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

theprint.in

71–80 of 309 posts

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

#71
post #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,…

personally I think the meaning of that "the Man" phrase is something like.. "a person of authority (male) acting to further authority (and its privelages/power/profits) for its own sake" .. in other words, the presentation is appeal-to-authority directives, given for the sake of reinforcing the existing authority and its privileges. This is typical for military-to-civilian communication, defending and advancing big b…

To me the man was a faceless power --not a person at all, but could be stand in for the USG, the fuzz, a boss, or shadowy figure, even things beyond your control.

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

#72
Too many bots was the stated reason that Elon Musk used to decide not to go through with his purchase of Twitter. Hopefully Twitter will take a massive stock dive with this news allowing Musk to buy the company for a much cheaper price. Otherwise there will be two platforms, Twitter for leftists and bots, and Truth Social for conservatives. If Twitter is not reformed then the two bubbles will no longer interact bifurcating the audiences stifling debate. Perhaps that is inevitable anyway as Democrats and Republicans no longer wish to have dialogue as evidenced by Katie Hobbs and John Fetterman refusing to debate.

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

#73

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 hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my ideal scenario they both take each out without effecting the actual EU.

The problem with them taking each other out is the millions of innocents they’d kill along the way.

The only good outcome is a peace agreement.

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

#74

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 hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my ideal scenario they both take each out without effecting the actual EU.

> Ukraine [...] seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups

So is the US. Rising fascism is simply the state of the world right now.

To pick the first story at the top of my feed right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/jan-6-camp-auschwitz-h...

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

#75

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.

[deleted]

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

#76

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…

It's obviously better if people always look at things with a sceptical eye but it isn't weird to me people want to support the Ukrainians.

Pair the narrative of the smaller country being invaded by the belligerent dictator next door with (in my case) a country where Russia is already unpopular due to various assassinations, sabre-rattling, and so on, its not hard to understand the current balance of

In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn't been too much potential for egregious nonsense.

In my obviously biased view the thing that worries me is actually people (knowingly, twitter promotes a fairly distorted presentation of ones true feelings) swallowing Russian propaganda hook line and sinker out of a fairly boring contrarianism.

It is easy to imagine the debates in the neutral (or less than neutral) countries of past historical conflicts - you can make your own mind up about how those debates would go, but this conflict (paired with such easy access to differing opinion) seems to be a great source of material.

Contrarianism is often a very important thing to have in society, make no mistake, but many would benefit (and perhaps internally do, who knows) from being contrarian against their own beliefs, even just for a little time a day - this goes for both sides of this conflict although I won't pussyfoot by saying that both sides are in some way the same.

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

#77
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…

even if you don't follow the conflict it's pretty easy to say whose the good guys and whose the bad guys

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

#79
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It did, but due to the limitations of technology it was not pervasive and did not have control over people's psyche. It did not control students, colleges and libraries, even private companies the way it does today. Not by a long shot.

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

#80

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's weakest link is the moderators. You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site. I imagine that's what the Ukrainian propaganda ministry has managed.

Outside this I find it somewhat bizarre that we've let the unemployed mentally ill decide what is and isn't acceptable for millions to see.

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