3 ms·
if the bots were on your side, would you really object to them, and when they were, what did you do to stop them? if the bot content were for drop shipping hus
by motohagiography 2y ago
if the bots were on your side, would you really object to them, and when they were, what did you do to stop them?
if the bot content were for drop shipping hustles and pharmaceuticals it would just be the kind of SEO engagement farming that the entire ad-tech business runs on. I don't see the difference, as though ad tracker networks were a better class of opportunist.
if the bots were on the other side of the issues it would be called grassroots organizing and getting the message out. what's different on X today is that mockery isn't suppressed and the wishful narratives of officialdom are not privileged. I don't know what people clutch at these days, whether it's lanyards or ring gags, but the word sanctimonious appears to have fallen woefully out of use.
The content is not divisive, the division is long since past. as McLuhan said, we are in a "guerilla information war with no distinction between military and civilian participants." Even though X does have a bot problem, it's better managed than it was, and the real solution is to improve the X api and treat it as a protocol to enable clients to filter better at the edges. The concern in the article seems like it's just forming a case for "disinformation controls," to reassert their official narratives.
- unethical_ban 2y ago>if the bots were on your side, would you really object to them Yes. Is this surprising? I don't like massive numbers of bad-faith lying bots pretending to be real people. If bots are pretending to be people, they are bad.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago> and when they were, what did you do to stop them? When were they?
- ethagknight 2y agoThis is a well-reasoned comment and shouldn't be flagged. Twitter pre-Elon was 100% a 'bots on the other side' era, though I maintain bots are equal opportunity egregious today. "We chose to focus on X because it’s a platform where there are a lot of political conversations." Yea convenient.... not reddit? Facebook? Or any of the others. What they are trying to do is obvious.
- anigbrowl 2y agoTwitter pre-Elon was 100% a 'bots on the other side' era. No it wasn't. I have many studies about Twitter botnets (which have dried up since Musk put streaming/search API behind a staggeringly expensive paywall, probably by design) and there just weren't any left-oriented bot farms of note.
- ethagknight 2y agoWe must have been using different Twitters? Can you link to these studies?
- anigbrowl 2y ago[flagged]
- ethagknight 2y agoI just skimmed through the first 5 results on Google. All say that political bots on twitter are significant problems. You say "there just weren't any left-oriented bot farms of note," I do not see that conclusion, and it really doesnt logically follow, unless you subscribe to "only the bad bots are bots" mentality.
- saagarjha 2y agoNobody liked the bots from pre-Elon Musk either. There were just fewer of them.
- anigbrowl 2y agoit would just be the kind of SEO engagement farming that the entire ad-tech business runs on Yes, and this is a Bad Thing