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The Yang Gang and Its Bots

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Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#41

Post by godelski »

waisbrot wrote: post #39
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…

> Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too? Which party do you think Yang is running for? Anyway, the article was clearly describing as "sad" that the teenager is trying to build an online following but his "following" is just bots using him to look less like bots.

One of Yang's pitches is that he is pulling from the MAGA group. Just scroll down the subreddit [0] and you'll see tons of posts about MAGA/Republicans switching sides for Yang. If anything I'd __expect__ a real person to be more likely to be connected to both MAGA and Yang (compared to the average democratic voter). But that also makes it difficult to tell real people from bots, which is what this story is really about.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#42

Post by tptacek »

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…

The teenager following the bots isn't sad because he intersects with MAGA, he's said because he's a kid working at Taco Bell who hopes to build up an online fanbase, and unbeknownst to him, all his interactions and affirmations appear to come from bot accounts.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#43

Post by scarmig »

ipsum2 wrote: post #38
baddox wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to. The fact that using Twitter bots hasn't caused one candidate to become the most popular doesn't seem like sufficient evidence. Perhaps he would be even less popular without the Twitter bots. And perhaps many of the other candidates are doing the same thing, but better or at a larger scale.

> It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to. Why? When people measure how ads perform, the null hypothesis is that the ad has no effect on the behavior of the viewer. Bots are sort of like ads that look like native content. That being said, I don't think a single data point (Yang) is enough to be conclusive, but it does change my beliefs…

Individual ads, sure. But an equivalent null hypothesis would be "social media advertising has no effect on people," which would seem pretty strange.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#44

Post by ilaksh »

I'm a 42 year old Yang supporter. I never voted before and only used Twitter for a week or so many years ago. A few Yang posts are the only things I have ever retweeted. In particular when he was excluded from the debates I was retweeting everything with #AmericaNeedsYang or whatever. I am not a bot. But my activity then might have seemed bot-like.

Anyway if anyone hasn't 100% made up their mind on Yang maybe watch a few YouTube videos of him.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#45

Post by harimau777 »

zachrose wrote: post #6
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.

> 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. Access to post on Twitter is not a 1st Amendment right!

When the president is using Twitter as his primary means of communicating with the public, it becomes a 1st Amendment right. Granted, this may be more an issue of the president using a private system to communicate with the public.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#46

Post by retsibsi »

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…

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

This is not logical. "This kind of thing poisons the political process" does not come close to implying 'any candidate who engages in this kind of thing is likely to become wildly popular'. That would be an obviously crazy position, and refuting it is only useful as a way to avoid engaging with non-strawmanned concerns about social media manipulation.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#47

Post by SuoDuanDao »

Communitivity wrote: post #29

I encountered this myself after responding to someone's comment about the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept, and got spammed with negative replies. I figured it was just ardent supporters, bots make sense though given the speed of the responses. Sadly, I think this may be the new normal of politics in the 2020s.

I had the same experience. I wonder what's behind it and how well organised the group is.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#48

Post by ci5er »

godelski wrote: post #40

This is an interesting post if you also follow the subreddit for Yang[0]. There are a lot of people there that created Twitter accounts just to follow Yang and participate in those polls about who is more popular. So when the author mentions the creation of new accounts when Yang started, it actually doesn't surprise me. The campaign is very technocentric after all. Also, these people (a lot of them "true believers"…

Seems (to me) to be similar to the Ron Paul bots (fanatics, I should say, because they certainly weren't mechanical war-bots; They seemed like what the right calls NPCs these days, but they were just so ... into it! 24/7! It's actually kind of nice to see groups of new/young people get excited about politics - I think they might learn a lot through the process (maybe)) all over Reddit in 2008 (not just /r/politics, but they were everywhere), esp. since that also included all of the influx of rapidly migrating Diggers.

Maybe it's not the same, but those folks were all in on the Paul Train (or whatever they called it). They were eggcited!

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

ngokevin2 wrote: post #14
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.

> Yang's campaign has been consistently growing and growing as other campaigns have dropped out.

His support is consistently enough nonzero across multiple polls that you can say he has some support, but it's often within the margin of error of zero on individual polls. He's not gaining enough to have a welk's chance in a supernova of winning.

On the other hand, he generally leads NY Times-endorsed Klobuchar (and yet, pollsters are less likely to include him in their polls), so there's that.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#50

Post by ilaksh »

KhoomeiK wrote: post #32

Kind of ironic that the candidate aiming to solve issues created by AI is being propelled forward by AI-driven bots

I think that one article doesn't prove that Yang's campaign is driven by bots.

I'm a 42 year old programmer who has never voted before. I am voting for Yang because his policies are superior and the other candidates have outdated policies or worldviews.

I have contributed around $400 or $500 and if there is something we are "trying to trend" I will retweet it (even though I never really used Twitter before now).

By the way, Yang has received endorsements from people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dave Chappelle, Donald Glover, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, James Gunn.

Saying the campaign is driven by bots is an unsubstantiated smear.

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