
Twitter analysis: identifying a propaganda bot network - anigbrowl
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2019/09/03/twitter-analysis-identifying-a-pro-indonesian-propaganda-bot-network/
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Jsharm
If it's possible to do this analysis why does twitter not routinely shutdown
these networks?

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scribu
The analysis in this post is only on two rather small hashtags (a very small
percentage of the whole of Twitter).

It also involves a lot of "eyeballing", particularly the part where the author
looks at the graph and notices a weird pattern. That's very hard to do
automatically.

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Nextgrid
> That's very hard to do automatically.

When you run a worldwide network that has significant potential for abuse and
spreading misinformation I would consider it to be your duty to monitor it and
guard against these kinds of things. If it costs too much then maybe you
shouldn't be in business or should change your business model so that you can
afford to clean up the damage your business is doing to society.

~~~
Zenst
Issue is if you run such automation with aggresive settings that would pick up
this - you also increase false-positives and those for such a business could
have a more negative impact than a few small bot nets.

So you do need people somewhere in the loop to handle these things.

What would be nice though would be if social media offered rewards for
identifying such abuse, after all - they happily pay bug bounties, why not
abuse bounties! That would get them lots of zero-hour/non-contract workers
doing their job for them and big companies love that it seems and to be able
to do that in a PR way that has positives. Well, it works for BUG bounties,
why not incentivise the populus to police the populus against abuse as well.

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cat199
> you also increase false-positives

...

> if social media offered rewards for identifying such abuse

couldn't this also be gamed for false positives, and create an incentive for
groups to form smear-for-profit entities which try to spin small communities
as 'bad' to the benefit of others?

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Zenst
When life is a game, everything is gameable. However, as humans are good at
adapting, you are playing one large mass of people against a lesser mass of
bad players. So whilst you may get gaming of the system, that would still
stand out to others who would investigate.

But let us not forget, things like posting IP and client and other such
details that may prove useful in identifying such abuse, may well elude public
investigation. So it would be these niche area's in which Twitter could then
focus upon.

However, as an example of a slightly comparable problem - wiki editing and the
weighted credibility of editors over time, we may well end up creating a
hidden social media based upon a small subset of society and perhaps yielding
a bias in some direction or another in judgment of what is abuse.

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cat199
agree all is gameable - this is why I argue social media should provide tools
for users to filter their own content rather than being everyones nanny

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Zenst
Totaly, that would work. Let people impose their world view upon themselves
via filters instead of imposing it upon everybody, would solve so much and
tick all the free speech boxes.

But with the ways social media churns upon spam/botnets, it would place a huge
load upon people self filtering.

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luckylion
> This exact sentence was published by many of the other bots in their own
> individual tweets using the hashtags #westpapuagenocide and #freewestpapua.

A clickbaity video "what the government is trying to hide" that contains pro-
gov messages ("they've developed an app for personal finance management and
are giving villages more opportunities", "they are helping the food industry")
posted under those hashtags. Is that attempting to influence people that are
looking up those hashtags (presumably expecting to find info on "the
genocide"), or is that just to add noise to the hashtag?

It looks too high quality for just noise (so it's probably too expensive to
produce a lot of that content), but on the other hand, I can't imagine someone
saying "woah, there's a genocide going on in west papua? I better check
twitter. Ah, here's a video ... mhh, they are deploying an app to help people
with finances and there's something about the food industry? I'm now convinced
there is no genocide". Like, is that some "if only people knew about our app,
they wouldn't mind the crimes" thinking? Does that work?

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ailideex
Not a bot, Twitter recently blocked my account that had almost no activity
without providing any reason and now I cannot delete it which is in
contravention of GDPR.

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peteretep
> I cannot delete it which is in contravention of GDPR

Go on. They’ve refused your removal request with appropriate ID sent to their
office, or?

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megous
Appropriate ID is username/password if real-life ID was not previously linked
to an account directly.

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eecc
Uh, from the article: why is he using sudo to run a python script?

    
    
      sudo twint -u bellanow1 –media -o papuabots1 –csv
    

Not good

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speps
Theory: he's a reporter, someone showed him the command, one time it didn't
work and the other person said to use "sudo" possibly because he was trying to
write a file somewhere he needed access to. Now he always uses sudo because it
always works...

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markdown
Surprising to see this on here. The ongoing genocide of the West Papuan people
by Indonesia has largely been ignored by the West.

BTW the propaganda team behind this bot network has also been very active on
reddit.

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nencrystation
Every now and then bellingcat covers a "lesser" news story like this one, so
they can pretend their main purpose isn't to push for regime change in Syria.

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howard941
bellingcat made its mark documenting the MH17 shootdown.
[https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/mh17/](https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/mh17/)
has the exhaustive history

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Udik
Let's say they seem to be consistently on one side of the Russia - USA
disputes, of which Syria has been one of the issues. Just a quick browsing of
the articles published in the last few months show that the vast majority of
the investigations is focused on various malfeasances of Russia, Syria or
Iran.

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varjag
Bellingcat investigations on Syria predate Russian involvement in Syria.

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Udik
Bellingcat was founded in July 2014, while Russia has been siding with Assad
from the start of the war- vetoing sanctions, providing weapons and preventing
an open attack by the US in 2013.

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varjag
Russia did not enter Syria until 2015. Bellingcat's founder was already
publishing on Syrian conflict in 2012.

