[HN Gopher] Almost half of local Twitter trending topics in Turk...
___________________________________________________________________
Almost half of local Twitter trending topics in Turkey are fake -
study
Author : FridayoLeary
Score : 417 points
Date : 2021-06-02 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (actu.epfl.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (actu.epfl.ch)
| iratic0 wrote:
| I imagine these are being manipulated significantly in many
| places.
| RGamma wrote:
| 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.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Twitter is a cesspool. Thanks Jack.
| m00dy wrote:
| looks like Twitter's tech is not enough to catch these bots
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| Twitter manipulates the trending topics themselves to fit
| whatever agenda is needed
| [deleted]
| jb775 wrote:
| 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-...
| souldeux wrote:
| [citation needed]
| [deleted]
| blincoln wrote:
| The research paper this article is based on covers a pretty
| broad spectrum of political (pro- and anti-Erdogan), 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| My "meta conspiracy theory" is that every conspiracy theory
| is generated by a Russian disinformation campaign.
|
| Actually, replace "Russian" with "Russian, Chinese, Iranian,
| domestic political (both sides), or corporate submarine", and
| it's probably not that far from the truth...
| smoldesu wrote:
| Why is it surprising that socially influenced teens are
| speaking out in support of liberal beliefs? Are you surprised
| when the sun rises every morning? This has happened for
| decades, and it's intrinsically tied to the cycle of how
| politics operate. I have a much easier time believing that a
| bunch of k-pop fanatics were peer-pressured into virtue
| signalling the Democratic party than believing that
| NoNameBunchOfNumbers (who made their account yesterday)
| supports the RNC.
| ibrahimsow1 wrote:
| 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/...
| [1]: https://psyarxiv.com/72w58/download/?format=pdf#:~:text=Th
| e%...).
| dominotw wrote:
| I never went back to twitter after their team put #uncletim on
| trending topic.
|
| Added twitter to my /etc/hosts block. Not missing anything.
| ziml77 wrote:
| 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.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| If you're using uBlock Origin, here are some of the filters
| that the author, gorhill, uses to strip out things like
| Trending Now.
|
| https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1375805467893624840
| [deleted]
| croon wrote:
| Is there any github repo or article or something with a
| collection of every ip list, filter snippet, configurations
| one could/should want in their browser extensions (UBO,
| umatrix, etc)? I want pretty stringent defaults, but I
| understand why site altering defaults aren't there in the
| base extension, but I'm also not motivated to google for
| every permutation of things one could want.
| justinzollars wrote:
| Is there a way to do this in Safari? I notice that this
| extension isn't available :/
| bombcar wrote:
| I use adguard for Safari but I'm not sure if the filters
| would be identical. It does have a "filter this element"
| option.
| Flott wrote:
| Thank you! I use an extension on Firefox for Windows but I
| had no solution for Android. I'll try this!
| gentleman11 wrote:
| If you want to stop using Facebook, go through your friends
| list and unfollow everyone. You can still see what they are up
| to by visiting their pages and can still message them but it
| breaks the addiction. You will also realize, as you visit
| peoples pages, that almost nobody you know posts about
| themselves, it's all news and memes and outrage
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I just unfollow the people that only post memes and outrage.
|
| My Facebook feed is mostly photos of my friends lives and I
| actually do enjoy seeing what they're up to. There's still
| memes and news articles but most of the really toxic stuff is
| gone.
| DixieDev wrote:
| Tweak New Twitter has made the Twitter experience so much nicer
| for me. I basically only follow 2 categories of people: People
| I know and artists. With retweets in a separate tab, I only see
| the content I signed up for when I clicked the follow button.
| It's fantastic.
| sudasana wrote:
| Tweetdeck also does not display trends unless you add a column
| for them.
| vmception wrote:
| > either add rules to your ad blocker to remove the trends
| section
|
| how?
| GordonS wrote:
| Huh, I use the official Twitter app on Android, and I don't
| even notice the "trends" - only time I even see the option to
| see them is if I use the search function.
| tommoor wrote:
| Minimal Twitter is a nice chrome extension:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimal-twitter/po...
| Tenoke wrote:
| Maybe it's because I'm in Germany but I use Twitter daily and
| have almost never more than glanced at the trends. It's as easy
| to ignore as seeing a front page of a newspaper on the street
| or a sponsored result in Google.
| schleiss wrote:
| Yes, I can only agree. I even wrote a blog post about it in
| 2018 [1] because the design was so annoying.
|
| [1] https://schleiss.io/fixing-twitter-design-with-extension
| riffraff wrote:
| Ive started using the "Calm Twitter" extension which hides both
| trends and social signals (number of likes and retweets, tho
| they're still visible on hover).
|
| Together with the time-based ordering, it has made twitter a
| much quieter experience.
| fredzel wrote:
| Also,in another area, 'People also ask/search for' section of
| Google. Worst offender when it comes to spoilers
| (movies/shows/books...). You just want to search something
| about one character and there it is, recommended search "who
| killed x", "why did x die" etc.
|
| Twitter trends can also be spoilerish in that way, although
| it's usually more ambigous.
| LegitShady wrote:
| You'll be even better off if you just stop using twitter.
| Twitter is highly manipulated by twitter, than by bots, then by
| brigading, etc etc.
|
| Ultimately it's a weird armpit of the internet elevated by the
| attention of journalists to something that simply does not
| deserve attention, and on whom attention actively damages your
| perception of reality.
| asicsp wrote:
| I use 200% zoom so that only tweets and navigation icons are
| visible.
| brightball wrote:
| In the same vein, I actively unfollow or hide all forms of news
| on Facebook. Including friends who just can't help but post
| political commentary all the time.
|
| Now my feed is funny, sports, friends and family.
| anm89 wrote:
| Did this too. Now my whole feed is mushroom foraging groups
| and I sort of like Facebook again.
| RpFLCL wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Graffur wrote:
| brilliant - thanks
| Jiocus wrote:
| Thanks for this hack. I found it hilarious (and useful).
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I wonder if it'll start filling up if enough users do this
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ...or someone figures out that appearing to tweet from
| that location suddenly puts their tweets in front of a
| lot of eyeballs.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| It's extremely easy to spoof your location online
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Great tip! Surprisingly awkward to do, but well worth it.
| pradn wrote:
| That's amazing. I picked the country Chad and I see no
| trends at all! With word and account blocking, I get good
| control over what I see, even in the official Twitter app.
| (A good number of the control methods, like disabling like
| numbers, are only available via browser extension.)
| yread wrote:
| Some years ago I did something similar with Facebook -
| switched my location to North Korea and voila all
| advertisements disappeared. Later, it stopped working and
| even later Airbnb (where I foolishly linked the account)
| asked me to accept new terms of use but I couldn't because
| they blocked anyone from North Korea from using Airbnb.
| hirundo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. :\
| williesleg wrote:
| All everywhere not just turkey.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| "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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Title should mention Turkey
| ______- wrote:
| 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-...
|
| [0] https://www.cultofmac.com/530455/twitter-crackdown-on-bots/
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| ______- wrote:
| 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 ;)
| thrower123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I try to pretend to be shocked, but it just comes out as "well
| duh"
| sumo89 wrote:
| It alway has been manipulated
| https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/the-social-chain
| strangattractor wrote:
| Only half. They gotta be miscounting. %75 minimum.
| strict9 wrote:
| 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://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimal-twitter/po...
| mdm_ wrote:
| Can anyone recommend an Android/iOS app that does the same
| thing?
| pcardoso wrote:
| I use Tweetbot on iOS.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Hmmm, I'm also a moderate liberal and my main Twitter stream
| reflects that, it's the trending topics that skew right for
| me.
|
| If you can call it "right", it's mostly invective, calls for
| resignation and skewed/unfounded criticisms of our Prime
| Minister.
|
| I mean, there is plenty of real stuff to criticize but the
| criticisms are mostly unfounded instead.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Are "moderate liberals" the ones who like Biden, don't mind
| the ongoing multiple wars in the ME, the incessant renewal
| of the Patriot Act, the treatment of Assange, etc?
|
| Not trynna antagonise, I'm genuiuely curious if all that
| bollocks is hiding behind the oh-so benign sounding
| "moderate liberal" label.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Those are establishment politics, not moderate
| liberalism. But yeah, moderate liberal politicians (like
| politicians of all ideological brands) often act out of
| line with their professed ideology in favor of
| establishment interests.
|
| I'm a moderate liberal only in the sense that my politics
| tend to be moderately liberal, but "moderate liberals"
| aren't my tribe (indeed, I don't have a political tribe--
| I'm very independent in that regard). This is all to say
| that I don't take offense to criticism of other moderate
| liberals because how a few moderate liberals behave
| doesn't define me.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I'm Canadian, so none of that crap applies to me ...
|
| The US democratic party platform is pretty "right" by
| Canadian standards.
| jayspell wrote:
| The Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma exposed the
| algorithms are designed to create "engagement" or clicks,
| that may look different for different people. If you happen
| to begin clicking links that make you angry you will have a
| feed that skews towards the kinds of posts that infuriate
| you (this is typical - rage really sucks most of us in). If
| you select links with puppies all day long, that is what
| you are going to get, puppies. I have personally seen this
| in my YouTube feed. If I select two or three videos on a
| particular topic all of the sudden my feed is filled with
| those videos. Personally it is really aggravating. I may
| want to watch one or two videos about JRR Tolkien, but I
| don't want to see a bunch of fan theory LOTR videos.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > skewed/unfounded criticisms of our Prime Minister
|
| reverse phycology? If all criticism you see is unfounded,
| you might erroneously start to believe all critics are
| biased - a kind of false-flag strategy.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| FirstnameBunchofNumbers is I think just how Twitter creates new
| accounts these days. They removed the ability or requirement to
| come up with an @name, and just create it based on the first
| name of the user.
|
| What you're seeing is an artifact of when a certain demographic
| started using Twitter.
| jdashg wrote:
| This is true, and while you can still change @name in the
| options, it is sort of buried in there.
| Kye wrote:
| It's just a return to numbernames. AOL did the same thing
| back in the 90s and 00s.
| can16358p wrote:
| I know another variant: alphanumeric usernames with exactly 8
| characters. All lower, no underscores or other characters,
| always 8 characters, spamming around. Very common with Turkish
| fake news. Probably all generated by a bot.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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.
| lepervier wrote:
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| 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.
| lancesells wrote:
| > "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.
| lawwantsin17 wrote:
| 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.
| genericuser314 wrote:
| "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/
| websites420 wrote:
| 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]
| telchar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It doesn't affect rich and important countries? Have you
| watched politics over the last several years?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Not in that way
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-.
| ..
| blocked_again wrote:
| > 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.
| drunkpotato wrote:
| While I think some careful regulation is required, I don't see
| how it would be legal to ban Twitter, nor possible for Twitter
| to entirely eliminate bots. But I think regulation could
| provide some carrots and sticks to encourage platforms like
| Twitter to be better at spotting and responding to these
| campaigns. Right now there's not enough incentive for them to
| invest much in combating bots, when their incentives are
| overwhelmingly to drive engagement (and advertising dollars).
| nathias wrote:
| OR simply not treat them as relevant in their decision making?
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Ironically, asking for an ID for internet access is usually a
| telltale of not-so-democratic regime.
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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.
| blocked_again wrote:
| Nobody said to ask for an ID. You can verify the user is real
| without tying the account to the ID.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is remarkably hard to do, and it's even harder if you
| want to prevent duplicate accounts.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Democracy and privacy are separate.
| thechao wrote:
| That only works in a well-functioning non-authoritarian
| state. I would suspect that every major Western democracy
| began in secret.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| No, they're not. Privacy is a human right.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| And democracy is not; if people want (say) anarchy
| instead, they may, but they mustn't take away others'
| privacy.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Under ECHR democracy _is_ elevated to a human right:
| https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-
| list/-/conventio...
|
| (well, the right to free elections by secret ballot,
| which is necessary but not sufficient)
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Sounds authoritarian to me. Hard pass.
| someguyorother wrote:
| You would need to use zero knowledge crypto on both sides so
| the state doesn't know what platforms you're subscribed to,
| and the platform doesn't know your real identity (or what
| other users you have, only that you're below the limit).
|
| It's hard but it shouldn't be impossible.
| blocked_again wrote:
| Well if a democracy elected by people decides to make this
| decision how is that authoritarian?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| In the same way that if a democracy elects an authoritarian
| then it stops being a democracy; by not respecting the
| rights of its citizens in the name of a political
| expedient.
| blocked_again wrote:
| I don't see how preventing malicious actors from using
| 1000s of bots to manipulate the public consensus as
| authoritarian.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The goal isn't, at least not publicly, but the methods
| are.
|
| But then again, authoritarians almost never come out and
| say "we intend to control every aspect of our citizens
| lives in order to maintain power"; rather they find some
| convenient fig leaf to hide behind.
|
| And such is the same with your proposal; you're
| advocating for greater government control over personal
| lives in the name of protecting citizens from other
| governments. Authoritarian shit, full stop.
| blocked_again wrote:
| You keep saying authoritarian a lot but you don't seen to
| have any logical arguments on why the proposed solution
| is bad. How on earth is preventing users from making
| 1000s of bots and influencing the public consensus bad
| for the democracy? I don't work for government. I don't
| want random people with 1000sof bots to manipulate the
| people around me and turn the democracy into a shitshow.
| I don't know how the tech companies will do it. But there
| should be only 1 account per person. 1 persons voice
| should not be worth 1000 times the voice of other people.
| That is not democracy.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I don't really care if two of the authors, bloggers or
| philosophers I follow happen to secretly be the same
| person, writing under pseudonyms. There being two
| identities doesn't make their voice count more.
|
| If manipulating an automated system in this way makes
| your voice "count more", there's a deeper problem.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You could simply force users to solve complex human
| CAPTCHAs if they want to post. Then sybil or bot attack
| becomes impossible, because there is a limit to how many
| trucks or bicycles any one user can recognize per day.
| Current methods of verifying ID would still exist, for
| users with accessibility issues that make it hard for
| them to solve CAPTCHAs.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > Then sybil or bot attack becomes impossible, because
| there is a limit to how many trucks or bicycles any one
| user can recognize per day.
|
| * But there isn't really a limit on how many trucks or
| bicycles my neural net can recognise per day.
|
| * Nor is there much of a limit on how many people I can
| pay pennies to solve CAPTCHAs for me.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > You keep saying authoritarian a lot but you don't seen
| to have any logical arguments on why the proposed
| solution is bad.
|
| I do, you've either misunderstood them or ignored them. I
| will explain it again thoroughly.
|
| I have no problem with your proposed goals, I take great
| issue with the means by which you would try and reach
| them. This is why "what's so wrong with <goal>?"
| arguments are utterly unpersuasive; you're completely
| ignoring the bits that I'm objecting to. It's not
| sufficient that you propose this to "save" democracy, as
| all policies good and bad come paired up with desirable
| (or at least popular) goals. If "we're doing this for a
| good reason" was sufficient, we'd be forced to conclude
| that there has never been a bad policy ever, which is of
| course ridiculous.
|
| Your proposal involves using the power of the state to
| control who can and cannot talk online, and to curtail
| where citizens can exercise their right of free speech.
| This is fundamentally an authoritarian proposal, as it is
| the state coming in to directly control the free speech
| right of its citizens. That this is done to "save
| democracy" has a "we were forced to destroy the village
| in order to save it" feeling to it.
|
| Aside from the blatant unconstitutionality of what you
| propose, there are two concrete issues; chilling effects
| and scope creep.
|
| Serious thinkers in this area, including the judiciary,
| talk about the "chilling effects" that governmental
| action can have on free speech. Even if the government
| doesn't explicitly ban X or Y speech, actions it takes
| can have the effect of dissuading people from saying
| certain things. It is not hard to see how a restriction
| on anonymous speech would be chilling, would people not
| be more hesitant to criticize the government if they
| could not do so anonymously? With the recent debates over
| "cancel culture", is it not obvious that some people
| would prefer to express controversial ideas under a
| pseudonym? The courts certainly agree that anonymity is
| required to avoid chilling effects as "anonymity may be
| motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by
| concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to
| preserve as much of one's privacy as possible" (McIntyre
| v. Ohio Elections Commission).
|
| Secondly, remember that any power you give the government
| will be eventually wielded by someone you do not like. It
| does not take an overactive imagination how the ability
| to ban websites "for the sake of democracy" would be
| eventually abused by a politician. History is littered of
| examples where emergency powers are eventually abused to
| erode the rule of law they were proposed to save; we
| should try and avoid such obvious mistakes moving
| forward.
|
| > 1 persons voice should not be worth 1000 times the
| voice of other people. That is not democracy.
|
| It seems to me that you might not actually understand
| what democracy actually is. Are we not a democracy
| because there are celebrities who have (far) more than
| 1,000x the reach that you or I have? Are we not a
| democracy because some people can go on TV to persuade,
| while others cannot?
|
| No. Democracy always was about equal access to the _vote_
| , not equal access to an audience.
| [deleted]
| willcipriano wrote:
| Democracy not only can be authoritarian[0], Aristotle
| thought that it was the inevitable outcome.
|
| "Republics decline into democracies and democracies
| degenerate into despotisms."
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
| gopiandcode wrote:
| It's honestly surprising how earnestly people can propose
| such draconian measures without even considering the
| consequences beyond a basic surface level analysis.
|
| Mass manipulation by foreign interests may be bad (Americans
| should bear in mind that for the majority of the world _they_
| are also a foreign influence), but this kind of knee-jerk
| reaction just paves the way for unprecedented censorship.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Likewise, I remain shocked how broad and bipartisan the
| support for expanding government power is. After the past
| four years I certainly have learned the lesson that I want
| to be more circumspect about what power I give the
| government over my life, but I seem to be in the minority
| here.
| cheschire wrote:
| How could you conceivably limit a service to only real users?
| What is a real user anyways?
|
| One account per person? What if that person has multiple
| personas they're curating?
|
| Require some form of ID verification? Well now you're talking
| about thousands of differing implementations.
|
| How does one prevent click farms that leverage real fingers
| tapping on phones?
|
| None of these allow a platform to scale like social networks
| are expected to.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| My Twitter trending section in Ukraine last week consisted
| entirely of porn related hashtags (pic:
| https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1397429733126721543...)
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| That makes sense. Upon reading your initial post again more
| carefully, I realized that I misinterpreted what you were
| trying to say. Thank you for clarifying.
| davesque wrote:
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| Every centralized "open to everyone" social media platform,
| yes. No "trends" on Mastodon though, so you don't have to worry
| about this BS on there, and blocking instances that allow
| bots/spam is easy. :)
| PhineasRex wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted. Decentralization is
| effective at limiting the effectiveness of misinformation.
| It's more difficult to impersonate a legitimate user in a
| smaller community.
| amatecha wrote:
| Whoever downvotes this (??): Am I wrong? You think Facebook,
| Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, VK, Tumblr, LinkedIn etc. are not
| having their algorithms/feeds exploited by bot-posted
| content? Even the most cursory search on the web reveals
| countless reports.
|
| Here are just a couple:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/19/social-
| me...
|
| https://internetofbusiness.com/propaganda-bots-social-
| media-...
|
| https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/06/24/how-fake-accounts-
| con...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2020/08/0.
| ..
| jaredwiener wrote:
| Simple solution -- dont get your news from places that let
| anyone post. https://blog.nillium.com/fighting-
| misinformation-online/
| davesque wrote:
| It's not so simple though. Because even trusted curators
| and media organizations still feel obligated on some level
| to maximize engagement. To compete with social media, they
| often end up promoting and peddling similarly terrifying,
| pessimistic, and "engaging" content.
| wmeredith wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| agumonkey wrote:
| web 2.0 makes one miss pubs
| TravHatesMe wrote:
| My concern is that it creates a false sense of reality. As
| people become more consumed by technology, the content of the
| technology becomes their reality. To be delusional is my
| greatest fear.
| hn8788 wrote:
| That's definitely true. I have a family member that was
| doing a running program as part of physical therapy. One
| day they said they were afraid to go running alone because
| they read about a girl getting kidnapped while she was out
| for a run. Turns out it happened over 1000 miles away, but
| the constant fearmongering and outrage bait has warped
| their perception to think that kind of stuff is happening
| everywhere all the time.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| Way ahead of you with religion.
| slivanes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Social media triggered the Arab Spring which destroyed
| nations.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| allochthon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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?
| amatecha wrote:
| Centralized communication platforms with engagement-
| incentivization built into the experience are an excellent tool
| for mass manipulation and propaganda.
| villgax wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| shrikant wrote:
| 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...
|
| Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07783.pdf
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| or just submit the real one.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27369315
| Natsu wrote:
| Thanks for that. When I read the headline, I wondered if they
| were talking about Twitter's own manipulation of what trends or
| not.
| cout wrote:
| Is there any way to see your own deleted posts, or otherwise know
| if your account is being used in this way?
| ratww wrote:
| 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.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Nothing of value would be lost if they nuked Twitter.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _it 's simply not worth writing about._
|
| We would need to convince _people_ in society that it 's
| not "worth writing about", which isn't going to happen.
| It's radical information freedom. People get access to
| information they would never have had access to
| previously. A drawback of that is that people become free
| to act on information they would never have had access to
| previously.
|
| The thing about Twitter, (about most social media
| actually), is that they are built on the reality that the
| vast majority of the population believe this stuff is,
| indeed, "worth writing about". That's how they make their
| money. Everyone writing about what everyone else wrote
| about. Business is good precisely because everyone thinks
| all this stuff is "worth writing about". And there is no
| sign anyone will meaningfully change.
|
| I don't see much hope actually. My best advice is try to
| maintain your privacy. (Well, I guess also "don't be an
| asshole" is pretty good advice as you intimate.)
| starkd wrote:
| But if this study is to be believed, it shows that many
| of these viral storms could very well be inauthentic or
| non-organic. In other words, they are not naturally
| occurring. They only rise to people's consciousness out
| of nefarious intent. Take out the algorithm and you might
| have more sensible trending topics.
| duxup wrote:
| I really wish the use of twitter as a method of gauging the hoi
| polloi's opinion would just end.
|
| It infects everything. I listen to podcasts and everything from
| coding podcasts to sports involves someone saying "i know
| people on twitter" or something like that before they give
| their thoughts.
|
| Bro I turned the podcast to hear from you, I don't care how it
| relates to twitter.
|
| A while back there was a 'fan revolt' among fans of a sports
| team I follow. So I hit twitter and it's as far as I can tell
| ... two dozen accounts and more than half had never tweeted
| more than 3 tweets...
| jancsika wrote:
| > It's merely a tool that reacts to spam.
|
| That sentence is only meaningful in the context of this
| article-- one in which research uncovered spammers who found a
| specific way to game Twitter's algorithm in order to exploit it
| to skew the results.
|
| Take away the research and the source for your sentence is
| either, "people who are saying..." or, "everybody on HN already
| knows..."
|
| The only difference I can see between that and generating "lazy
| pseudo-journalism" is remuneration.
| ratww wrote:
| I'll try to qualify my assertion:
|
| _> It 's merely a tool that reacts to what is mostly
| useless/placeholder/redundant/uninteresting/spam content_
|
| Happy?
|
| The current topic on my region is "#Hurentag" and the most
| relevant tweets are mostly "Happy #Hurentag", plus some spam
| from people linking to their Instagram.
|
| The second is #getimpf which is just people making selfies,
| others complaining about the selfies, and some people trying
| to prop-up their blogs.
|
| The third is "Switch Pro" which is one article by Verge and
| lots of people discussing why it's trending. Plus some blog
| and Instagram spam. There's also an OnlyFans spam showing up
| for me.
|
| Then there's "Nintendo" which is the same as the above.
|
| If you scroll down two pages on each topic you'll always see
| people posting unrelated things with the trending topic
| words/hashtags.
|
| Apart from one post from The Verge on the top of "Switch Pro"
| and "Nintendo" there is NOTHING of value on those tweets.
| ZERO discussion. Nobody talking about anything.
|
| The issue is not that it's useless. That's quite fun,
| actually. The issue is that it's not really a proper way of
| measuring what people are really talking about, because 99%
| of the content has NOTHING to do with the topic in question
| other than containing a word or hashtag.
|
| _> The only difference I can see between that and generating
| "lazy pseudo-journalism" is remuneration._
|
| Not really. I'm doing this while I wait for my tests to run,
| so I'm definitely getting paid, probably more than
| journalists.
| Epokhe wrote:
| I don't use trending topics in ordinary days. It helps me a
| lot when something important happened recently.
|
| An important political speech, a big earthquake, bombing...
| For this kind of situations, Twitter trending topics help a
| lot, because it provides you the most up-to-date source of
| news.
|
| When critical situations happen, your priority is getting
| the news live. Correctness, officialness are less
| important. I don't know a better way to get that kind of
| news other than trending topics.
| ratww wrote:
| But you don't need trending topics for that. It can be
| replaced with a simple search, which is way more
| effective. Having important news jumping into the
| trending topics tend to add noise to the search because
| of the popularity.
|
| I do searches all the time to check whenever
| Github/Jira/whatever is down, or when there's some
| helicopter over my neighborhood, or even in major events,
| but as soon as it enters trending topics it's a bit less
| effective.
| Epokhe wrote:
| I also thought about just using search. But trending
| topics let me know if something important is happening
| when I'm not aware. I still think it's valuable at times,
| while I also think it may be spammy and should be
| improved.
|
| I think its low signal to noise ratio makes you ignore
| it, which is bad. But I think instead of just removing
| it, spams should be prevented more effectively. Because I
| know "trending" concept is useful when it works. HN,
| Reddit and some other aggregator sites have homepages
| with trending content, of course with varying degree of
| success.
| rvz wrote:
| They need the outrage machine to continue running. Soon it will
| be a paid for service.
|
| Thank heavens I'm not the one moderating the tweets on that
| hell-stew of a website.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I have a friend who is moderating a pride-relevant subreddit
| this month. They plan to postpone most of their social
| engagements in anticipation of the drama so they can keep the
| discussion reasonable. Imagine how it must get that they need
| to commit so much time
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| 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. Aland
| Islands).
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Better yet install the Calm Twitter chromium extension and
| you'll never have to look at them again.
| strangattractor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I just follow a bunch of people, I never click on trends or
| hashtags.
| spinny wrote:
| Interesting ... big tech oligarchs manipulating social media is
| ok, somebody hacking the trends algo is bad ...
| rvz wrote:
| 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.
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