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60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

theprint.in

21–30 of 309 posts

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#21
eh, by now, I think we are all pretty well resigned to Twitter, FB, TT, etc., being organs of propaganda with a social veneer. By propaganda I mean propaganda, to disseminate the establishment take on things. Occasionally you get the dissenter's take or opposition's propaganda, but it's pretty much all propaganda, mostly from, to borrow a hippie phrase, "the man". Not everything "the man" says is automatically wrong, as was presumed in the '70s, but you know, he has his prerogatives.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#22
post #8

Retry the same experiment over VK. I bet you'll get opposite stats: 99% bots pro Putin.

Well, I take you on your bet. Now you can go and retry it and if you manage to get that 99% I'd be genuinely surprised: from my experience, it's about 20% if that, and there are lots of Ukrainian-administered groups VK support team pretty adamantly refuses to "deal" with for the last half the year.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#23
post #13

So, the million (or trillion) dollar question is, who controls them?

Private companies that leverage interest in war to drive traffic to their services

Don't you think that would be a pretty big PR risk?

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#24

Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Any even neutral story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia's propaganda is. But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc. This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a s…

That depends mightily on the subreddit though, as always. The better ones flair or ban the propaganda posts.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#25
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private companies that leverage interest in war to drive traffic to their services

Don't you think that would be a pretty big PR risk?

Plausible deniability

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#26
post #18

Title should be: 60-80% of Twitter accounts posting on Russia-Ukraine war WITH GENERIC HASHTAGS are bots Most tweets I see don't have any of these hashtags

I don't see bots in my feed, but they have free reign in the comments. I'm worried that both bots as a means to message at volume and the rise of NLP and captcha-beating models will ultimately lead to a loss of freedom. One way to combat these is to massively fund anti-botting teams, which doesn't really feed the bottom line. The other way is to require full state ID - driver's license or passport - to register for s…

You can probably buy pictures of IDs from India or some other place where people don't care much about not being able to use Twitter.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#27

Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Any even neutral story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia's propaganda is. But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc. This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a s…

I run a social media marketing service; we stream all reddit content (~110 posts/comments per second). We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts.

Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. It’s really concerning, particular that the “real” users on reddit tend to be young and impressionable.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#28

Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Any even neutral story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia's propaganda is. But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc. This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a s…

Alleged Russian bot here, I was torn apart in a thread about the European energy crisis for attempting a balanced perspective. It's sad to see, but not really worth the time trying to fight against it. The vast majority of folk seem actively happy to be misinformed, so long as that misinformation is consensus among their social circles. Better to use the information as some kind of indicator of the demographic you are interacting with, and act accordingly (most probably, find something better to do)

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#29

Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Any even neutral story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia's propaganda is. But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc. This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a s…

Reddit has gotten...weird. It's at the point where I almost consider that most of the people I'm talking to there on the mainstream subs actually are bots.

Re: 60-80% of Tweeters posting on Russia-Ukraine war are bots, 90% pro Ukraine

#30
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see bots in my feed, but they have free reign in the comments. I'm worried that both bots as a means to message at volume and the rise of NLP and captcha-beating models will ultimately lead to a loss of freedom. One way to combat these is to massively fund anti-botting teams, which doesn't really feed the bottom line. The other way is to require full state ID - driver's license or passport - to register for s…

You can probably buy pictures of IDs from India or some other place where people don't care much about not being able to use Twitter.

I don't know. I think such a system would integrate an ID verification process. That would be almost inescapable.
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