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I think the "bot" versus "real" account differentiation is quite irrelevant in practice. For example, every now and then I check what some elected Canadian pol

I think the "bot" versus "real" account differentiation is quite irrelevant in practice. For example, every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently. Even though these are Twitter accounts that would probably be considered "real", and they often have a check mark, pretty much everything they tweet is, in effect, following a script. Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of, or they're tweets delivering pointless congratulations for an irrelevant "accomplishment", or they're tweets regurgitating some very specific party talking point that a bunch of other representatives from the same party are simultaneously regurgitating. These accounts are seen as "real" accounts corresponding to "real" people, yet what they produce is consistently some of the most artificial content I've ever seen.

dwaltrip 4y ago
That's an unusual example. Most posts on twitter are not formulaic recognition of holidays by politicians. In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  There’s many variations of this. News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference. I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care. In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
  - throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
    > In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse. What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
    - H8crilA 4y ago
      I'm posting this only to further decrease the upvote/comment ratio.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      I kinda wish engagement had less effect on content visibility and having a swarm of bots "attacking" a comment wasn't decisive. Talking about HN comments, some have extremely bad but feel good takes that will garner a huge first wave of upvotes, to then get beaten down as it got more attention, to perhaps get some more sympathy votes as timezones shift. The interesting part to me is the comment can go all the cycles because it stays there, is still visible even when flagged to death and can be rescued. That's also how I read reddit, with downvoted to death comments and posts in the timeline. People who care enough should probably do the same for Twitter as well. Disclaimer: I am not politicaly engaged so have less exposure to the nastier battles where thousands of people shout a each other. I still don't understand why anyone would go there in their free time. PS: I also don't think there is any one size fits all strategy for a service used by millions of people all over the globe. To me the "divide and conquer" approach reddit takes is a better fit, and expecting Twitter, or any social media to have a good mechanism to deal with social swarms is a pipe dream...dealing with abuse when you can have 5000 ton gorillas throwing their weight in the balance would be a tall order for any private company.
      - sroussey 4y ago
        I think TikTok nailed this. They will promote posts to their home page that do not have lots of engagement but but are high quality for the site.
- nradov 4y ago
  Why do you want to know if a machine or human wrote a tweet? What difference does it make, and where do you draw the line? If I use Grammarly to correct my language in a tweet then did a machine write it? How about if I generate text using GPT-3 and then manually edit it? Please define your terms.
  - epgui 4y ago
    One is more labour intensive and more expensive. The other can be done at scale for cheap. The negative impacts most likely don’t scale linearly, so volume is an outsized concern.
- weisk 4y ago
  [not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing] And what difference does it make, wether some content was written by an algorithm or it was written by professional staff, when the objective might be the same: to misguide / influence you to act in someone else's favour
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    A brief conversation is usually all it takes me to notice even the more elaborate bots. I would share my methods, but I'd prefer they not figure it out too quickly. Suffice it to say bots just don't behave the way a human would.
krisoft 4y ago
Most politicians are boring. So what? Just don’t follow them. The problem with bots is not that they are “artificial sounding”. They can and are used for scaming people, they can and are used for manipulating the public discourse.
- strangattractor 4y ago
  The problems with bots is they jack up advertisers cost and don't buy things and cannot be influenced. Follow the money.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    There are bots on every platform and advertisers are well aware of them. They simply factor them in as a cost of doing business.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    some will also increase engagement though
- mmcwilliams 4y ago
  I think the problem is less that many official accounts are "boring" and more that they are run by staff and don't have the feel of direct communication that makes Twitter interesting to begin with.
- nradov 4y ago
  Politician social media accounts are mostly run be teams of staffers who are literally paid to manipulate the public discourse. They are no different from bots.
  - weisk 4y ago
    We've arrived to a very satisfying conclusion here: politics has always (mostly) been the biggest of all scams. Wether its a team of script writing artists, or the state of the art machine generated content, its the same worthless junk.
andrepd 4y ago
> Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of Lol. Yes that's a mandatory part of being a politician. I hardly think that when most people think of the problems of twitter/social media they are thinking of Trudeau tweeting "congrats Mattea Roach on winning 23 consecutive games of Jeopardy" or whatever. Btw, actually I just scrolled through his twitter and his tweets are almost entirely practical https://nitter.it/justintrudeau https://nitter.it/justintrudeau. Anyway, the problem here is bot farms creating tens of thousands of sockpuppets posing as "average citizens" to push some sort of narrative and try to manufacture consent, which is qualitatively different from what you are describing.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
One of the secrets of getting positive value out of Twitter is to block all or most politician accounts you come across. Mute the names of the popular politician for extra measure.
- CraftingLinks 4y ago
  Exactly this. It takes some work to set up, but the reward is plenty. At least the bare minimum tools are available to enable this. In addition, what other platform even lets you block the advertisers, giving you at least some deciding power over the adds you get.
humanistbot 4y ago
A politician is an organization, as much as any corporation or brand is. The politician is the owner, spokesperson, and mascot, but the more senior they are the more they have a huge staff that is responsible for what would otherwise be called CEO, CFO, Chief Council, PR, HR, IT, R&D. And remember that corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people. When Taco Bell hires a marketing firm to pay a TV station to air a commercial X times, is that a bot? Or even stranger, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut can get into a twitter troll war with each other, even though they're both wholly-owned subsidiaries of Yum! Brands, Inc. and the whole thing could have been written by a marketing firm and scheduled it through TweetDeck. Is that a bot? Edit: Or every newspaper is basically auto-posting their recent articles, some even just doing it like an RSS feed, where it tweets a link and headline whenever an article is posted. Is that a bot?
- pferde 4y ago
  Absolutely, yes to all of that. (Off topic, but I love the juxtaposition of your handle and the topic being discussed. :) )
- heresie-dabord 4y ago
  > corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people. It has been said elsewhere that corporations are a sort of amoral artificial intelligence. The trouble is that they are more powerful than a human citizen, while having none of the community or political interests of a human citizen.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    The bigger one is the lack of any consequences whatsoever. For instance, do something that leads to the death of another person, even unintentionally, and you may find yourself behind bars for some significant period of time. Do it as a corporation, even on a large scale, and you'll generally suffer little more than a fine that is generally no more than a few days of yearly revenue, and of course zero consequences for the executives who in many cases are directly culpable - frequently making decisions consciously prioritizing short-term profit over all, including safety. Boeing being the contemporary poster child.
tobyjsullivan 4y ago
> every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently there's yer problem, eh?
jrumbut 4y ago
In recent years we've seen what it's like when politicians stop being boring on Twitter. There are worse things in life than polite artifice. Maintaining it is, itself, an achievement.

dwaltrip 4y ago

That's an unusual example. Most posts on twitter are not formulaic recognition of holidays by politicians. In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.

makeitdouble 4y ago
There’s many variations of this. News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference. I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care. In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
- throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
  > In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse. What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
  - H8crilA 4y ago
    I'm posting this only to further decrease the upvote/comment ratio.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I kinda wish engagement had less effect on content visibility and having a swarm of bots "attacking" a comment wasn't decisive. Talking about HN comments, some have extremely bad but feel good takes that will garner a huge first wave of upvotes, to then get beaten down as it got more attention, to perhaps get some more sympathy votes as timezones shift. The interesting part to me is the comment can go all the cycles because it stays there, is still visible even when flagged to death and can be rescued. That's also how I read reddit, with downvoted to death comments and posts in the timeline. People who care enough should probably do the same for Twitter as well. Disclaimer: I am not politicaly engaged so have less exposure to the nastier battles where thousands of people shout a each other. I still don't understand why anyone would go there in their free time. PS: I also don't think there is any one size fits all strategy for a service used by millions of people all over the globe. To me the "divide and conquer" approach reddit takes is a better fit, and expecting Twitter, or any social media to have a good mechanism to deal with social swarms is a pipe dream...dealing with abuse when you can have 5000 ton gorillas throwing their weight in the balance would be a tall order for any private company.
    - sroussey 4y ago
      I think TikTok nailed this. They will promote posts to their home page that do not have lots of engagement but but are high quality for the site.
nradov 4y ago
Why do you want to know if a machine or human wrote a tweet? What difference does it make, and where do you draw the line? If I use Grammarly to correct my language in a tweet then did a machine write it? How about if I generate text using GPT-3 and then manually edit it? Please define your terms.
- epgui 4y ago
  One is more labour intensive and more expensive. The other can be done at scale for cheap. The negative impacts most likely don’t scale linearly, so volume is an outsized concern.
weisk 4y ago
[not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing] And what difference does it make, wether some content was written by an algorithm or it was written by professional staff, when the objective might be the same: to misguide / influence you to act in someone else's favour
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  A brief conversation is usually all it takes me to notice even the more elaborate bots. I would share my methods, but I'd prefer they not figure it out too quickly. Suffice it to say bots just don't behave the way a human would.

krisoft 4y ago

Most politicians are boring. So what? Just don’t follow them. The problem with bots is not that they are “artificial sounding”. They can and are used for scaming people, they can and are used for manipulating the public discourse.

strangattractor 4y ago
The problems with bots is they jack up advertisers cost and don't buy things and cannot be influenced. Follow the money.
- threeseed 4y ago
  There are bots on every platform and advertisers are well aware of them. They simply factor them in as a cost of doing business.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  some will also increase engagement though
mmcwilliams 4y ago
I think the problem is less that many official accounts are "boring" and more that they are run by staff and don't have the feel of direct communication that makes Twitter interesting to begin with.
nradov 4y ago
Politician social media accounts are mostly run be teams of staffers who are literally paid to manipulate the public discourse. They are no different from bots.
- weisk 4y ago
  We've arrived to a very satisfying conclusion here: politics has always (mostly) been the biggest of all scams. Wether its a team of script writing artists, or the state of the art machine generated content, its the same worthless junk.

andrepd 4y ago

> Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of Lol. Yes that's a mandatory part of being a politician. I hardly think that when most people think of the problems of twitter/social media they are thinking of Trudeau tweeting "congrats Mattea Roach on winning 23 consecutive games of Jeopardy" or whatever. Btw, actually I just scrolled through his twitter and his tweets are almost entirely practical https://nitter.it/justintrudeau https://nitter.it/justintrudeau. Anyway, the problem here is bot farms creating tens of thousands of sockpuppets posing as "average citizens" to push some sort of narrative and try to manufacture consent, which is qualitatively different from what you are describing.

abdullahkhalids 4y ago

One of the secrets of getting positive value out of Twitter is to block all or most politician accounts you come across. Mute the names of the popular politician for extra measure.

CraftingLinks 4y ago
Exactly this. It takes some work to set up, but the reward is plenty. At least the bare minimum tools are available to enable this. In addition, what other platform even lets you block the advertisers, giving you at least some deciding power over the adds you get.

humanistbot 4y ago

A politician is an organization, as much as any corporation or brand is. The politician is the owner, spokesperson, and mascot, but the more senior they are the more they have a huge staff that is responsible for what would otherwise be called CEO, CFO, Chief Council, PR, HR, IT, R&D. And remember that corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people. When Taco Bell hires a marketing firm to pay a TV station to air a commercial X times, is that a bot? Or even stranger, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut can get into a twitter troll war with each other, even though they're both wholly-owned subsidiaries of Yum! Brands, Inc. and the whole thing could have been written by a marketing firm and scheduled it through TweetDeck. Is that a bot? Edit: Or every newspaper is basically auto-posting their recent articles, some even just doing it like an RSS feed, where it tweets a link and headline whenever an article is posted. Is that a bot?

pferde 4y ago
Absolutely, yes to all of that. (Off topic, but I love the juxtaposition of your handle and the topic being discussed. :) )
heresie-dabord 4y ago
> corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people. It has been said elsewhere that corporations are a sort of amoral artificial intelligence. The trouble is that they are more powerful than a human citizen, while having none of the community or political interests of a human citizen.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  The bigger one is the lack of any consequences whatsoever. For instance, do something that leads to the death of another person, even unintentionally, and you may find yourself behind bars for some significant period of time. Do it as a corporation, even on a large scale, and you'll generally suffer little more than a fine that is generally no more than a few days of yearly revenue, and of course zero consequences for the executives who in many cases are directly culpable - frequently making decisions consciously prioritizing short-term profit over all, including safety. Boeing being the contemporary poster child.

tobyjsullivan 4y ago

> every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently there's yer problem, eh?

jrumbut 4y ago

In recent years we've seen what it's like when politicians stop being boring on Twitter. There are worse things in life than polite artifice. Maintaining it is, itself, an achievement.