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The Yang Gang and Its Bots

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Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#11

Post by aazaa »

The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process.

It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills.

The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those who still can't accept that the US elected the current president, is that things like Twitter bots and fake Facebook ads are just sideshows.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#12

Post by Barrin92 »

aazaa wrote: post #11

The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process. It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills. The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those wh…

even assuming that's true and all other things being equal, people passing bots off as natural users rather than clearly marking that they're bots is simply lying and detrimental to discourse if for the sole reason that these bots are being mistaken for authentic users.

Given the crude tactics outlined in this article, with accounts making 400 tweets per day in regular intervals, duplicate accounts of the same alleged person and so on I think it's pretty bad that platforms like Twitter do not pursue the issue much more agressively.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#13

Post by ngokevin »

It deems accounts as bots if they post and retweet a lot and are newly created? Being familiar with the Yang Gang, people are extremely passionate almost to an addiction of supporting Yang. They follow his every move, his surrogates words, and engage with any tiny bit of content they can. Many are new accounts because few have ever followed politics and want to keep separate from their main accounts.

Yang has one of the strongest audit scores with 95% of followers being real. Contrasted with Bernie Sanders at only 69%. https://www.twitteraudit.com/andrewyang | https://www.twitteraudit.com/berniesanders

While there may be a few bad actors, it is definitely not representative of those that engage with Yang and his campaign. It shows up on the ground as well where Yang's following shows up in biggest numbers.

At least in Iowa, there were hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that flew in to canvass in the snow, outnumbering most campaign ground forces. In San Francisco, weekly hangouts have been growing to 30 people, and volunteer events turn out 15+ people regularly. I believe this is nationwide as well, there aren't many campaigns that have been matching the grassroots volunteer forces.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#14

Post by ngokevin2 »

aazaa wrote: post #11

The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process. It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills. The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those wh…

Yang's campaign has been consistently growing and growing as other campaigns have dropped out. He raised $16.5M last quarter. Polls show him at 5%+ with an up arrow attached to it. And that's not counting that polls don't capture his base (first-time voters, independents, disaffected conservatives).

As for the article, I'll address it in another comment.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#15

Post by comnetxr »

Someone should make a Twitter-like that verifies posters at various levels based on humanness/geographic locale and other characteristics.

Then posters could limit conversations to those with >90% human score (with score going up when twitter has more certainty that you are a human) located in the US (for US political conversations), etc.

I'd certainly pay a few bucks to be verified and contribute much more often to conversations than I do now, as now it just seems like screaming into the bot void.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#17

Post by ngokevin2 »

save_ferris wrote: post #4

It’s terrifying how cheap and easy it is to masquerade as hundreds of thousands to millions of people on social media using automation, and how little social media companies are doing to stop it. Regardless of the numbers, the stress it’s placing on discourse is devastating, and there seem to be few serious, market-driven solutions to this problem. The growth-at-all-costs mentality has put companies like Twitter in a…

It's also terrifying that headlines and articles can be taken as valid. Smear articles and misleading information are troubling as well in the upcoming years.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#18

Post by naveen99 »

Yang supporters believe expats should also get the freedom dividend. It would be funny if yang just declares a United States of earth and distributes the freedom dividend to every human on the entire planet...

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#19

Post by ngokevin2 »

leptoniscool wrote: post #3

I'm surprised Twitter isn't doing more about political bots, since they've banned political ad dollars. On the other hand, if they banned an account and it turned out to be a real person, they could get some first amendment lawsuits.

I think they do what they can. But it's not really as prevalent in the Yang Gang as the article suggests.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#20

Post by rdtsc »

proximitysauce wrote: post #8

That's a lot of narrative overlaid on the data. The author even says this about Democratic politician accounts: > All of them had bot activity of some kind. Given enough time to collect the data, bot networks would eventually appear for all of them. I think the analysis could be very interesting but they're injecting too much personal spin on the motivations of everyone involved. Why is the teenager who follows the Y…

I found it was a good intro to the world of Twitter bots. I don’t use Twitter but like to read about its influence and how others are using it.

But yeah I did get the same tinge of condescension about the “sad” and “lonely” teenager Mike because he works at Taco Bell, doesn’t want to go into $100k worth of debt going to college and is following bots from campaigns she doesn’t agree with.

> He seemed lonely. Eager to please. His last video blog he announced he wasn’t going to college after all…

Like you said, what if he followed Bloomberg bots, would he be described as “sad” too.

However at the same I would have to concede that writing an unbiased article about political bots in this day and age is probably not gonna happen, either.

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