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

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

#61

Post by mikkergp »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #49
trasz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Any even neutral story about Russia People tend to approach a country differently depending on whether it's a genocidal regime invading another country, or the defending nation. When thinking about WW2 we think of Nazis in a fundamentally different way than we think of their victims. Another thing is, it's been six months and we can tell how close to reality Ukrainian and Russian propaganda turns out to be afterward…

Regardless, when thinking about WW2 we look for evidence for claims, and take neither Nazi propaganda nor Allied propaganda at face-value. Propaganda from those days seems almost comically transparent in retrospect. During war time even today, propaganda is a powerful and pervasive weapon. The weird thing is Redditors seem to understand this fully, and yet assume this rule applies only to one side.

What would be the benefit of being able to identify the propaganda, practically speaking. I get being principales against it, but are there any big ballot measures I missed? I have no ability to impact the war, why does it matter if I want to rah rah for the invaded a bit?

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

#62

Post by perihelions »

stazz1 wrote: post #34
imnotreallynew wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fake activity is how reddit got to threshold growth, the trend continues :P

To anyone unfamiliar with the background:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139876 ("How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts")

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

#63

Post by pclmulqdq »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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 used to be a mod of a small subreddit and I was a huge redditor a while ago. It was kind of an open secret that pretty much everything on reddit was manipulated by bots. A huge redditor at the time (unidan) was banned for using bots to pump his posts and comments, and that made bot manipulation a lot less secret for a while.

It's an anonymous site and you don't even need an email address to sign up, so it's very easy to spin up many accounts.

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

#64

Post by mikkergp »

mc32 wrote: post #58
unsupp0rted wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless, when thinking about WW2 we look for evidence for claims, and take neither Nazi propaganda nor Allied propaganda at face-value. Propaganda from those days seems almost comically transparent in retrospect. During war time even today, propaganda is a powerful and pervasive weapon. The weird thing is Redditors seem to understand this fully, and yet assume this rule applies only to one side.

Imagine if the USG had this power in the 60s and 70s as draught dodgers and war protestors sought to provide an alternative perspective. With this technology and todays psyche, they would have been buried and labeled as foreign agents and bits and what have you. People cannot lose sight of that. We need dissent, even when we're right.

What makes you think this didn’t happen? It seems to me that the 60s and 70s were full of this.

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

#65

Post by unsupp0rted »

cantSpellSober wrote: post #53
prox wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That was more true a decade ago. Once a reddit gets big enough to be useful, it will be too big. After the_donald and similar, strange white supremacist posts started appearing in, say, small programming reddits that had previously been immune to shitposting.

I also experienced the reverse: programming subreddits, tv show subreddits, and even blogs and mailing lists started telling me to support BLM (which isn't a thing in my country), avoid beating up Asian people (which was easy to do since I was living in Asia), etc

I was there for Javascript tricks and they insisted that I check my privilege. It got exhausting, not because it's insulting, but because the signal to noise ratio of what I came to a subreddit or mailing list to see was way off the mark.

This seems to have improved a bit in the last year or two, since Covid stole the show, but not entirely.

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

#67

Post by raverbashing »

imnotreallynew wrote: post #27
unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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.

I mean, you even see bot comments on threads that are plain copies of previous comments on the same thread

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

#68

Post by mpclark »

volkk wrote: post #35

i've stopped following this war/conflict because the amount of bs stemming from both sides is unparalleled from other stuff i've seen historically. i legitimately can't tell what is made up/staged/propaganda from actual facts, and i am guessing i will never know. some of it is very blatant. twitter is filled with bots, and deceit is everywhere. not surprised at all reading this fyi -- i was born in ukraine and i can…

If I was a propagandist, this is the second order effect I'd want to see. If people don't lap up my story, inducing apathy is the next best thing.

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

#69

Post by ilikecakeandpie »

sudden_dystopia wrote: post #37
thepasswordis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting. I’ve only ever used Reddit for like diy, maker type subreddits and those are pretty hard to fake. Between Reddit and twitter, it sounds like we are being manipulated to the moon and back.

I'd assume that niche subreddits are probably fine, but any that have frontpaged are probably laden with bots

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

#70

Post by xani_ »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #20

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'm guessing sentiment is "well even if it's a lie, it's a lie in good cause". And it's not exactly easy to even fact check anything
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