
A BlockTogether list for election propaganda bots on Twitter - kitskid
https://americapossible.com/2019/01/27/cleanup-twitter-for-the-2020-elections/
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Mirioron
I'm a bit skeptical of this. It could be used for some rather nefarious means.
However, I found this comment from one of the authors of it troubling:

> _Twitter users should be able to engage in healthy online discourse without
> foreign countries and organized groups manipulating the conversation._

This rhetoric makes it sound like only Americans should engage on Twitter.

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jchw
I believe they mean foreign governments, from interfering with domestic
elections. This would actually be useful outside of the U.S. as the U.S. is
far from the only country this kind of manipulation has occurred in, in fact
it is probably even more prevalent elsewhere.

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iamdave
That in mind, in the interest of specificity I wonder if the phrase '[foreign]
state actors' would be better used?

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burfog
Yes, if it were justified.

It isn't justified. There is zero reason to believe that these accounts are
foreign or bots. I checked a bunch of them. Every account looked like a normal
human American on one side of the political spectrum.

It would be nice if the list were clear on that, but "block foreign bots" is
more marketable than "filter bubble me harder".

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greymeister
I find the methods listed on
[https://botsentinel.com/faq](https://botsentinel.com/faq) a bit confusing:

"Q: How do you determine which accounts are classified as fake news?

Classifying fake news accounts is a manual process. We review hundreds of
tweets and retweets during the review process. If an account has a large
number of followers and a high percentage of misleading and/or factually
incorrect tweets, that account could be classified as Fake News."

"Q: Why is my account rated problematic or alarming?

Our machine learning model was developed to identify accounts that exhibit
irregular tweet activity related to politics. The more you exhibit irregular
tweet activity, the higher your trollbot score will be."

So how much is manual and how much is their model? By what criteria do the
manual reviews judge tweets?

It all seems way too opaque without more information.

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mc32
Totally. Are they sure thd training data aren’t biased? Are they considering
the full spectrum of politics? Are they neutral to results?

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beaconstudios
if you review the list of users on the list, it clearly is biased - I've only
checked 10 random accounts but at least half of them appeared to be real,
regular Republicans. I mean, the fact that botsentinel rate accounts as
"problematic" is pretty amusing given that it's language associated with a
particular political orientation.

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smileysteve
This is interesting given that Twitter could be doing this on their own to
promote a better platform.

But instead requires trusting a 3rd party. Which, from an open source
standpoint could be better with verification and such that seems to be
present.

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prezjordan
I'm under the impression that the number of times an account is blocked
_could_ provide some signal to twitter that, hey, maybe this person/bot/thing
shouldn't be on here - so I went ahead and clicked the go button for this huge
list.

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aphextron
I vigorously curate and purge my Twitter of anything (or anyone) remotely
political, and it makes it a great place to see what people in the industry
are up to. Otherwise it's a complete dumpster fire. I'm completely convinced
that >90% of all accounts are not a human being.

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nategri
Maybe a step in the right direction but I would much rather have the content
from these entities still be visible, but flagged, so I could warn others.

Probably not possible without a custom twitter client, though.

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kitskid
If you follow @botsentinel, it does this.

