
Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots - smacktoward
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/21/1002105/covid-bot-twitter-accounts-push-to-reopen-america/
======
gentleman11
Headline is strange. The article itself says something similar but not the
same:

> But in a new study, the researchers have found that bots may account for
> between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19.“

Edit: this was more interesting:

> not only were bots gaining traction and accumulating followers, but they
> accounted for 82% of the top 50 and 62% of the top 1,000 influential
> retweeters

~~~
lowdose
CMU has published before that probably Russian adversaries fused different
groups in the social graph of Facebook in 2016 and basically got in control of
both groups after the merge.

Bots are used to get attention, steer the conversation, introduce key
retweeters to bot retweeters and merge a couple independent user groups at
scale.

This is a highly specialist job not a couple of random amateurs, and could be
the underlying mechanism at work here.

Big brands pay a fortune to execute similar tactics but are not even 10% as
effective. Coke for example has an annual advertisement budget 7+ billion.

------
kgin
Again, it follows the same pattern of observing American culture, looking for
the pre-existing conflicts and just pouring gasoline into whatever side needs
it to catch fire.

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feelthepress
Bot Sentinel uses machine learning to find bots.
[https://botsentinel.com/](https://botsentinel.com/)

~~~
acali
From Bot Sentinel's About Section:

"Instead of creating a model based on our interpretation of a troll or bot, we
used Twitter rules as a guide when selecting Twitter accounts to train our
model. We searched for accounts that were repeatedly violating Twitter rules
and we trained our model to identify accounts similar to the accounts we
identified as “trollbots.”"

That's not a bot.

~~~
aeternum
It's also a very questionable way to source training data.

Most bots should be programmed to avoid violating Twitter rules to ensure they
are not banned.

Maybe Bot Sentinel's model is simply finding users that prefer not to follow
authority/rules.

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xienyc
So only 0.5% of America's population is advocating for reopening America on
Twitter as opposed to the 1% that is for keeping it closed?

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modzu
probably more than half of all Twitter accounts are bots :)

edit: apparently this too is a pursuit of academic study. estimated at 15%:

[https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/1558...](https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15587)

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magwa101
News flash, half of twitter is bots.

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dntbnmpls
What about the account pushing to keep america closed? Are half of those bots
as well? Or was this "study" done with a particular agenda in mind?

~~~
chris123
Exactly. You can probably find pots pushing it just about anything. Wire
articles about and takedown the ones that question mainstream opinions. Leave
the rest. They did the world we live in right now. Extreme, forced conformity.

------
Nginx487
In every crime, look the one who had a solid reason to commit it. Russia and
China support literally any freaks, like anti-vaxxers, just to make US focused
on its internal problems. Notice, how well-organized the reopen movement, and
how sporadic and unprepared anti-reopen protests, mostly organized by small
groups of medical workers.

~~~
mrscottson
No need to leave the country to find well capitalized suspicious characters.

I'm sure the CEO of Jet Blue (the guy that funded a phony study to minimize
covid) and execs like him would gladly astroturf on twitter.

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throwaway-2020
Even though this is an interesting story, I'll make a prediction this post
will be flagged into oblivion, as an earlier post will testify

[https://news.ycombinator.com/itemid=23258169](https://news.ycombinator.com/itemid=23258169)

------
aaron695
Russia's view on C19 changed from disbelief to acceptance in April I think?

So either you will see this in the data, or you'll see them playing both
sides.

So where are the bots to close America?

The study isn't even released yet. So who knows what they may have made up yet
with their 'machine- learning'.

There obviously is a lot of misinformation from nation states on Twitter and
Reddit and HN. This press release is next to useless unless it has a point or
interesting proof or names a new nation not Russia.

~~~
Barrin92
>So where are the bots to close America?

Bot disinformation campaigns like this tend to be fuelled by US adversaries
and thus usually push into directions that are harmful or embarassing for the
US, so there isn't much incentive to advocate for keeping the containment
measures going, because that's essentially the sensible decision backed by
health experts at this point.

All the spam around covid, which you can even see if you just browse twitter
yourself is mostly miracle cures, reopening the US, Bill Gates conspiracy
theory stuff and so on.

~~~
aaron695
> and thus usually push into directions that are harmful or embarassing for
> the US,

No they aren't. They push conflict is the theory. If this theory is incorrect,
then that's a big deal.

But as I also said Russia also did a 180 on whether lock downs were good or
bad.

So we still should have seen this turn. They would have wanted the USA to
lockdown at first, since they didn't.

If any other country is involved, that too is a big deal.

This press release just repeats what we know. Russia messes with twitter to
piss people off, but the article leads with a great Russian designed title
"Only bots push to reopen"

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1MachineElf
Everyone _may_ be a bot.

------
pcdoodle
Anytime something doesn't fit the narrative we're all supposed to submit to:
bots.

~~~
smadge
So you believe there are conspirators who manipulate the media to push a
certain narrative on the public, but you do not believe there are conspirators
who manipulate social media to push a narrative?

~~~
perl4ever
I saw something recently that was supposed to be a tearjerking story about a
doctor who is just drained by all the crazy conspiracy theorists that are
persecuting him. But the whole story _was_ a conspiracy theory about Facebook
and Google creating viral conspiracy theories, with no particular motivation
or mechanism. This seems to me like a whole genre, it just stood out because
of the anti-conspiracy theory fillip.

I can hardly think of anything I've read in a long time that attacks
conspiracy theories, specific ones or in general, without promoting an
unbelievable one as an alternative. Or demanding one by implication.

If you absolutely are going to reject the idea of a conspiracy being
responsible for general insanity, it seems like maybe we should be looking for
an environmental factor, analogous to leaded gasoline.

Everybody has been worrying about cell phones causing cancer, maybe the
radiation just makes people crazy instead? Or maybe there is a virus that
unlike Covid doesn't cause lung problems that people notice?

~~~
perl4ever
I just want to note that when I wrote the above I was unaware of the specific
conspiracy theory that covid-19 is caused by 5G - I saw that this morning, and
it's a coincidence, I swear!

------
collyw
I'll admit that I didn't read the article, but the headline sounds so much
like "the boy who cried wolf" by now.

