I have wondered whether the 50c army will go global, and what would become of forums like this one if it happens.
They're already all over Quora and Reddit.
False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
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Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#22I have wondered whether the 50c army will go global, and what would become of forums like this one if it happens.
It's already happening. the 50c army vs the $0 army thinking they're doing anything useful with those arrows lol.
I’ve been accused of being 50c army for expressing a more neutral tone on China and challenging pro-US anti-China rhetoric.
It’s actually impossible to have a reasonable conversation about China, Chinese economy, Chinese government, or Xijinping because those seperate things are all conflated into a single one.
Where as if you try to conflate, Biden (or trump) with US economy, america or the america people you will quickly get torn down as being ridiculous for the conflation.
It’s very hard to overcome this blind spot on HN.
Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#23Suspicions were aroused after researchers found a third of the accounts under investigation to have been created within minutes of each other. They exclusively promoted UK-based PRC diplomats, ignoring those in other countries.
So human researchers were able to spot a pretty obvious pattern. How come Twitter's own staff and algorithms never seem to catch on, despite having even more data to look at?
It amazes me that Twitter fails at something so basic -- identifying and shutting down bot networks -- and has been failing at it for so long. Here's a report from 2017 (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082). Another one from 2014 (https://medium.com/i-data/fake-friends-with-real-benefits-ee...). If you look through the archives you will find similar reports going back 15 years.
Someone on HN (can't find the ref) once speculated that Twitter has an incentive not to shut down the fake accounts because the fakes boosts user numbers and "engagement" which correlate with profit. Twitter is certainly making a lot: I once looked into running a Twitter ad campaign for my business until I saw projected $2+ clicks. Are the massive margins suggested by those CPCs built on the backs of fake accounts?
Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#24We're not supposed to question it, but in this case it seems salient: your account was created just to post this and it's got a lot of upvotes for something seemingly banal. Is this part of a competing "diplomatic program"?
This. Even the website bitterwind just looks like an attack site against China. It seems to just have “articles” that just say negative things about China. This is just seems to be another play in an influence campaign.
Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#25> We identify a large network of Twitter accounts that demonstrate multiple forms of coordinated inauthentic activity. The network consists of 62 accounts in total, 29 of which were recently active until we flagged their activity for Twitter. 29 active accounts is 'a large network'? From this report: https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/127/20...
Even the 62 accounts? That is like nothing, I would expect single person to manage half of that in a day with efficient tools.
Why are these numbers always so laughable like all the press of Russian spending couple tens of thousand on advertising, when in general speding was in billions.
I wonder how many pro-DNC troll accounts there are too, and why those aren't tracked in like?
Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#26At this point, I truly believe (despite this can sound utterly obvious) that social networks are not just products for "entertaining" the masses (In reality is just a honey pot for gathering your data, make a consumer profile out of your interactions and sell stuff to you later roughly speaking). I mean, it might be the case that initially were conceived strictly for this purpose, but the side effect is that it also provides with a huge vector for spreading propaganda and manipulation, not only by local actors, but also for foreign countries. Basically is a direct communication channel with the vast majority of citizens from a region. So, maybe with the right amount of persuasion ,good strategy and time, external governments can be destabilized.
Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#27Impressive headline wording where the concept of borders simultaneously exists and doesn’t exist so people can feel fearful of their home lives being threatened and also fearful because it’s a scary other doing it from so far away. “Invade” lol
Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#28Odd that an academic paper would fail to mention the work of the UK company Bell Pottinger that conducted a deliberate, paid Twitter campaign with thousands of false account in 2018 with the intent to stoke a racial war (nevermind overturn democracy) in South Africa on behalf of the former president's faction and a family of Indian criminals.
From what I understand it bloody nearly succeeded. Perhaps the Chinese learnt from the great job the British did?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/business/bell-pottinger-g...
Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's not salient at all. It's a research report from the University of Oxford: https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/127/20... If you want to criticize something, criticize that. We can do without baseless accusations.
First, there point was that this post seems to engage in similar tactics. The report existing doesn't mean this isn't some counter information campaign. Second, the post links to an article about that report, and though the article mentions 189 twitter accounts the report only lists 62. Similarly, they don't show close to the 62000 tweets mentioned in the article from what I could see.
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Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK
#30Suspicions were aroused after researchers found a third of the accounts under investigation to have been created within minutes of each other. They exclusively promoted UK-based PRC diplomats, ignoring those in other countries. So human researchers were able to spot a pretty obvious pattern. How come Twitter's own staff and algorithms never seem to catch on, despite having even more data to look at? It amazes me that…
Well yeah, what we see as obvious bots, twitter sees as MAUs which it can include in figures given to investors and shareholders.
Because they haven't developed any systems to identify the bots, they can pretend that they do not know they are bots - and their active user figures are not fraudulent/illegal. If they identified the bots, then they would not be able to lie about these accounts.