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A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

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Re: A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

#11

Post by Fauntleroy »

iratewizard wrote: post #4
BitwiseFool wrote: post #3

Can anyone familiar with Twitter explain how people like Jeff Tiedrich, Eugene Gu, ToddlerTrump, TrumpOwO, etc, manage to be the first few responders to everything @realDonaldTrump tweets? (Edit) To expand on this, some of these accounts are clearly bots that just modify the text of the tweet. I can see how easy it would be to make these bots - but not how they manage to be the first responses so consistently. Surely…

Spam bots as a form of attack is OK when you are desperate to prevent someone from being elected. At least that's Twitter's official policy.

At least they consistently allow the same spamming behavior on other candidates' posts.

Re: A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

#12

Post by Goladus »

lenitabinol wrote: post #7
iratewizard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam bots as a form of attack is OK when you are desperate to prevent someone from being elected. At least that's Twitter's official policy.

Is it hard to understand why people are disgusted by him? If you can't acknowledge that, it's hard to have a conversation at all. His type of behavior and language brings out hate and revulsion in even the kindest people. If you don't get it, I don't know what to say. It has nothing to do with his politics or policy stances, it has to do with his behavior.

His type of behavior and language brings out hate and revulsion in even the kindest people.

From what I see, the hate and revulsion is brought out primarily by confirmation bias due to (a) subjective reporting on his behavior and language and (b) gaps in factual knowledge.

I assume there are people who are legitimately repulsed by his behavior, but I never see people actually explain themselves clearly. They always engage in question-begging and other fallacies and misdirection, as you are now. You state that Trump's behavior is reprehensible, but do not allow that position to be challenged and provide no argument at all in support of your statement.

If you don't know how to apply discipline and empirical methods to have a discussion in a detached and productive manner, then yes you are going to have a very hard time with conversations with people who don't share your biases. And if you can just downvote, censor, and otherwise dismiss/marginalize/deplatform the person challenging your bias, you will never learn the truth.

Re: A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

#13

Post by cwhiz »

tjoff wrote: post #10
jeffbee wrote: post #2

Pretty remarkable how easy it is to click your way to an insane spammer. For example the #1 inbound to Kamala Harris is some account with no followers or mentions, recently joined, posted the same reply to 600 different threads all on October 16th, liked all of its own posts, and has been dormant since. Not exactly a great contribution to the discourse.

How is that not automatically detected? Is there any evidence of any sort that any attempt to thwart things like this has even been attempted?

It is easily detected. Neither Twitter nor FB have any (edit: typo) desire to remedy this. These bots are what keep the discourse going.

Re: A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

#14

Post by [deleted] »

lenitabinol wrote: post #7
iratewizard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam bots as a form of attack is OK when you are desperate to prevent someone from being elected. At least that's Twitter's official policy.

Is it hard to understand why people are disgusted by him? If you can't acknowledge that, it's hard to have a conversation at all. His type of behavior and language brings out hate and revulsion in even the kindest people. If you don't get it, I don't know what to say. It has nothing to do with his politics or policy stances, it has to do with his behavior.

[deleted]

Re: A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

#15

Post by cwhiz »

It is obvious from these graphs than an overwhelming percentage of political discourse on Twitter is from bots. Just eyeballing it, it seems to be at least 70-90% of inbound mentions are from bots.

These bots are obvious enough that we should wonder what is motivating Twitter.

Re: A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

#16

Post by Goladus »

commandlinefan wrote: post #8
lenitabinol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it hard to understand why people are disgusted by him? If you can't acknowledge that, it's hard to have a conversation at all. His type of behavior and language brings out hate and revulsion in even the kindest people. If you don't get it, I don't know what to say. It has nothing to do with his politics or policy stances, it has to do with his behavior.

Disgusted? No, I really don't see it. He's a bit of (ok a lot of) a hot-head, and definitely not politically correct, but otherwise he's not that much different than past presidents besides actually saying what he's thinking.

This post is being downvoted to protect the echo chamber. No dissent is allowed, even on an obviously subjective matter such as interpretation of a public figure's behavior.

Re: A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

#17

Post by ehsankia »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #9
BitwiseFool wrote: post #3

Can anyone familiar with Twitter explain how people like Jeff Tiedrich, Eugene Gu, ToddlerTrump, TrumpOwO, etc, manage to be the first few responders to everything @realDonaldTrump tweets? (Edit) To expand on this, some of these accounts are clearly bots that just modify the text of the tweet. I can see how easy it would be to make these bots - but not how they manage to be the first responses so consistently. Surely…

Do those accounts really manage to get "frost pist" status? Their replies often appear first when you open a tweet from president Trump, but I assume replies are listed in order by some popularity measure and not chronologically.

This is very easy to verify, go under any big tweet and you can see that the replies are not chronological. It is indeed trying to use some sort of popularity metric. Having many followers that see and like your tweets would definitely help you get positions higher than random bots.

Re: A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

#18

Post by ehsankia »

jeffbee wrote: post #2

Pretty remarkable how easy it is to click your way to an insane spammer. For example the #1 inbound to Kamala Harris is some account with no followers or mentions, recently joined, posted the same reply to 600 different threads all on October 16th, liked all of its own posts, and has been dormant since. Not exactly a great contribution to the discourse.

Meanwhile I have a Twitter bot which only replies to direct @ mentions, with 3000+ followers, and it gets shadowbanned on a monthly basis, hiding the bot's reply not only from random viewers, but even from the very person who is tweeting @ my bot and also follows my bot...

And they somehow claim that they don't "shadowban" [0]. What a joke. Worst part is that since you're not actually banned, there's literally no recourse or support you can get either.

But then these new accounts with no followers can spam thousands of tweets to big accounts and get away with it? Very strange.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...

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