[HN Gopher] The Rise and Fall of 'Social Bot' Research (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
The Rise and Fall of 'Social Bot' Research (2021)
Author : mike_hearn
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-01-23 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (papers.ssrn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (papers.ssrn.com)
| pphysch wrote:
| The entire "online manipulation" research field is deeply
| compromised and unserious. Because there are _enormous_ political
| ramifications to it. You can 't just come out with a rigorous &
| factual study of the "Russiagate" hoax or Julian Assange
| defamation campaign. That would be career suicide if it ended up
| anywhere but a right-wing or Russian blog.
|
| One of the most glaring flaws of the research is the lack of
| effort put into verifying attribution. Some suspicious accounts
| are pushing barely-literate propaganda in support of Country A?
| Case closed: it's a propaganda campaign by the government of
| Country A. These "studies" virtually never test whether the
| suspicious behavior was orchestrated by an _enemy_ of Country A
| to generate bad press, that is, propaganda _against_ Country A.
|
| This still happens even after the Vault 7 leaks revealed that the
| CIA actively plants "false flag" strings in Iranian, Russian,
| Chinese languages within CIA malware.
| staiz wrote:
| There is also the economic remifications, Facebook, Google,
| Amazon, MS, All depend upon quantity of Users and quantity of
| Users time. If there is no distinction between bots and real
| users, then bots directly increase thier revenue.
| pphysch wrote:
| There is a threshold where platform manipulation can destroy
| the value of the platform, so these companies definitely have
| an interest in keeping it in check.
| fourthark wrote:
| The word seems to be used as an insult equivalent to "NPC".
| Mizza wrote:
| I think it's funny how the language of the terminally online
| political partisans is mirrored. NPC/Russian Bot, SJW/Chud,
| Libtard/Nazi, Snowflake/Fragile, etc.. round and round it goes.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Those terms have differing reasons to why they are said, they
| aren't mirrored, just grouped.
|
| They don't really have to be partisan terms either. Some are
| dangerous and dehumanize the other side, not just insult.
| Some are just stupid. Some are rude but accurate.
|
| -
|
| NPC = Person who isn't thinking for themselves, follows the
| group mindlessly.
|
| Russian Bot = Term used to dehumanize and attribute real
| dissent to a disinformation campaign.
|
| SJW = Social justice warrior. An overly PC person who goes on
| social media cancel culture brigades in the name of fixing
| social injustices.
|
| Chud = Foreign or strange in Slavic or slang for
| "unattractive"? Seems to be an insult at appearance, not
| intelligence.
|
| Libtard = An insult at liberals/leftists directed at their
| mental capability.
|
| Nazi = Term used to dehumanize. Usually implies the person is
| racist.
|
| Snowflake = Someone who gets offended easily
|
| Fragile = Never heard this one used, usage is older than
| snowflake, maybe just used now because one side doesn't want
| to use the same term?
| sincerely wrote:
| Chud came from the movie
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.H.U.D. ), it entered the
| political "discourse" through the Chapo Trap House and
| became a generic word liberals use for conservatives/trump
| supporters
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Interesting, that is what urban dictionary listed
| (C.H.U.D. definition). From that movie reference it still
| just seems like a general insult to appearance / culture
| (basement dweller). Unless there is more to how Chapo
| Trap House used it..
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Russian Bot = Term used to dehumanize and attribute real
| dissent to a disinformation campaign._
|
| I'm gathering from the context of the thread that this is
| used to describe real people, not actual bot accounts.
| After all, who would tweet at a spam bot?
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I was talking about general usage of those terms, not
| specific to this thread.
| lamontcg wrote:
| NPC is used to dehumanize real dissent. I don't see how
| calling someone an NPC isn't calling them a bot since both
| are saying that your opinions were programmed by someone
| else and that your opinions can be dismissed.
|
| Your characterization says more about which side of the
| debate you're on.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| NPC could be used whichever side you are on, it's an
| insult for someone that follows group think.
|
| Russian bot can only be used on the side that uses Russia
| as a scapegoat for any political event.
|
| When you call someone an NPC you are saying they aren't
| thinking for themselves, but the issue isn't questioned
| as foreign propaganda, just as parroting talking points
| without thinking.
|
| When you call someone a Russian bot, you are saying
| either that's not a real person or what they are saying
| is Russian propaganda.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Those names are reflective of various ways you can dismiss
| people without considering their positions -- or more
| charitably, categorize and dismiss people espousing positions
| you've already considered and dismissed. It shows that those
| techniques are non-ideological, independent of the views of
| the person employing them. Use of language like that of a
| sign that if you're looking for substantive discussion of
| ideas, you're in the wrong place.
| iratewizard wrote:
| The CIA used white papers during the Cold War for psyops against
| adversarial nations. This is just one of many examples to show
| that feds are doing it domestically as well.
| WpgRubyDev wrote:
| No, quite the opposite. The contention that 'psyops' were being
| conducted using bots is now in serious doubt because of this
| new research.
|
| And far from such 'psyops' being the act of the American
| federal government, as you suggest, instead it was argued that
| the _Russian_ government was responsible.
|
| And the accusation that there was collusion with Russians to
| achieve this was the central driving force behind the
| impeachment and near-removal of the U.S. president.
|
| It's completely irrelevant and nonsensical to respond to this
| research by claiming it proves "the feds" are "doing psyops"
| domestically.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| I thought the accusations of collusion were more about one-
| sided release of information from hacked servers? and that
| the bots accusation (which is not disproved here afaict?) was
| more directed at the russians _in addition_ to the hacking
| accusations. but i always understood that the collusion was
| strictly about the hacking. correct me if i'm wrong.
| iratewizard wrote:
| So first the evil Russian government (with a gdp smaller than
| several US states) was behind the bots that were reported by
| white papers funded domestically. Now that the bots are seen
| as fake, it was the evil Russians again that faked the
| domestically funded reports! It's amazing how competent their
| government is at espionage and how grossly incompetent ours
| is on every level, according to you.
| r721 wrote:
| Twitter thread from author:
| https://twitter.com/FlorianGallwitz/status/13761673088345292...
| Wronnay wrote:
| The author also made a talk about it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwiss4qWuTs
|
| May be easier to consume than reading a scientific paper...
| m4lvin wrote:
| https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-2021-chaoszone-297-the-rise-and-f...
|
| and there you can watch it without tracking :-)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I remember the social bots on MySpace. It turns out that it is
| easy to pass the Turing Test when you have big boobs.
|
| Although... wasn't the original Turing test actually involving
| whether a man would beat a bot in pretending to be a woman?
|
| Edit: yes, it was about gender detection:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#:~:text=The%20Tu....
| lmeyerov wrote:
| This article is good to see but frustrating as similarly weak in
| execution due to cherry picking and selection bias. People will
| mistake the review's sloppiness and issues with some papers with
| "social bots don't exist and detection is mostly false
| positives". It's not like Facebook is spending ~$1B every year
| here to ban 0 accounts.
|
| - Manipulated accounts are prevalent: People sell manipulation
| tools, and once you identify the tool fingerprints, you can often
| precisely identify the accounts using them. For example, one of
| our team members published on NBC etc on a 'cyborg' (mixed use)
| tool used by Qanon + Trump's social media manager which,
| initially, self-identified itself via a unique user agent tag.
| Those resulted in high volume same-text tweets & fake retweets as
| they'd blast out via members who gave personal account access,
| which is huge for scales like MAGA Twitter. We have plenty of
| examples like this, and reading the paper gives a weasel-worded
| impression that it's not happening.
|
| - The paper explicitly did not check accounts Twitter already
| removed for likewise suspicion of being bots. Note that Twitter
| is generally slower and and more conservative here than a
| researcher -- they have money at stake that really likes bots --
| so when even Twitter agrees it's a TOS-abusing bot, that's
| generally a good sign. Ex: One of our collaborators was reporting
| on Saudi bots, and it took a year for Twitter to take them down,
| namely around the time Twitter acknowledged the Saudi gov had
| corrupted one of their employees and they announced a sweep.
| Skipping those accounts for validation is massive selection bias.
| Bans take awhile, and frustratingly generally too late as only
| well after the accounts are used for social media manipulation.
| But looking at old papers and ignoring the confirmed findings and
| then claiming no bots is bad science.
|
| - The original botometer paper was years ago, which matched a
| different era in Twitter use, Twitter moderation, and attacker
| patterns. The paper seems similar to evaluating a HFT algorithm
| from 10 years ago in the current stock market, and worse, with
| bad settings, and being surprised they lost money. You wouldnt
| invest your savings that way. Likewise, who would use a 5yr old
| virus scanner? It's a more boring paper when you phrase it this
| way.
|
| There are good takeaways from this paper for folks in the field,
| but they give a quite warped impression if you don't have the
| context for these
|
| Ex: Simple rules and features like in botometer can work, but
| settings matter (drift, ...)
|
| Ex: While we and others are moving to graph neural networks and
| other continuing advances in account/event analytics, we need to
| make sure these tools are accessible else social scientists will
| be stuck with old algorithms, crufty implementations, and
| confusing settings. (GNNs are super exciting in general, see our
| recent review on industry adoption of more modern graph
| intelligence w/ gradientflow .)
|
| Ex: Twitter's rules for accessing+ publishing data (... you
| largely can't) hurts infodemic research, forcing deep hacks in
| what should have been a simpler reproduction study like this
|
| Ex: Based on reception and writing of this paper, the term bots
| may be confusing the public on what social media manipulation
| looks like
|
| Edit: They could have used clean methodology and written a paper
| "The Botometer tool is increasingly unreliable; X% of papers
| relying on it are likely incorrect". I think they should, because
| it's probably higher than people suspect. But it's not what they
| did, so I wouldn't conclude much from it until they do. The
| (mis)reproduction study is not even close to the standards my
| (peer-reviewed) peers regularly work for.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Those resulted in high volume same-text tweets & fake
| retweets as they'd blast out via members who gave personal
| account access, which is huge for scales like MAGA Twitter.
|
| But these are not bots, this is "huge" maga twitter
| coordinating messaging that they all individually support.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| No, during the time windows of media manipulations, the
| accounts are controlled by the puppet master, not the account
| owner. The puppet master picks a message and a rolling
| schedule, and as in a malware botnet, the bot-side software
| is listening and autoresponds. You can google the tool's UI
| panels & instructions, it's pretty clear. Funny enough, you
| may have heard of Roger Stone, and with all of the Trump
| indictments and later QAnon scrutiny, some of the details we
| hadn't known at the time here came out.
|
| Hence why I wrote 'cyborg': The accounts are bots during the
| inauthentic media manipulation, and human otherwise. Twitter
| is uncomfortable banning these accounts despite TOS
| violations because they know these are sellable eyeballs.
| Pretty insidious!
|
| Where you are right is there is a slippery slope. A more
| benign and hypothetical version would be where the user is
| emailed text to retweet, and in support, people manually do
| something. That's a grassroots campaign by people. A dark
| variant happens in reality here: It's quite common for
| misinformers to build up their twitter feed into a misinfo
| parallel universe, and with Twitter happily auto-generating a
| wall full of misinfo recommendations for them, to then
| like/retweet each in support without actually reading any.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I will say a lot of the examples of false-positives for bots are
| true-negatives for BotSentinel. Many of the handles are
| deactivated or suspended, but here are some examples of some live
| ones.
|
| - @ErikLuczak https://botsentinel.com/profile/1077274080984862720
|
| - @pdmonna https://botsentinel.com/profile/1200756272942829575
|
| - @CTO1ChipNagel https://botsentinel.com/profile/1411284846
|
| Some accounts get a "disruptive" score
|
| - @cj_panirman https://botsentinel.com/profile/719017787805577220
|
| But another question is, do we care if these bots are _actually_
| automated, or whether they are individuals that behave like them.
| Manually tweeting a single, political hashtag 854 times in a six
| day period is a spammer, regardless if they are a human. The
| result is little different than if they had programmed a bot to
| do so. Another was spamming using an IFTT trigger.
|
| If I was on the twitter team, I'd have no problem if that person
| was flagged as a bot.
| [deleted]
| autopilot23 wrote:
| Great paper, thanks for your effort!
| taubek wrote:
| So there are no bots on Twitter?
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| This paper is deeply flawed.
|
| It basically says "we rebuked one study, therefore bots aren't
| real."
|
| Anyone who has been on Reddit for the last year has seen
| government run botnets posting spintext by the hundreds.
|
| Thinking there are no bots is wildly naive
| freebreakfast wrote:
| The paper does not claim "bots aren't real." It claims:
|
| > The field of "social bot" research is fundamentally flawed.
| While "social bot" researchers have received an enormous amount
| of public attention, their methods are highly dubious. And, as
| we and others have demonstrated, they fail miserably and
| consistently when evaluated under real-world conditions.
| Studies claiming to investigate the prevalence, properties, or
| influence of "social bots" have, in reality, just investigated
| false positives and artifacts of the flawed detection methods
| employed.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Their research shows nearly all social bot papers are wrong,
| not just a single paper. I've summarized the paper and talk
| here, along with some more of my own inputs (I used to work on
| bot fighting):
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
|
| One of the points I make is that social bot research is a
| prolific academic field. There are nearly 10,000 papers indexed
| on Google Scholar on the topic and that's not all of them. And
| basically all of them are fantasy. Clearly, bots do exist, but
| the techniques in these papers are not able to detect them
| reliably and the authors don't seem to care.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| "All" is an ambitious claim.
|
| They show some papers use a bad bot detector with even worse
| (and unrecommended) settings. Worse, they _explicitly skip
| bot accounts that twitter confirmed_ , and thus evaluate on
| _accounts twitter didn 't think were bots._ That kind of
| mistep means it fails to show botometer is a good/bad
| classifier (even if we all know that), so until they fix
| their methodology, their misreproduction is bad _scientific_
| grounds for disqualifying all papers using it.
|
| This is why we have peer review and you can pick what level
| of peer you trust your work at. I like the intent of the
| paper. But, I wouldn't have let it pass peer review as-is.
|
| I do agree social scientists deserve better tools because
| botometer is more of a crude footgun at this point. A lot has
| happened since botometer, and what may have made some sense
| 5-10 years ago doesn't make sense today. They could have
| written a scientific paper showing this and I'd 100% believe
| it, but instead they used garbage methodolgy and people are
| inferring whatever they want from that.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Could you point out where they say they ignored all the
| accounts shut down by Twitter? In most cases they can't
| even do this because the sets of accounts identified as
| 'bots' by othe researchers aren't made public. If you look
| at their methodology for proving Botometer is flawed, it's
| based on taking sets of verified human Twitter accounts
| like US Congress, none of which were shut down by Twitter,
| and then showing high FP rates (like 50%).
|
| Some of the papers mentioned in the analysis don't use
| Botornot, but are still deeply flawed. I should point out
| here that I'm cited by the authors (Hearn2017) and the
| paper I looked at doesn't use Botometer at all, nor did I
| exclude accounts identified by Twitter for the simple
| reason that no specific accounts were named by the
| researchers at all.
|
| _" I like the intent of the paper. But, I wouldn't have
| let it pass peer review as-is."_
|
| Then you will be pleased to know that despite peer
| reviewers signing off on thousands of incorrect, evidence-
| free papers talking about social bots, this paper - which
| provides ample proof of its claims - remains a preprint
| because none of the journals interested in social bots are
| willing to publish it. What a surprise.
|
| You sound like someone who is or was a social scientist? I
| think you should take it from a guy who did get paid to
| fight bots at Google: none of this research matters to or
| is read by the people whom it's supposed to benefit.
| Industry ignores it or occasionally points out that it's
| flawed, as Twitter did here:
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/bot-or-
| no...
|
| _" What about tools like Botometer & Bot Sentinel? ...
| This is an extremely limited approach ... These tools do
| not account for these common Twitter use cases, how far
| we've come, and how things have evolved. As a result nuance
| can be lost. The outcome? Binary judgments of who's a "bot
| or not", which have real potential to poison our public
| discourse -- particularly when they are pushed out through
| the media."_
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Section 3.2: the 10%+ of already-deleted accounts were
| removed. You can often actually infer why an account was
| removed, but they didn't.
|
| Furthermore, it is questionable to me to know 10% were
| already confirmed removed and then state the reproducers
| found all of the remaining were great.
|
| If I went deeper, I bet even more issues. As is, this is
| already enough to remove any word like "all" and various
| weasel word phrasings.
|
| ---
|
| Ad-hominem shouldn't matter. But:
|
| Professionally, I work with top gov agencies, top 3 cloud
| providers, F500s, startups, misinfo teams, etc. to
| provide pluggable core tech for their core graph
| intelligence pipelines (Graphistry), such as for sigint
| tasks. Botnets, hackers, account take overs, account
| abuse, etc - threat hunting, threat research, AML teams,
| digital human trafficking. As a #data4good effort, we
| help non-profits & researchers on the same things, such
| as via our free tier & some of our own hands-on help.
| We're just a tiny startup, but helped with massive
| international takedowns, flagged one of the Jan 6
| indictees back in December (that FB and friends didn't
| take down util after more pressure), regularly help folks
| publish breaking news, etc.
|
| Before, I was a well-cited academic (Test of Time award,
| Best of Years, etc), and work spanned early R&D for
| engineering tools your colleagues likely use today, and
| empirical & social research stuff for being able to judge
| work like this. Which I am, harshly. It looked like an
| easy win of a paper if they were dilligent, but ended up
| needlessly weasely.
|
| ---
|
| I agree with you on the tools weaknesses and big
| companies ignoring researchers, but for different reasons
| than researchers being wrong.
|
| The Twitter response is stock corporate CYA, so I don't
| take that at face value.
|
| Instead, consistent with what I've written, tools like
| botometer are largely irrelevant to modern practitioners
| here because reasons like:
|
| - Abuse teams at free social platforms are at battle with
| themselves and their surrounding organization & CEOs. The
| Facebook whistleblower accounts may particularly resonate
| well with you on why being factually right/wrong has
| little to do with what platforms do.
|
| - Botometer is dumb. Twitter went as far as acquiring the
| startup of one of the top GNN researchers: In contrast,
| botometer is from the dinosaur era.
|
| - Botometer is data-starved. Data is thin (no IPs, ...)
| and at low volumes (capped APIs). When you have APIs, app
| use logs, etc., same as someone self-hosting even the
| tiniest and most boring online store, you can do much
| better informed analyses. It's like a crypto app fraud &
| compliance team who only looks at blockchain data to
| decide good bad account/transaction, and ignores all the
| app log data & threat intel data.
| elcapitan wrote:
| I think this is specific about the notion of "social bots",
| i.e. bots that are mostly indistinguishable from humans or
| could even interact with them in a realistic way. Obviously
| everybody can write a spambot, or click a "post this on
| twitter" button (which is 90% of what people mistake for "bot
| posts", anyway).
| mypastself wrote:
| The paper found that the vast majority of Twitter users
| classified as bots were actually human. They analyzed data sets
| previously used by three organizations responsible for the
| majority of available papers on the topic.
|
| The authors of the paper concluded that, in the future, any
| claims that withhold the list of account handles classified as
| bots should be ignored because the claims can't be
| independently verified.
|
| So they didn't rebuke just one study but datasets underlying
| most studies on the topic, they analyzed Twitter rather than
| Reddit, and they did not claim that bots don't exist. If I am
| mistaken, someone who's analyzed the paper in more depth than I
| did can correct me.
| Jiro wrote:
| It's the most common bot detection software and was used by
| over a thousand research papers.
| [deleted]
| pthread_t wrote:
| What about "trolls farms" [0]?
|
| [0]
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
| r721 wrote:
| There's quite a few of undercover journalistic investigations
| too:
|
| >Meet The Activist Who Uncovered The Russian Troll Factory
| Named In The Mueller Probe
|
| >Internet activist Lyudmila Savchuk spent two months working
| undercover at the troll factory in 2015
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/15/594062887/...
| (2018)
|
| >Inside a Ukrainian Troll Farm
|
| >To understand how these powerful mechanisms function, OCCRP
| member center Slidstvo.Info sent a journalist undercover to
| work at a Ukrainian troll farm in advance of this summer's
| parliamentary elections.
|
| https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/inside-a-ukrainian-t...
| (2019)
|
| >Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
|
| >Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz spent six months running fake social
| media accounts at self-described 'ePR firm' in Wroclaw
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/01/undercover-rep...
| (2019)
| Raed667 wrote:
| In places where labor is cheap, it could be more effective to
| employ the equivalent of a "call center" to have a large number
| of people animate a whole bunch of Facebook and Twitter accounts.
|
| No bots or special tooling needed.
| caaqil wrote:
| Wow, this is really interesting. The research in this area, as
| the paper points out, is almost completely garbage. The Botometer
| case is especially shocking:
|
| > The total numbers of Twitter followers they analyzed during the
| election campaign was 838,026, which, assuming the claimed
| "social bot" prevalence of 9.9%, would correspond to roughly 83k
| "social bots". However, the paper does not provide any examples
| of "social bot" accounts and the raw data was not shared. When we
| contacted the authors, they were unable to provide us with a
| single credible example of a "social bot".
|
| > To summarize the result, not a single one of the accounts in
| the list was a "bot" in any meaningful sense of the word,
| certainly not a "social bot". In other words, every single "bot"
| in our sample was a false alarm; the precision (positive
| predictive value) of Botometer on this task is 0%. Assuming that
| Botometer does not perform worse than a random number generator
| (as we did not check the accounts rated as human), we can also
| conclude that the best guess for the number of "social bots"
| following the political parties in Germany is not 83,000, as
| claimed by Keller and Klinger, but zero.
| Hokusai wrote:
| It seems that is reasonable to claim that Botometer has not
| proven its effectiveness. But that does not prove the opposite.
|
| That a police department is unable to distinguish thieves from
| the rest of citizens do not prove that there are no thieves but
| just that the police department is incompetent.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Quite a few comments seem to be mixing up a couple of things
| here:
|
| 1. Do spam bots exist
|
| 2. Do "social bots" exist
|
| For (1) the answer is clearly yes and nobody is claiming
| otherwise. However, academics don't see to care about
| spambots. That's a problem industrial researchers care about
| but not the sort of people who publish 'scientific' papers.
|
| For (2) the correct answer is "there is no reliable evidence
| to support this". The term social bot is of course vague, but
| these papers are usually defining it as bots that attempt to
| subtly manipulate political discourse for ideological or
| geopolitical agendas. And when you go looking for evidence
| that such bots exist you end up finding what Gallwitz & Kreil
| found - that not just some of the research is bad, but all of
| it is. Where are the papers proving this problem actually
| exists in a clearly convincing way? There aren't any.
|
| There's a very deep problem here which crops up in lots of
| other contexts e.g. why is there so much research into
| psionic abilities, why is COVID modelling so unreliable, why
| do scientific journals keep publishing auto-generated
| gibberish as "peer reviewed science" [1], why do so many
| papers in so many fields fail to replicate incl. not just
| social sciences but fields of critical importance like
| oncology? The root causes are the same, namely, academic
| institutions don't actually seem to care if research uses the
| scientific method or not. So you get things like Botometer as
| featured in this article, where it's just some ML model
| that's producing noise. It classified half of US Congress as
| bots and nobody cared. Thousands of papers have been
| published on the back of this model and zero have been
| retracted. It's because in that world what matters is
| publishing things that are interesting, not publishing things
| that are true.
|
| [1] https://dailysceptic.org/2021/10/03/436-randomly-
| generated-p...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 2. Do "social bots" exist...
|
| > For (2) the correct answer is "there is no reliable
| evidence to support this". The term social bot is of course
| vague, but these papers are usually defining it as bots
| that attempt to subtly manipulate political discourse for
| ideological or geopolitical agendas. And when you go
| looking for evidence that such bots exist you end up
| finding what Gallwitz & Kreil found - that not just some of
| the research is bad, but all of it is. Where are the papers
| proving this problem actually exists in a clearly
| convincing way? There aren't any.
|
| I'm not sure clear on your distinction between "spam bots"
| and "social bots," but clearly there is reliable evidence
| to support "bots that attempt to subtly manipulate
| political discourse for ideological or geopolitical
| agendas," exist, like plans to procure accounts for them.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/c
| h...
|
| > Suppliers should provide accounts on overseas social
| platforms to purchasers at any time. The platforms include
| Twitter, Facebook, etc., and the supplier should provide
| about 300 accounts per month on each platform. Note:
| Content for this project is highly time sensitive.
| Suppliers should be able to supply accounts at any time.
|
| I'd imagine those accounts would be deployed and managed in
| an automated fashion. Is someone automating accounts to
| send out propaganda operating a "spam bot" or a "social
| bot"?
| yehNonsense0 wrote:
| aaron695 wrote:
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-23 23:01 UTC)