The Yang Gang and Its Bots • Hacker News Board

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#111

Post by speedplane » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:06 AM UTC

jshevek wrote: post #103

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.

> From what I have seen of Yang Gangers, that could very well have been the result of real people.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The very fact that people are questioning whether political support is real or not the significant problem.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#112

Post by partiallypro » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

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 "everyone is a bot" thing is insanely stupid. It's not just happening with Yang, it happens with Trump, Bernie, and Tulsi (generally the others don't get accused.) Some people just can't imagine a world where so many people disagree with them that they make up reasons why it's happening. Yes bots exist, but one of the greatest tricks Russia has pulled is making people believe they are bigger and more powerful than they are.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#113

Post by pstuart » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:10 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #69

charlesju wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that perspective, but I hope you can see that unlike a religion, politics, especially in USA is through people. People need to push a specific candidate because they represent a vision for yourself and the people you love. One key thought experiment I like to do is to project out a behavior pattern for all people and then asking whether that would be a positive or negative for yourself and society. If ev…

I see that perspective and appreciate the comment. To be more clear, the weird thing to me is the __degree__ of fanaticism. I understand being passionate, there are many things I'm passionate about. But there are very few things where I would drop everything and campaign for someone. This REALLY reminds me of religion (I left a religion that sends people to go knock on peoples' doors for 2 years of their lives). I al…

To take the religion + politics thing further, consider that the president is hailed as being sent by God, and is surrounded by Christian Dominionists that are actively trying to apply make the U.S. a theocracy.

That's bound to stir up some passion on both sides, being that the stakes are rather high.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#114

Post by DalekBaldwin » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #63

vegcel wrote: post #57

I wonder how many people are more of the author's mistaken bots, like Mike mentioned in the article? If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior. Activities the author describes as bot-like to me seem like activities a noob on twitter would engage in. Twitter itself does a lot to self-create these node clusters, with a circle jerk of recommended follower…

> If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior. To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate. It is definitely an agenda that is pushed. Lots of new Twitter accounts that are pro Yang is not surprising if you visit the subreddit. It also shouldn't be surprising tha…

> To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate.

Not only that, Yang ran a couple of UBI-themed contests offering a chance to win money for following and retweeting him. What better use is there for acquiring an army of fake accounts?

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#115

Post by godelski » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:15 AM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #81

proximitysauce wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing bot like about this person's post. It's actually kind of a nice tale of civic re-engagement. It does make me more interested in hearing what Yang has to say because it seems honest and like a statement from someone who hasn't been doing political activism for years.

This looks like a green handle bot supporting another bot. You may find my statement pretty silly today but in about 5 years we will be in the uncanny valley.

Up and coming HN post "How I used GPT-2 to join the Yang Gang". (clearly I am a bot)

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#116

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:16 AM UTC

turtlecloud wrote: post #97

How many startup people have actually read “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel? Yang has gone from 0 to 1 and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. All these articles are people who have a distorted views of reality and chalk up his support as bots in order to fit their world view. The most likely reason from my observation is bias against Asian American men in leadership positions.

> Yang has gone from 0 to 1

Yang hasn't gone anywhere, he's been bouncing around in the same range for months with no systematic progress.

> and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer.

If he did something radical like doubling his support in Iowa in the, what, 10 days remaining, and the sources of support he gained were optimally distributed for him to move up positions, that would still only get him to fifth from his current sixth in Iowa, and he'd only be a little over half the support of #4.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#117

Post by bnjms » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:20 AM UTC

EdSharkey wrote: post #26

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 candidate straight outta Google is struggling? Too bad, Google. You could use more friends in high places the way things are headed.

Yang is often referred to as a “tech entrepreneur” but it’s practically a smear to insinuate he’s some billionaire (a common assumption). It’s more accurate to say he’s a nonprofit entrepreneur given his dot-com was a charity organizing company and his nonprofit works with startups in underserved markets.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#118

Post by godelski » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:29 AM UTC

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…

> In fact a quick check on twitteraudit.com

Yang: 95%; 1,061,978 Real 48,878 Fake

Bernie: 69%; 7,052,953 Real 3,124,469 Fake

Warren: 84%; 2,966,118 Real 560,776 Fake

Buttigieg: 93%; 1,481,598 Real 102,999 Fake

Biden: 84%; 3,375,998 Real 619,266 Fake

Trump: 79%; 56,463,132 Real 14,292,673 Fake

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#119

Post by zweep » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:42 AM UTC

People exhibit such bot-like behavior in certain circumstances that the burden of proof for calling something a bot is extremely high. If you saw sports fans in a stadium you’d think they were bots authored by the team’s robotics division — the same behaviors manifest in online discussions of politics. It's like how CAPTCHAs today are virtually unsolvable for humans -- we meatbags are more bot than the bots.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#120

Post by bnjms » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:51 AM UTC

lonelappde wrote: post #56

godelski wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

Obviously a dark horse Democratic candidate would claim MAGA support, that's a tactic to present as "electable".

Sure but in this case it’s his adherents who are claiming to be right leaning and former MAGA supporters.

It doesn’t look good to Democrats to see memes for Yang or back to Trump so I cannot be cynical here.

edit: Because it's a bad look with Democrats to have a lot of right leaning support I take the MAGA supporters at their word. Particularly because I'm a Yang supporter and became politically disengaged after supporting Bush in my first election cycle.