Bunch of threads on twitter from expert researchers on how this study is bogus. The main point is that there is zero paper or even a blog post that can be referenced to see if this statistic is true.
Almost all "research" I've seen in this domain is politicized bullshit. I assume even if it isn't, the ones that get air do not get it because of merit; but because it suits someone's political axe-grinding.
My takeaway is that "news" from commercial outlets like MarketWatch (the publisher here) largely is not fact-based. Compare to reports in February about waves of anti-Asia discrimination, correspondeding to a major and ill-advised Democratic information initiative.
I don't know if Twitter has bots or how they tilt. What I do know is post-coronavirus commerical "news" outlets have lost my trust, as has much of the political establishment, red or blue.
One thing I considered with bots like these is that it doesn't matter which side of an issue they are pushing, the end result is just to further divide the 2 sides. So I think that's the goal.
The issue they push with the bots may not be, and likely isn't, their actual position on the issue.
It's pretty crazy that a few researchers can identify this in a short month or two of work.
It's even crazier that Twitter can't do that research themselves and remove those bots.
Obviously the big debate is censorship. It feels like there could be a tech solution to this, where conversations aren't shaped by volume, but I guess that is what Twitter is anyway.
How many real people is it OK to squash when squashing bots? How confident can you be when banning accounts?
It’s a lot harder problem then it might sound on the surface. And realize if you find bots 100%, they will change for round 2 and the game starts over.
Lots of those studies pick a few criteria to label something "probably bot", with little verification that the mechanism is actually accurate. Which still makes for big headlines, but doesn't tell you if it would be effective and fair treatment if actually used to ban users.
(I'll add the link if I can find it, but a recent example pretty much boiled down to "actually, these accounts giving many repeated identical replies have totally normal timelines otherwise. And it turns out, many identical replies in short time shows someone knows about copy-and-paste, not that they're a bot")
I’ve worked at a global-scale platform for user-generated content doing anti-abuse and anti-spam tooling. In my experience those researchers do exist in-house and there was an imperative to remove abusive and spammy accounts.
The difference in my perception is that the presence of the bots and bad actors on Twitter that come to the attention of reporting like this increases engagement and views, and thus top line revenue.
This isn’t saying “bots count as views, so we get more ad dollars”. It’s that bots and bad actors promote topics and conversations that bring more real users to the platform, and increase the session duration for new and existing users.
I would imagine that Twitter sees spam bots and purveyors of illegal content as unwelcome and probably has an engineering team that dispatches those accounts quickly. But whether deliberately or unconsciously, they probably don’t apply the same rigor to accounts that break the TOS but manage to drive the top line up.
I’d love to hear from an engineer from Twitter who works in this space.
I see these "x number of bots found on Twitter" reports every so often. What are the most common methods used to determine if an account is a bot or not?
Twitter's primary metric is "Monthly Active Users" which is driven by a) tweeting and b) engagement (aka activity) on those tweets.
It's not in their best interest to wipe out the bots at any large scale. Sure, the occasional cleanup or purge as a token effort or to get the most egregious stuff but remove them all? Nope.
Not surprising at all. From my experience with Twitter, I would say 45-50% of all tweets come from bots.
I feel like there are 4 types of Twitter users: 1) bots, 2) influencers that heavily use automation to the point where they are almost the same as a bot, 3) famous/popular that are somewhat to mostly real, but have someone else managing their account for them, 4) real people who think 1-3 are all real that gained their followers organically.
Probably most users fall on categories 1 and 4 above, although most of Twitter traffic is probably generated by tweets of 2 and 3.
Twitter is so easy to game. I once wrote a script that auto-likes everything on the page and ran into no throttling by Twitter - It simply let me rack up an enormous like count nearing 1 million random likes. I got lots of followers as a result because they thought my like was a genuine human interaction and I 'cared' for them in some way. Far from it.
I think Twitter needs to add an option which marks an account as a bot or non-human account so that people can gauge instantly what the account's real motivations are. Most actual bots will ignore that setting and pretend to be human however, so the responsibility is on Twitter to weed out automated accounts that are obvious attempts to game the platform.
The idea that half of Twitter's accounts are bots is not new: https://gizmodo.com/how-many-social-media-users-are-real-peo... (written in 2018)
Another older article puts the issue into a larger social context and makes some sloppy estimates:
"Since Twitter’s yearly revenue is between 2 and 3 billion dollars — that is as much as 50 dollars per potential customer on average and that doesn’t count what people are spending to purchase fake followers and bots. If only English speaking customers are targeted by Twitter ads, that means 150 dollars is being spent to grab the attention of each customer."
https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/08/05/the-fake-econ...
Personally, I watched a guy who was promoting his crappy, plagiarized book go from 25k followers to 90k followers over the course of a week. They were all clearly fake since he rarely got more than a single like on everything he Tweeted.
Bots can be used for many purposes. Many (maybe most?) are constructive. There have been a number of DIY tutorial for beginners about how to use Arduino or Raspberry Pi to let plants tweet when they need water. Here’s one (old) example: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/houseplants-wil/.
I'd like to know what "bot" means. Is it the new word for internet troll or do these Twitter accounts really have better AI than Microsoft or Facebook.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data."
I often wonder when we are going to see more left wing reactions to this sort of behavior. Seems the right, based on my limited information, seems to be more aggressive about these disinformation campaigns.
Also it stands to reason that this particular misinformation campaign is being sponsored by a foreign state. I think that this would be an effective weapon to use against the United States. Sort of like biological warfare by proxy of disinformation.
I have quite a “purple feed” on FB. I have to say that I see a lot of utterly ridiculous content created ostensibly supporting both blue and red causes/topics.
If you primarily think one side is crafting ridiculously bad content and it’s therefore a misinformation campaign from a foreign state, I think it’s wise to consider how much of that is personal bias and if you’re perhaps “giving a pass” to stupid content that at least aligns with your views.
“Well, they meant well, so it’s probably just a right-minded American who made a simple off-by-factor-of-a-million arithmetic error and no one spent 50ms doing a basic sanity check. No one’s perfect.”
Or “Look, maybe I think Obama did an Ok job, but I saw all that content about he wasn’t born here, and there has to be something to it if so many people are talking about it. The government hides things; the truth is out there, ya know? Oh, and Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
Why would the use of bots to push a narrative be restricted to “the right”? Isn’t it more likely that 50% of all posts on divisive topics are made by bots? The talking points for both sides seem imminently scriptable.
Perhaps we should all step back and evaluate whether our internal thought processes are being shaped by bad actors via an appeal to our innate tribalism? Notice how easily you fall into the script: 1) it’s the other team only 2) my team should do something to fight back 3) maybe it’s sponsored by a foreign state.
Adding an option to verify accounts by linking them to social security numbers or corporate registrations and marking them accordingly (without necessarily making the details visible publicly) could at least direct trust to accounts that can be traced to real entities.
The problem is that the US has no proper/well working ID systems. A large amount of social security numbers had been compromised through leakage and are hardly reliably usable for identification anymore.
Through there are many countries in which this can be indeed done reliably sand effectively.
Through the main problem is still this networks are global, so bots will just register with origins where IDs can be easily faked/stolen etc.
But it might still help a lot for local discussions if you would make it clearly visible if a person had a no or a non local real person identification.
If such a system is done cleverly it could also help law enforcement while it still upholds privacy. Through it's will always be someway prone to abuse by police and similar if not done perfectly transparent but you can be sure that certain lobbies will invest insane amounts of money into making it non transparent over time. Which makes such systems potential dangerous to have.
> Adding an option to verify accounts by linking them to social security
Not sure if you’re joking, but this would be a completely awful privacy situation. Why would you ever give your social security number to a social media site?
I'm cynical enough to think you can almost certainly say the same of the reverse, too. :(
That said, with reading this, if you are thinking of skipping it. Does somewhat confirm that most of the not posts are on conspiracy theories. Which, I guess is not that surprising. Even if the conspiracies are.
[+] [-] zaxm|5 years ago|reply
* https://twitter.com/ngleicher/status/1264614994475315200
* https://twitter.com/benimmo/status/1265329734705197056
* https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1264643202293751808
* https://twitter.com/3r1nG/status/1264567090742206464
(edit to add more examples of counterclaims to this "research")
[+] [-] koheripbal|5 years ago|reply
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-dis...
I imagine they're going to publish the research, but it doesn't look like they have yet.
...though some of their methods are described.
[+] [-] scottlocklin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flavius29663|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drtillberg|5 years ago|reply
I don't know if Twitter has bots or how they tilt. What I do know is post-coronavirus commerical "news" outlets have lost my trust, as has much of the political establishment, red or blue.
[+] [-] lukeholder|5 years ago|reply
The issue they push with the bots may not be, and likely isn't, their actual position on the issue.
[+] [-] guerrilla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xrd|5 years ago|reply
It's even crazier that Twitter can't do that research themselves and remove those bots.
Obviously the big debate is censorship. It feels like there could be a tech solution to this, where conversations aren't shaped by volume, but I guess that is what Twitter is anyway.
[+] [-] herval|5 years ago|reply
a) it was a non profit and
b) people didn’t cry “censorship!” every time they do anything to curb abuse and
c) it would be ok to deactivate a % of real users by accident (these researchers can’t tell who’s a bot vs who’s an actual user _for sure_)
It’s not an easy problem.
[+] [-] brianwawok|5 years ago|reply
It’s a lot harder problem then it might sound on the surface. And realize if you find bots 100%, they will change for round 2 and the game starts over.
[+] [-] detaro|5 years ago|reply
(I'll add the link if I can find it, but a recent example pretty much boiled down to "actually, these accounts giving many repeated identical replies have totally normal timelines otherwise. And it turns out, many identical replies in short time shows someone knows about copy-and-paste, not that they're a bot")
[+] [-] beager|5 years ago|reply
The difference in my perception is that the presence of the bots and bad actors on Twitter that come to the attention of reporting like this increases engagement and views, and thus top line revenue.
This isn’t saying “bots count as views, so we get more ad dollars”. It’s that bots and bad actors promote topics and conversations that bring more real users to the platform, and increase the session duration for new and existing users.
I would imagine that Twitter sees spam bots and purveyors of illegal content as unwelcome and probably has an engineering team that dispatches those accounts quickly. But whether deliberately or unconsciously, they probably don’t apply the same rigor to accounts that break the TOS but manage to drive the top line up.
I’d love to hear from an engineer from Twitter who works in this space.
[+] [-] zaxm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 12xo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caseysoftware|5 years ago|reply
It's not in their best interest to wipe out the bots at any large scale. Sure, the occasional cleanup or purge as a token effort or to get the most egregious stuff but remove them all? Nope.
[+] [-] ta1234567890|5 years ago|reply
I feel like there are 4 types of Twitter users: 1) bots, 2) influencers that heavily use automation to the point where they are almost the same as a bot, 3) famous/popular that are somewhat to mostly real, but have someone else managing their account for them, 4) real people who think 1-3 are all real that gained their followers organically.
Probably most users fall on categories 1 and 4 above, although most of Twitter traffic is probably generated by tweets of 2 and 3.
[+] [-] ta6382936526|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] diablo1|5 years ago|reply
I think Twitter needs to add an option which marks an account as a bot or non-human account so that people can gauge instantly what the account's real motivations are. Most actual bots will ignore that setting and pretend to be human however, so the responsibility is on Twitter to weed out automated accounts that are obvious attempts to game the platform.
[+] [-] nixtaken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixtaken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Drybones|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
* 50% of positive posts for candidate x are bots!
* Most people who support X online are bots!
Easy and cheap, and the message carries well.
[+] [-] dorkwood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esmi|5 years ago|reply
That condition is the key. Are you sure they can do that? It’s very tough to do with certainty.
[+] [-] mch82|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] missedthecue|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonmenc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixtaken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 12xo|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simulacra|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] striking|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] runawaybottle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simulacra|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedays|5 years ago|reply
I often wonder when we are going to see more left wing reactions to this sort of behavior. Seems the right, based on my limited information, seems to be more aggressive about these disinformation campaigns.
Also it stands to reason that this particular misinformation campaign is being sponsored by a foreign state. I think that this would be an effective weapon to use against the United States. Sort of like biological warfare by proxy of disinformation.
[+] [-] sokoloff|5 years ago|reply
If you primarily think one side is crafting ridiculously bad content and it’s therefore a misinformation campaign from a foreign state, I think it’s wise to consider how much of that is personal bias and if you’re perhaps “giving a pass” to stupid content that at least aligns with your views.
“Well, they meant well, so it’s probably just a right-minded American who made a simple off-by-factor-of-a-million arithmetic error and no one spent 50ms doing a basic sanity check. No one’s perfect.”
Or “Look, maybe I think Obama did an Ok job, but I saw all that content about he wasn’t born here, and there has to be something to it if so many people are talking about it. The government hides things; the truth is out there, ya know? Oh, and Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
[+] [-] abduhl|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps we should all step back and evaluate whether our internal thought processes are being shaped by bad actors via an appeal to our innate tribalism? Notice how easily you fall into the script: 1) it’s the other team only 2) my team should do something to fight back 3) maybe it’s sponsored by a foreign state.
[+] [-] domsom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dathinab|5 years ago|reply
Through there are many countries in which this can be indeed done reliably sand effectively.
Through the main problem is still this networks are global, so bots will just register with origins where IDs can be easily faked/stolen etc.
But it might still help a lot for local discussions if you would make it clearly visible if a person had a no or a non local real person identification.
If such a system is done cleverly it could also help law enforcement while it still upholds privacy. Through it's will always be someway prone to abuse by police and similar if not done perfectly transparent but you can be sure that certain lobbies will invest insane amounts of money into making it non transparent over time. Which makes such systems potential dangerous to have.
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
Not sure if you’re joking, but this would be a completely awful privacy situation. Why would you ever give your social security number to a social media site?
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|5 years ago|reply
That said, with reading this, if you are thinking of skipping it. Does somewhat confirm that most of the not posts are on conspiracy theories. Which, I guess is not that surprising. Even if the conspiracies are.