
On Twitter, a Battle Among Political Bots - walterbell
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/on-twitter-a-battle-among-political-bots.html
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jwtadvice
This portends some very incredible things for the future of social media and
politics.

Astroturfing of various forms is in its infancy as a technology. Yet, it's so
successful even in its crude form that every successful advertiser, media
company and political party participates in it. Given that paid protestors,
astroturfed comments, and brigading are seen as dubious tactics each of these
parties uses their brigading, astroturfing and bots to accuse their opponents
and competition of using brigading, astroturfing and bots.

Therein, the situation is a manifestation of what economists call a "tragedy
of the commons" where each actors' best response to collective negative
behavior on account of their opponent is to participate in it better
themselves.

There are few ways out of a "tragedy of the commons" situation, with
regulation itself having a quite spotty record. The best way out of the
situation is for the incentive structures and technologies that encourage the
behavior to move toward a more healthy 'market' structure that raise the costs
of the behavior and lower the effectiveness.

Any attempt to 'solve' automatically and provide the user with access to what
they 'really need to know' is an escalation of this trend, and will be
gamified, copied and duplicated in an automatic fashion, making the situation
worse - not better.

The only solution is a critically thinking public with the tools themselves to
determine what is fake and what is real.

Platforms promising to introduce fake information and advertisements as a
critical and crucial feature of their network are not able to achieve both a
skeptical, critically thinking user base at the same time that it encourages
gullible social participation.

