
Quarter of all tweets about climate change produced by bots - bookofjoe
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis
======
awb
> On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the
> climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics
> – bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of
> all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

For those wondering, it's estimated that 9-15% of all tweets come from bots
([https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/new-study-says-
almost-1...](https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/new-study-says-
almost-15-percent-of-twitter-accounts-are-bots/)), so there is an estimated
~2x typical bot volume on this topic.

However, it would be nice to know their reach. It's not clear if these bot
tweets on climate are being liked, retweeted and followed or mostly ignored.

~~~
archi42
Careful: It's not clear if the 9 to 15% number covers bots overall or only the
relevant subgroup for disinformation campaigns. Though I suppose it's more
likely to plainly cover ALL bots.

Now lets wildly assume 6 to 10 %-points of these are actually not disguised as
humans and are not setup with the intent to mislead (e.g. think automatic
service status tweets), then the average "bot disguised as genuine human"-rate
for any topic would be below the 10% range - which in turn makes the 25% much
more bleak.

~~~
kick
There are like three dozen twitter bots that automatically repost HN posts,
and there are like ten thousand twitter bots that automatically repost popular
reddit posts. A single post getting to the front page of both will get you a
hundred thousand tweets in ten minutes.

They don't seem to have linked the study, so I can't check if they controlled
for that, but it's such a common use case that I really hope they did.

------
pmyteh
I would be very cautious about this article; the botometer tool used to do the
classifications is known to be problematic and the study is not available for
dissection.

I used to work with people at Oxford University who studied this stuff, and it
teaches you to be careful. See this thread by a former colleague for some
reasons for scepticism:
[https://twitter.com/_FelixSimon_/status/1230862078950420480](https://twitter.com/_FelixSimon_/status/1230862078950420480)

------
olivermarks
Would like to see actual verifiable evidence of 'bot' activity, not the vague
assertions in this article, regardless of the emotive topic being discussed.

------
thrower123
It would be better if journalists treated Twitter as if anyone that they
haven't personally laid eyes on behind a Twitter handle, was a bot. And even
in those cases, to exercise a great degree of skepticism.

Twitter is great, and I love it, but it is one of the last reserves of chaos
and shit-postery on the mainstream internet. It is full of bots, trolls,
personas, and just plain crazy people, and any kind of zeitgeist distilled
from it should be taken with a pillar of salt.

Normal people are just not aware of what is going on on Twitter, except to the
extent that the news interjects their reporting with Twitter controversies.

~~~
homonculus1
That's a great point. I accept 4Chan and despise Twitter, both of which being
cesspools of lunatics, but now I realize that I'd feel the opposite if the
media reported on 4Chan drama instead and mostly left Twitter alone.

Which is to say, _if members of the media were 4Chan users instead of Twitter
users_. Or more generally, the social ills I've been blaming on Twitter are
really the result of the commentary class inflicting its own obsession with
social media on the rest of us.

~~~
AcerbicZero
Hah. Commentary class really worked on me. I think you're spot on here.

------
dnprock
I was in Vietnam and saw the effect of climate change. People (millions) are
moving from the Mekong Delta to Ho Chi Minh City. The Delta is being invaded
by saltwater. Agriculture is heavily impacted. The city is crowded and
polluted.

My view is climate change is real. Of course, I'm never heard on the internet.
Bots are everywhere. :)

~~~
lurquer
Many rivers feeding into the delta have been dammed, diverted for Agri, and
the forest canopy has been decimated (leading to more evaporation).

In any case, like all delta regions, when the freshwater flow upstream is
reduced, the salinity of the delta inncreases.

To blame this on climate change is silly.

~~~
jvanderbot
This. Easily refuted climate change effects do way more harm than good.

------
tjpnz
The one still active account cited by the article looks legitimate, albeit
operated by a crank. The same probably couldn't be said for their followers.

------
mensetmanusman
Twitter should follow Musk’s advice. Get rid of all bots, spend all AI effort
on doing that.

~~~
sneak
Bots are just humans posting with alternate clients.

We have not yet invented bots that post to twitter all by themselves.

~~~
mcswell
Nonsense. It's trivial to program a bot to post something, it's creating the
natural language content to post that's more difficult. But from what I've
seen, typical bot-posts are hardly what you'd call natural language.

~~~
sneak
Yes. Programming a bot to post something is a human initiative, just as
programming an alternate client to post something. The posts made by bots are
no less legitimate human expressions, and should not be censored.

------
ocschwar
That's why there is no alternative to activism in meat-space. Which reminds me
it's Friday, so I'll be taking some food to the Greta fans down the street.

~~~
lonelappde
> Greta fans

Please don't do this. Worshipping undermines whatever credibility her efforts
had.

~~~
ocschwar
I was not trying to disparage or praise them. Just being concise.

------
thedance
My faith in my own ability to identify twitter bots was upended recently when
an account with no followers, following nobody, with no posts, with eight
digits at the end of its handle, which had liked or retweeted nothing but
Trump propaganda since its joining, started replying to me about a very
specific local transportation policy topic, in a real way and not a some way
that could possibly be automatic. Now I don’t know what is going on at
twitter.

~~~
aalleavitch
That's just stepping up tactics: most bots aren't engaged with, you hook
someone then you use that opportunity to make yourself appear valid. You only
need one person doing this for a sea of bots.

~~~
thedance
So you think they have bus-rapid-transit enthusiasts in Berkeley taking an
hourly rate to legitimize robot accounts?

~~~
aalleavitch
Yeah, honestly, that sounds exactly like a Berkeley student to me.

~~~
thedance
Even reply guys gotta get paid I guess.

------
user00012-ab
90% of all Bloomberg tweet are produced by paid actors.

------
aazaa
> On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the
> climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics
> – bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of
> all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

Meaningless without a baseline percentage of all tweets that are fake.

> “More often than not, they turn out to have all the fingerprints of bots,”
> he said. “The more denialist trolls are out there, the more likely people
> will think that there is a diversity of opinion and hence will weaken their
> support for climate science.

The article doesn't discuss what any of these fingerprints are.

> Thomas Marlow, a PhD candidate at Brown who led the study, said the research
> came about as he and his colleagues are “always kind of wondering why
> there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more
> or less settled on”.

How any self-styled scientist can claim something a complex as the earth's
atmospheric behavior is "settled" is beyond me.

Just recently, a study appeared in a peer-reviewed journal by a
non-"denialist" group regarding the outsized effect of CFCs on polar warming:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00108-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00108-2)

~~~
travisporter
It's actualy not beyond you, you're zoomed in. If you zoom out, you can see
that people straight up ignore or deny any link between human activity and
climate change/CO2/ozone.

------
kls
It is a pet peeve of mine when I hear a scientist parrot this trope:

"always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about
something that the science is more or less settled on"

It seems like we have lost all rational and respect for skepticism and
correlating verification in science.

Personally I think warming is real (I am skeptical about all the doomsday
predictions, as all of them have been flat out wrong.) but I would far from
venture to say it is settled, there are still really big issues like the
disapproval of the Hockeystick paper which a portion of other research relies
on. The Pause Buster paper and the major discrepancy in Tree Ring data. Not to
mention that the CRU antics gives plenty of valid reasons to be skeptical of
clear agendas invading science. These bots being more proof of the case, there
are clearly agendas on both sides and everything needs to be validated.
Skepticism is a health part of science and making authoritarian statements
like "it is settled" only invites the suspicion that one is trying to deflect
true scrutiny, whether that is the intent or not.

~~~
mturmon
This comment is typical of HN climate-change skeptics:

    
    
      - "Warming is real", *but*
      - "skeptical of all the [unnamed] doomsday predictions", *and*
      - dropping a few random facts about specific puffed-up  "discrepancies"
    

You're way in the weeds, and you're not an expert. The place for technically-
literate outsiders to start is
[https://nca2018.globalchange.gov](https://nca2018.globalchange.gov), or the
science-specific report linked on that page. The folks who compiled those
reports specifically waded through the literature and summarize it
technically.

~~~
kls
You are right I am not an expert, that being said I have a confidence in my
scientific background enough to weight a science as a whole, and there is no
doubt that climate science is not on par with say physics or chemistry. I
think this validates my skeptical position, until it matures into a more solid
science that can make accurate predictions.

That being said, I am not an expert and I do not plan to become an expert, but
I will remain skeptical until repeatable outcomes can be produced. Just
because my post fits a pattern does not negate the need for those answers.

I will freely admit that I have developed a bias and my skepticism comes from
personal experience with reef restoration and the sugar industry funding
climate papers to deflect from nutrient reef poisoning. It has shown me that
there is an agenda on the other side as well.

To note though my skepticism is more towards the predictive outcomes and not
towards there actually being something to climate change.

~~~
snowwrestler
I just want to point out that the theory of human-caused climate change rests
_directly_ on our understanding of thermodynamics, and was first proposed by
scientists who were initially developing that understanding over 100 years
ago.

To say that climate science is not on par with physics does not make sense;
it's like saying a wooden house is not on par with a piece of wood.

~~~
pnako
Yeah, right. There's a bit of a jump from "it's thermodynamics" to "do
everything Greta says". Skeptics (like me) tend to have a problem with the
parts of that science on the right of that spectrum.

But even staying in the most scientific part of that spectrum (that goes from
science to politics through economics and policy), it's a jump from "it's
thermodynamics" to the data torturing that goes on in e.g. proxy
reconstruction papers.

------
fingerlocks
> The researchers examined 6.5m tweets posted in the days leading up to and
> the month after Trump announced the US exit from the Paris accords on 1 June
> 2017. The tweets were sorted into topic category, with an Indiana University
> tool called Botometer used to estimate the probability the user behind the
> tweet is a bot.

Botometer website:
[https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/#!/CB](https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/#!/CB)

------
izzydata
I was under the assumption that about half of all twitter was bots. So 25%
seems pretty good.

------
briantakita
A debate between the leading voices for each position would help clarify
matters. The side that is closer to the truth has the most to gain from this
debate & the side that is more deceptive has the most to lose.

For example, Michael E Mann, inventor of the hockey stick graph, should debate
Tony Heller, one of the more well known skeptics.

~~~
AlexandrB
Suppose I become a well-known skeptic of the heliocentric theory of the solar
system. I write lots of blog posts, show up on contrarian TV segments and
attract a large following.

Should an astronomer or astrophysicist come and debate me? Would they have
anything to gain by doing so? Would I have anything to lose?

~~~
Canada
I'm not so sure that analogy holds. The problem is that it presumes the
skeptic of the heliocentric model has significant followers and that there is
any point in changing their minds.

There is no point in the astronomer debating that skeptic because convincing
his followers won't change anything. The astronomer has nothing to win.

A significant segment of the public does not believe AGW is actually happening
so there's benefit to be had in having the debate: The skeptics followers will
watch it. Refusing to do it just allows the skeptics followers to remain
within that bubble completely unchecked.

~~~
yongjik
Sadly, winning a debate has more to do with charisma than sound logic and
evidences. Trump had multiple debates on TV, he "won" them well enough to be
elected, and he thinks global warming is a Chinese hoax.

Scientists, being scientists, are fundamentally trained to communicate to
fellow scientists with basic scientific competency and no desire to twist
every word out of context. They aren't the best TV debators.

You wouldn't give members of the Manhattan project gladiator swords and march
them into Colosseum - what would you expect?

------
nurettin
Waiting for the xkcd showing bot volume vs factual accuracy of statements on
twitter.

------
toss1
It seems past the point where we need to have pro-information bot campaigns to
counteract the disinformation/dezinformatsiya campaigns that are actively
undermining western democracies.

------
bedhead
Definitely not at all presumptuous when we call it now the climate "crisis."
Nope, totally objective... [eye roll]

------
aldoushuxley001
I'm not surprised. There's so much money pushing climate alarmism these days,
so much potential geopolitical power to be gained by pushing the climate
agenda. Would've been more surprising if more of these tweets were real.

~~~
Quenty
The article states the bots were on the side of denialism.

