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The Yang Gang and Its Bots

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Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#101

Post by jshevek »

hanniabu wrote: post #21
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.

What really pisses me off about bot accounts isn't the fake info simply because I analyze things based off my own opinions and research, although I understand how this is an issue for the general majority. My issue is that if I happen to retweet somebody opposite of that running a bot farm, then the bots are trigger to all report me and then I need to verify my account again the next time I'm on. And the sad thing is…

That is unfortunate. Sadly, it also happens without bots. Some communities self righteously abuse Twitter's reporting system just to silence or censor views they disagree with.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#102

Post by ci5er »

kevitivity wrote: post #99
ci5er wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

So true, the "Paulestinians" as I called them were the first thing that came to my mind while reading this. There is too little detail of methodology in this article to take it too seriously, but still interesting.

> "Paulestinians"

Ha! Never heard that one. It is by far more clever than any of the half-dozen or so that I did.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#103

Post by jshevek »

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.

From what I have seen of Yang Gangers, that could very well have been the result of real people. A high proportion of them are always online, highly vigilant, eager to participate in online activism.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#104

Post by pstuart »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #90
RyJones wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no position on Yang. After a couple very negative experiences with the Yang Gang, where anything less than instant adulation must mean you're anti-Yang, I'm anti-Yang.

Funny, I had the same experience with Bernie.

And I had the same experience with Hillary, yet I still voted for her (not as enthusiastically as I'd have liked) because I don't want to let a bunch of jerks make my mind up for me.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#105

Post by jshevek »

ilaksh wrote: post #50
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 t…

I am most definitely not a Yang support, I am critic, and yet I strongly agree with your last sentence. Saying the campaign is driven by bots, based on the 'evidence' presented so far, is an unsubstantiated smear.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#106

Post by dragonwriter »

ilaksh wrote: post #80
dragonwriter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Most recent poll has Yang at 8% nationally, beating Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. And Yang has been left of several polling questions entirely (whereas Klobuchar and Buttgieg always included) and left out of several graphics on TV. Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively.

> Most recent poll has Yang at 8% nationally, beating Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar.

Paying attention to individual polls produces more noise than useful information; you get more value (though less cherry-picking opportunities) from a poll aggregator like 538s.

But if you want to play that game, the most recent national primary poll I can find that includes Yang has him at 3%, the best recent polling was at 5% in a couple of polls about two weeks ago. [0] The only 8% for him I can find is a poll of voters under 30. [1]

> Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively.

No, Bloomberg—who started much later and actually is polling in the neighborhood of 8% now—is gaining massively. Yang's been bouncing around between 2-5% with no real trend since October; he's not gaining or losing anything that isn't small enough to be obscured by noise.

[0] see the list of polls here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary...

[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-da...

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#107

Post by speedplane »

raz32dust wrote: post #91

The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. She makes that inference very quickly, and from then on, they are just referred to as "bots". I am 100% sure there are bots, but I am highly skeptical that Yang Gang is the worst offender here or stands out in any way compared to other campaigns. In fact a quick check on twitteraudit.com tells that he mig…

> The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey.

The sad truth is that the vast majority of bots are extremely unsophisticated, they don't even try to hide their IP address through a proxy server, and basic tools like Google Analytics can identify this. In Google Analytics, just find the "Network" section, and see how much of your traffic is from "amazon web services", and just block all of it.

It may not block sophisticated scrapers, and it could potentially harm legitimate users (e.g., amazon based VPN services), but it's amazing how much "bot" traffic is identifiable.

The only real bot traffic that's hard to identify are actual people with machines that have been compromised.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#108

Post by jshevek »

Ottolay wrote: post #64
godelski wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting comment from multiple directions. 1) because I could see someone calling __this__ comment a bot comment, but you're much more active here and so it seems like you aren't. 2) Because if you are real, it really shows the idea (I suggested this in another comment too) that Yang Gangers come off as bots. (I also found the statement about Yang accounts being linked to MAGA accounts as evidence as fu…

I like Yang and it is kind of insulting to be dismissed as a bot for posting a comment supporting him. It feels dismissive and similar I would imagine to being a Bernie supporter and being called a "bernie bros". I know lots of Bernie supporters who are not dumb college males and lots of Yang supports who are not automated scripts (aka bots). edit: spelling

I have seen this accusation made frequently towards supporters of Bernie, Tulsi, Trump, and Yang. In all cases the accused were real people.

Edit: I could see this kind of mistreatment causing an increase in general anti-establishment sentiment.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#109

Post by coenhyde »

RyJones wrote: post #86
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"…

I had no position on Yang. After a couple very negative experiences with the Yang Gang, where anything less than instant adulation must mean you're anti-Yang, I'm anti-Yang.

That's unfortunate. Yang himself isn't very dogmatic / ideological. But his supporters are very passionate about his candidacy. So i can see your bad experiences happening. I support Yang; not sure if i would call myself Yang Gang...

For me personally, Yang is the first political candidate who sees and reasons about the world in a similar way to myself. He's a systems thinker. Everything in society is connected and to correctly address issues you have to understand how one component will influence another. That is very exciting for me!

He has a lot of policies, i don't agree with all of them but i'm a lot more aligned with him than any other candidate. Left or right.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#110

Post by speedplane »

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.

> 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.

Ardent non-supporter of UBI here! Not a bot!!

The nefarious issue with UBI is that it threatens our existing social safety nets. The social goal is not to give everyone a single basic income, it's to give everyone a single basic standard of living.

It's far more fair and moral to give folks access to basic standards of human decency (e.g., healthcare, education, housing, food, air), than writing them a check and letting them fend on their own. The moral underpinning of social safety nets is not to increase the total or average, but to increase the lowest.

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