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A Quarter of All Tweets About Climate Crisis Produced By Bots (theguardian.com) 129

Posted by BeauHD from the can't-say-I-am-surprised dept.
XXongo writes: According to a yet-to-be-published study from Brown University of the origin of 6.5 million tweets about climate and global warming, a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, disproportionately skeptical of climate science and action. The Brown University study wasn't able to identify any individuals or groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of influence they have had on the climate debate. "On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots," reports The Guardian. "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. Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence."
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A Quarter of All Tweets About Climate Crisis Produced By Bots More

A Quarter of All Tweets About Climate Crisis Produced By Bots

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  • Missing context (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday February 22, 2020 @06:22AM (#59753750)

    What percentage of all tweets are produced by bots?

    • Something like 34%

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Does that include Trump?

        • Does it include the dating tweets luring customers to their subscription websites?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Why are bots allowed to tweet at all? It is a social platform for humans to interact, no machine should be creating content. That is pure expolitation.

      • Why are bots allowed to tweet at all? It is a social platform for humans to interact, no machine should be creating content. That is pure expolitation.

        I don't understand why anyone tweets at all. Or why anyone follows people on twitter, so I guess I couldn't answer that question.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dpilot ( 134227 )

          Or why anyone pays attention to what's being tweeted.

          My tweets are better than your peer-review science publication? There may be problems with science publications, reproducibility, and all of that, but to make that assertion is false equivalence.

          • It's interesting to note that TFA is not a peer reviewed science publication, but a leak, of a draft, of an as-yet-not-published paper in an unstated state of peer review.

            The leak is in The Guardian, a UK tabloid noted for being accused of faking quotes from Julian Assange and for a 2017 claim, later retracted (after a storm of protest from security professionals) of discovery of a backdoor in Whats App (different from the issues discovered in 2019).

      • Free the bots!!!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The best study into that so far gives a range of 9 to 15%.

      But it's not evenly spread, some subjects are far worse than others. And that includes things that clearly identify as bots, which are fine.

    • And 93 Escort Wagon makes the salient point! Of course, anyone who is familiar with Automated Insights, automated "news" today, countless newspots, etc., and BotBuilder and various other such subjects, realizes that a fraction may be a mighty small percentage indeed!
    • aHA ... i was wondering if you could bot Twitter ... that could make it actually useful , heh, great ... but in this case that's about mentally beating people with information, about 99% akin to branding (ah, the good old days ...) where you just expose the mass-brain to the same imagery over and over until it feels "safe" cuzz familiar ..
      twitterbots huh, gotta get me one of those, post across different networks in one go, sounds like a plan for the future i cant find no more

  • Only Twitter? (Score:3)

    by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Saturday February 22, 2020 @06:31AM (#59753756)

    I wouldn't be surprised if a large proportion of posts about climate change here on Slashdot and many other forums such as Youtube were produced by bots.

    • From observation, there aren't enough and they're not consistent enough. From a few trolls, yes, that seems consistent with their poor quality and erratic content.

    • Re:Only Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ilguido ( 1704434 ) on Saturday February 22, 2020 @09:21AM (#59753938)

      I wouldn't be surprised if a large proportion of posts about climate change here on Slashdot and many other forums such as Youtube were produced by bots.

      First, we should have a clear definition of bot. My technical background tells me that a bot is just a little piece of code to automate things, some people extends the term to include shills and astroturfers, the media often seem to include people with opinions they do not like in the bot count, fringe or not. General public just does not know, for them it is one of those foggy concepts they do not understand and do not need to understand, because the experts know better.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zieroh ( 307208 )

      I wouldn't be surprised if a large proportion of posts about climate change here on Slashdot ... were produced by bots.

      Nah. Bots would at least pretend to sound coherent.

    • callRefute10Count
      10. The Science is Settled!
      20. The Science is Settled!
      30. The Science is Settled!
      40. The Science is Settled!
      50. The Science is Settled!
      60. The Science is Settled!
      70. The Science is Settled!
      80. The Science is Settled!
      90. The Science is Settled!
      100. The Science is Settled! /EndcallRefute10Count

      #Line counters for debugging only. Remove before production...

  • I welcome this work, but I doubt there is a reliable test for bot-ness. The study uses a particular tool which has been developed at a university. A cutting-edge bot farm is probably very protective of its techniques, and is unlikely to give them any hints, or a good sample of their output to analyse. Probably the original report is clearer on this.

    I also wonder whether the 5% of bot comments for global warming are real, or just the background noise.

    • > A cutting-edge bot farm

      I'm sorry, but that model is like a "cutting edge spammer" or a "cutting edge botnet", or a "cutting edge computer virus". There are resources that can be used, motivations to use them, and perceived benefit to the attackers. They need not be well designed or even competent to flood the networks, and the very poor quality flood leave niches for more competent attacks to slip past the defenses being overwhelmed by the poor quality attacks.

      That said, it's relatively easy to detect

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )
      In this case, what you're saying is that the figure 25% is a lower bound on the number of tweets by bots.

      • Basically yes. A large amount of the auto-generated traffic is quite obviously so. The suggestion that further, more subtle attacks are hiding in the noise also seems quite likely.

  • You might as well go fully dishonest and automatize the process.

    • I think the measure was in relation to the number of bot posts against climate change, which according to an unreleased study is implied to be lower than 25%

      Which I think demonstrates that whilst our work on Artificial Intelligence has a long way to go, we've barely scratched the surface on artificial stupidity.

      On a serious note, does the study make a distinction on deliberately automated comments and bots posing as human commentators? If we're including the bots from organisations like NOAA, GISS, US
    • It's spelled out clearly, right there in front of you, that those bots are -denying- climate change. Nice try but read better.

  • Weaponized bot-calling and fake news (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sumguy2436 ( 6186944 ) on Saturday February 22, 2020 @08:41AM (#59753860)

    Looks like The Guardian simply labels people they disagree with as bots: https://reclaimthenet.org/twit... [reclaimthenet.org]

    That one account posted a lot of ramblings but that's what humans do. 3% chance of being a bot is apparently enough for The Guardian to call for canceling people. Hell, a 2% chance seems to be enough, too. Also, the "study" is a draft that has not been peer-reviewed.

    And they wonder why they get called fake news and biased.

    • Bot denialist! Heretic! DENIALIST!!!1!!1!!

    • Free speech cuts both ways

      3% chance of being a bot is apparently enough for The Guardian to [use their free speech]

    • These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trumpâ(TM)s withdrawal from the Paris agreement,â states the draft study, seen by the Guardian.

      You know the study is flawed right away by their use of judgmental language. Just more agitprop for the mob.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The "data scientist" they cite is Alex Griswold, a right wing hack who writes hit pieces about centre and left leaning publications.

      His "evidence" are some tweets he saves before they were deleted.

  • Just let it rot and fester with all those Bots slagging each other off plus the occasional word of lunacy from Donald there really is little to justify its existence let alone using it for anything productive.

    much the same could be said about the content that gets posted on FaceBook, Instagram and Whatsapp.

    Either get rid of the bots or get rid of the platform they use.

  • - Climate change is beneficial to bots
    - Exxon is run by bots

  • Twitter is a cesspool of stupidity, virtue signaling and echo chamber blather. If Twitter vanished forever tomorrow very few real people would notice. When Trump leaves office, millions will stop using it for anything, because why bother? It's just a few people and thousands of bots screaming at each other.
  • A quarter of tweets calling out the climate hoax? Oh my! It still doesnt make climate change any less of a hoax, or any more than a religion.
  • goal is not to fight for climate, goal is to make us fight!

  • Twitter IS a PR platform!

    EVERYONE on ther is doing PR. In one way or another.

    What does "Come from bots" mean anyway?
    It's not like thinking machines are writing text here.
    It's *people* writing text, maybe in template form, and *spamming* it. It is not "bots". It is *people spamming*!

    Which is kinda to PR what alcohol is to German Carnival. (Nobody will admit it, but it's the reason it is done at all!)

    • Noticed people might think I'm thinking that, after posting.

      My standpoint is that all advertisement/marketing/PR/politics/lobbyism/TV talkin heads/etc is a captal crime equivalent to treason, and requiring banishment from society, or death incase of refusal to leave.
      What can I say... I stay fair, but I don't like to drag out, compromise or half-ass things. ;)

  • Well then publish it. Put it out there for peer review and stake your reputation on it.

    But please don't split off a group of analysts, call them 'Climate Science Publicity Experts' and then claim that they constitute a legitimate peer group.

  • The bot generated traffic is there to keep the issue 'trending', despite nothing really new out of either side in quite a while. It is also a tool to raise money for those activist activities by making their voice a bit louder in an already over-cluttered space that really doesn't have much impact on ordinary lives. Twitter doesn't seem to mind, as the fake traffic makes their platform seem busier than it really is and can charge advertisers a bit more. The fact that they won't police it will eventually

  • "Bot and bot. What is bot?"

  • I knew you could.

    What better subject than this, a problem with absolutely no solution, that is designed to harm the US economy with woefully inadequate measures to attack the problem at ginormous costs.

    There's not a law that the US could pass that would noticeably affect the production of CO2 world-wide. This problem will be solved in exactly one place, and it isn't any halls of legislature anywhere. It is in research laboratories that will discover the way to build batteries that store renewable energy

    • Russia has a smaller economy than Spain. Their defense budget is less than $50 billion a year. Democrats and the media mocked Romney [youtu.be] in 2012 for saying Russia was a threat, yet here we are with a huge number of Americans trained to shit the bed on command any time neocons say BOO. The same neocons who lied you into Iraq, only now they aren't even bothering to provide evidence for their bullshit.

      Bullshit that people like you have just eaten up. With a spoon.

  • Bots replying to bots.

  • While I believe in climate change and that the effects are negative and caused by us humans, there is a LOT of BS on both sides. Just in the last few weeks, there were two studies, one showing how a major threat to animals was insect populations rapidly dropping globally caused by climate change, another showing huge increase in Mosquito populations caused by climate change increasing malaria... always a negative spin... you can't have it both ways.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Uberbah ( 647458 )

      Just in the last few weeks, there were two studies, one showing how a major threat to animals was insect populations rapidly dropping globally caused by climate change, another showing huge increase in Mosquito populations caused by climate change increasing malaria... always a negative spin... you can't have it both ways.

      Why not. Both things can be true at the same time - bee populations dropping while we have more mosquitos carrying more diseases.

  • ....are yet-to-be-published studies.

  • suspected as much, but ofcourse the real question remains unanswered, who is behind it?

  • and so he buys bot time and programming
    And we ALL know whom I refer to.

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