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Social Networks The Internet Twitter United States

Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts Pushing To Reopen America May Be Bots (technologyreview.com) 288

According to a new study from Carnegie Mellon University, researchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19. The normal level of bot involvement for U.S. and foreign elections, natural disasters, and other politicized events is usually between 10 and 20%. MIT Technology Review reports: Many of those accounts were created in February and have since been spreading and amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, and pushes to end stay-at-home orders and reopen America. They follow well-worn patterns of coordinated influence campaigns, and their strategy is already working: since the beginning of the crisis, the researchers have observed a greater polarization in Twitter discourse around the topic.

A number of factors could account for this surge. The global nature of the pandemic means a larger swath of actors are motivated to capitalize on the crisis as a way to meet their political agendas. Disinformation is also now more coordinated in general, with more firms available for hire to create such influence campaigns. But it's not just the volume of accounts that worries [Kathleen M. Carley, the director of the University's Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity]. Their patterns of behavior have grown more sophisticated, too. Bots are now often more deeply networked with other accounts, making it easier for them to disseminate their messages widely. They also engage in more strategies to target at-risk groups like immigrants and minorities and help real accounts engaged in hate speech to form online groups.
"Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem," the report concludes. "Banning or removing accounts won't work, as more can be spun up for every one that is deleted. Banning accounts that spread inaccurate facts also won't solve anything"

"Carley says researchers, corporations, and the government need to coordinate better to come up with effective policies and practices for tamping this down."
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Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts Pushing To Reopen America May Be Bots

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  • by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Friday May 22, 2020 @08:03AM (#60090110)
    I have a Twitter account, I occasionally do check it. I would never "follow" someone unless I know exactly who they are (friends, politicians, celebrities, family, etc). I don't understand how a bot would make any difference to anyone.
    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      I don't understand how a bot would make any difference to anyone.

      human sheep do read them and even take them seriously, and are influenced by the amount of noise.

      since there are infinite ways to easily manipulate human sheep you're actually right, it doesn't make much difference.

      • Yea use the Term Human Sheep, that will prove to the world that you are an independent thinker, like that term isn't over used.

        Look people are being scammed, lets laugh at them for being so stupid. Unlike me who is smart and independent, to join with the group of people laughing at them, vs actually working out how to fix the problem.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          *hits the joint*

          Nah, man. To fix the problem you gotta like... You see the government... Like, what I'm saying is that like. To save the sheep you have to be a sheep. You know, man? That way.... *hits the joint* ... you can blow their sheeple mind with what ever this shit is, man.

          Anyone have any Funyuns?

        • It is pretty much true that anybody who calls people "sheep" most likely has nothing useful to say, but the point underlying that is valid.

          It's not the bots per se that are the problem, it's the people that spread the misinformation by forwarding ("retweeting") them.

          • by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian DOT bixby AT gmail DOT com> on Friday May 22, 2020 @09:31AM (#60090542)

            Many (most?) of the retweeters are bots as well, so the tweet looks to the undiscerning that it's extremely popular and many people take it seriously.

            Isn't it time for Twitter to go the way of AOL?

      • Because there are a billion twitters a day, and so people just look at what's trending or whatever the AI think matches their search criteria.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I don't understand how a bot would make any difference to anyone.

      The people behind the bots buy followers and pay to have posts boosted via retweets and likes.
      They take advantage of trending keywords and hashtags so they appear in searches.
      They also tag and dm key influencers likely to spread the message.
      There are just enough people willing to blindly share anything they find on social media that vaguely supports their beliefs or they think will make others angry that the occasional bot can gain traction.

    • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday May 22, 2020 @08:53AM (#60090340)

      Humans are naturally social animals.
      If they think that an Idea it popular, they will often latch onto it, especially if it seems to be part of group.
      This happens all the time, even to you and me.

      Do you have an Opinion on Systemd? Do you really have an opinion on it, or just heard a lot of people with opinions on it, thus you have an opinion on it. Even if you use the Stock Linux Distribution.
      How about the Removal of the iPhone headphone jack?
      The lack on interchangeable batteries in Cell Phones and Laptops?
      The inclusion or exclusion of the Betsy Ross American Flag on Nike Sneakers?
      That people like Macs over PC?
      That people like PC over Macs?

      These spammed issues on topic that really do not effect us, while we decided to create a strong opinion on them. Is often due to this herd mentality.

      Bots can push an idea from a stupid idea, to a key talking point, where it can still be a stupid idea, but people are giving it more thought then it is worth.

    • A short view of Twitter should demonstrate many don't act as you might. Also trending, and the feedback loop of people jumping on things that are trending. Yes this has been shown to have influence. This is a game being played by many parties, and in some senses goes back a long way - e.g ww2 faked radio stations reading out faked messages from soldiers to give the impression lots were tired of the war.

      But we have had some of our own fakes here too.

    • by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Friday May 22, 2020 @08:59AM (#60090370)

      When literally FoxNews uses what's trending and stats from Twitter to indicate that the President has the right idea. I get that a lot of the folks here don't fall for the bots and just as soon as the majority of news networks employ Slashdotters I'll feel a lot better.

      But yeah, what's trending on social networks is used A LOT in print, radio, and TV news media. To an incredibly worrying degree.

      • by cusco ( 717999 )

        just as soon as the majority of news networks employ Slashdotters I'll feel a lot better.

        Even APK would be better than most of the Fox News staffers.

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Alright, so you don't. But that celebrity you know? He DOES. And he sees this crap. And he retweets it. And then YOU see it, from a source you think is to be trusted.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday May 22, 2020 @08:05AM (#60090118)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by satanicat ( 239025 ) on Friday May 22, 2020 @08:24AM (#60090188)

      I was just running into the comments section to write something almost exactly this. So I guess I concur!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      nope, you would have a substitute for twitter or facebook in a matter of days.

      there's only one good start, which is to educate people in critical thinking. however, if more than just a tiny fraction of the population were critical thinkers our political and economic systems would implode.

    • by rho ( 6063 )

      No need to shut them down, but anybody who talks about Facebook or Twitter as if they're important has to go to Internet Jail.

    • Look at any checkmarked personality or brand on Twitter with a large amount of followers, then scroll through their followers. Notice how many of them are no-avatar stirngs of letter and numbers with zero posts and at most a couple of reposts of other checkmarked accounts? Hmm, I wonder what is going on.
  • Conjecture: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DRichardHipp ( 995880 ) on Friday May 22, 2020 @08:15AM (#60090150)
    If you select N twitter acounts at random *more* than half of them will be bots.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      TFA says normally about 20% of accounts discussing contentious issues are bots. In this case it's a lot higher, and for accounts supporting ending lockdown it's even greater.

      This is not surprising.

  • by nucrash ( 549705 ) on Friday May 22, 2020 @08:16AM (#60090154)

    You need to find a way to flag the bots but in a way that makes it difficult for bots to determine they have been flagged. disabling an account would be an easy detection. If account x doesn't work, register and start account y. But again, you have to flag the bot in a way that coding a way that the bot can't easily determine if it's been flagged. Best way is to leave the interface alone and only show that the bots are flagged from signed in users, but.... only signed in users that haven't been flagged as bots.

    • Reddit does this with shadowbans; but it's easy to see if your view of a discussion is different from that of another account (and perhaps on another IP address). So the alleged bots could be easily programmed around it.
      • by nucrash ( 549705 )

        Again, this would have to be implemented in such a way that bots can see other bots and not be flagged. But then you would have to flag bots in such a way that if they see the flags of some bots so that they know they haven't been flagged.

        Another way would be to created a tool that flags the bot not in a binary manner but as a 1 to 10 rating of the potential to be a bot. Then they have to create bots that strive for that 1 rating instead of the 10 of definitely a bot.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      They just keep a few real human accounts around to monitor the bot ones for shadow bans, and keep creating new bot accounts on the assumption they will get mass banned sooner or later anyway.

      We got on top of the spam problem which is essentially the same thing, we should be able to use the same techniques to fix social media bots.

  • It can even be $0.01 for a hundred tweets, but then you can start banning at the payment level and it's much harder to come up with many payment sources than with creating new accounts.
    • If they find a way to ban this, they'd better g*d-da*n well find a way to ban robocalls the same way. Following the money is easy, if the powers that be really want to.
      • You could create a junk mail kind of tweet, paid, but no astroturfing would be interested in using it because it would be tagged as paid content.

        The point is to pretend to be real people.

    • For users, no. A twitter clone will pop up that doesn't. There are many struggling along just waiting for twitter to screw up, the way MySpace did and facebook jumped in.

  • Article does not mention which percentage of pro-lockdown accounts are bots.

    Without that statistic this number is pointless in itself, as probably over 50% of the accounts on twitter are bots in the first place.

    • I would suspect 95% of new accounts that post anything but cat videos are bots and more than likely the bots are more about moving marketing eyes than political opinion. If your not on twitter at this point your either to young, to smart or to dumb for twitter.
      ITs a wasteland either way, I have a twitter account to see if my API works.
  • "may be" (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Sumguy2436 ( 6186944 )

    How conveniently vague.

    Reminds me of another one of these "people who disagree with me are bots" stories from earlier this year. People they called bots had a whopping 2-3% bot rating according to the metrics they used: https://reclaimthenet.org/twit... [reclaimthenet.org]

    It's weaponized bot-calling.

  • by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxrubyNO@SPAMcomcast.net> on Friday May 22, 2020 @08:40AM (#60090270)

    Where is the context? How many bots are pushing the lockdown? How many bots are pushing pro China propaganda? How many bots are pushing FUD? Without some context the article lacks any merit or value. This is nothing more than FUD.

    The editors really need to do a better job at clamping down on garbage articles like this. Comment count (user engagement) is significantly down from years past and polarizing articles like this are a big reason why. Stop alienating a significant part of your audience, Please show a little bit of tolerance, I promise it will not actually hurt you or anyone else.

  • "Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem," Require a phone number for signup, make accounts unable to post for 3 days after signup. Disclaimer: I am not sure if you currently need a phone number to sign up at the moment and I know you can bot that part, but I am sure that's quite costly since I can't buy free numbers.
  • Almost half? These days more than 60% from the Twitter accounts are bots.
  • by Wolfier ( 94144 ) on Friday May 22, 2020 @09:06AM (#60090420)

    Possibilities:
    1. American business interests (for obvious reasons)
    2. American government itself (see #1)
    3. Communist Party of China (to drag this on and delay investigation)
    4. Russia (a usual suspect of these online disinformation campaigns)
    5. ??? who else ???

  • Could have just written "Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts May Be Bots"...

    But then you couldn't push an agenda, I suppose.

  • Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts May Be Bots

    FTFY

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