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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 de

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.
lancesells 5y ago
> "This manipulation has serious implications because we know that Twitter Trends get attention. Broader media outlets report on trends, which are used as a proxy for what people are talking about, but unfortunately, it's a manipulated proxy, distorting the public view of what conversations are actually going on," This is definitely news and I would hope that this makes members of the media writing stories about "people up in arms" a twitter trend. In the US only 1 in 5 people use twitter. When something trends I would love to see how many people that really is. 1 in 50? 1 in 500? 1 in 5000? I wish I had the time and skills to really show the statistics because I don't think it's all that viable until it's used in the media and / or politicians.
genericuser314 5y ago
"for each thing "everyone knows" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time." ~ https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
amatecha 5y ago
Yes, what's newsworthy is that an in-depth study has concluded some specific quantities about just how manipulated the trends are. Rather than "yeah, you can just tell that stuff is manipulated", they have concrete analysis to substantiate that.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  While I understand that, the conflict that makes this analysis important is based on reasserting a presumption that Twitter and its trends represent organic sentiment or desire. Make no mistake, the entire social media business model is predicated on disinformation (outrage for ad engagement), and the only real problem they are running up against is how to keep doing as much harm they are doing without being regulated out of existence. Good on them for publishing, but concrete analysis in this case is faint praise, and imo, it's going to look like astroturfed tobacco science in 10 years.

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.

lancesells 5y ago

> "This manipulation has serious implications because we know that Twitter Trends get attention. Broader media outlets report on trends, which are used as a proxy for what people are talking about, but unfortunately, it's a manipulated proxy, distorting the public view of what conversations are actually going on," This is definitely news and I would hope that this makes members of the media writing stories about "people up in arms" a twitter trend. In the US only 1 in 5 people use twitter. When something trends I would love to see how many people that really is. 1 in 50? 1 in 500? 1 in 5000? I wish I had the time and skills to really show the statistics because I don't think it's all that viable until it's used in the media and / or politicians.

genericuser314 5y ago

"for each thing "everyone knows" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time." ~ https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

amatecha 5y ago

Yes, what's newsworthy is that an in-depth study has concluded some specific quantities about just how manipulated the trends are. Rather than "yeah, you can just tell that stuff is manipulated", they have concrete analysis to substantiate that.

motohagiography 5y ago
While I understand that, the conflict that makes this analysis important is based on reasserting a presumption that Twitter and its trends represent organic sentiment or desire. Make no mistake, the entire social media business model is predicated on disinformation (outrage for ad engagement), and the only real problem they are running up against is how to keep doing as much harm they are doing without being regulated out of existence. Good on them for publishing, but concrete analysis in this case is faint praise, and imo, it's going to look like astroturfed tobacco science in 10 years.