" accounts. Seems like they're just a belligerent party in the west vs south conflict.

known 5y ago

"If you don't read newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed" --Mark Twain (b. 1835) https://archive.is/76OMW https://archive.is/76OMW