
Update: Russian Interference in 2016 US Election, Bots, and Misinformation - coloneltcb
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Russian-Interference-in-2016--Election-Bots-and-Misinformation.html
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BinaryIdiot
> On average, our automated systems catch more than 3.2 million suspicious
> accounts globally per week — more than double the amount we detected this
> time last year.

Holy crap that is a lot of suspicious accounts!

It's impossible to find political conversation on twitter without multiple
accounts named like `HouseWifeXX937` (always something with weird characters
then numbers at the end) in the middle of the conversations and rarely reply
like you would expect a real person to do. Sometimes I wonder if I'm in a
conversation entirely with bots and it gets depressing; why would I even want
to bother using Twitter beyond talking with people I know are people?

Nowadays I mostly ignore any strangers.

~~~
Cleisthenes
> Nowadays I mostly ignore any strangers.

Isn't that one of the political goals? To undermine your trust of society
(i.e. strangers)?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
You're exactly right and yet I don't really know how to fix it. Perhaps if
Twitter opened up the verification process to anyone (free or paid) then I
could limit to only those who are verified so I know I'm most likely talking
with a real person.

Still, bots will get through the cracks but that has to be better than what is
there, today. Right?

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tlb
It seems to have taken about a year for basic information about last year's
misinformation campaign to come out. 3 years from now there'll be another
election and presumably another misinformation campaign. Should we be
optimistic that someone will be on top of it before the election?

~~~
dragonwriter
Since it's more widely accepted to be a significant part of the threat model,
there should be more attention and effort focussed on identifying and
revealing information about it.

OTOH, there will be misinformation directed to confuse the public about that,
too, and that may be challenging to sort out.

~~~
save_ferris
> OTOH, there will be misinformation directed to confuse the public about
> that, too, and that may be challenging to sort out.

This is what scares me. We saw in the last few days that a prominent 'antifa'
Twitter account pretending to based out of Boston tweeted from Vladivostok,
presumably in error.

Accounts like these provide the fuel that empowers elements of the alt right,
and they're still active in these efforts.

If Twitter and Facebook fail to become more proactive on countering these
baiters, what does that mean for our future? This doesn't seem like a problem
we can easily retroactively assess our way out of.

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tareqak
100 K on Facebook and 274 K on Twitter: I remember a lot of detractors saying
that both campaigns spent way more (in the tens of millions or higher AFAIK).
What about ads on Google Ads and other ad networks? What does the total dollar
value of Russian ad spend in the November 2016 US election have to be for
those detractors to think again?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Naturally these figures are related to specific accounts, too. I wonder if
they can aggregate spending based on origin location and how much higher the
amount would be.

For example if you're doing something fishy with moving money around you
wouldn't move, say, $100k from a single place. No, you'd move $5k 20 times
from likely multiple places. It's trivial to setup new accounts to then use
for ad buying.

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ycaccount
Twitter, et al, 'fixing' this issue would make it difficult for American
companies and teams to fulfill their mission. It might be easier just to
control the narrative and deflect.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-
op...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-
social-networks)

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ycaccount
"Persona management by the US military would face legal challenges if it were
turned against citizens of the US, where a number of people engaged in sock
puppetry have faced prosecution."

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amai
Why doesn't Twitter ask to solve a captcha every time before one can send a
message?

