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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

#131

Post by danjoredd »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #102
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…

> Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Can it be called "propaganda" if it's just like, an r/worldnews link to a story on some website and then 100,000 "actual users" (I don't think they're all bots?) on their own volition/will/brainpower spread/support (upvote) the "pro-Ukraine" message in the comments?

If those users are legit, sure. But lets be honest...writing bots in Reddit is stupid easy. I have done it myself. Most things that appear on the front page are most likely not legit. Darknet Diaries, a podcast on hacking, had an episode proving how Apple Podcast top 10s are rigged through bots. Episode 27, specifically. And the thing is...if we can easily do it by pushing mediocre podcasts to the top of a list, why can't we do so with Reddit posts? The API even has calls to upvote/downvote posts and leave comments. This is a thing that Reddit as a company actively supports.

I highly recommend watching two videos..."The Dead Internet Theory", by All Time, and "Reddit is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills Every Day" by Point. They go into how Reddit works algorithmically, and how there is a strong incentive for corporations, governments, and political movements to write bots to manipulate karma. If hackernews lets me, I will link both of them and the darknet diaries episode. Im new here, so Im not sure how links work on ycombinator.

Darknet diaries 27: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/

Dead Internet Theory: https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I

Reddit is run by shills: https://youtu.be/4uIrnEIuL8o

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

#132

Post by hackerlight »

thrown_22 wrote: post #93
wycy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

In the US you don't have regiments with swastikas on their flags. In Ukraine you do.

The US has the luxury of not being invaded by a country 3x as big. Ukraine doesn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing who is allowed to defend.

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

#133

Post by hackerlight »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #100
bergenty wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you spend a fair amount of time living in Ukraine, you're unlikely to encounter or notice Neo Nazi groups. They certainly do exist and you'll see a swastika spray-painted on abandoned buildings here and there. You can probably find and join a Neo Nazi group more easily than you could in the West, sure. But generally people don't seem to have much problem with Jews (at least publicly). Middle-aged people and older…

Antisemitism is significantly higher in Russia than Ukraine according to polling.

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

#134

Post by yamtaddle »

the_mar wrote: post #82
bergenty wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where are you seeing this? Genuinely asking because I always thought that the whole ukraine neo-nazi thing was entirely made up

My understanding was that they do have a neo-Nazi militia that was incorporated into the official army, and they made at least some effort to clean them up a bit, after that. This happened because the militia rose up and started having significant success against the Russians in 2014 while the Ukrainian army was struggling, so there was a "the enemy of my enemy..." aspect. Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know.

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

#135

Post by less_less »

To clarify the title: The authors sampled accounts that tweeted certain pro-Russia or pro-Ukraine war-related English hashtags. Roughly 90% of the sampled accounts were pro-Ukraine and 60-80% of the sampled accounts were estimated to be bots. It's *not* a situation where the humans are pro-Russia and the bots are pro-Ukraine. The vast majority of the (supposed) bots were pro-Ukraine, but so were the vast majority of the (supposed) humans.

From the article:

> Pro-Russian accounts have a mean CAP score of 0.42, while pro-Ukrainian accounts have a mean score of 0.43, with medians 0.36 and 0.34 respectively.

The CAP score is the estimation of bottiness from the Botometer software they used.

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

#136

Post by thrown_22 »

hackerlight wrote: post #132
thrown_22 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US you don't have regiments with swastikas on their flags. In Ukraine you do.

The US has the luxury of not being invaded by a country 3x as big. Ukraine doesn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing who is allowed to defend.

Had the Nazis been purged between 2014 and today Russia would have most likely not invaded.

Least we forget that during that period Nazi death squads killed more people in the break away regions than have so far died in this war. The last time US citizens were killed abroad in large numbers by the army of another country was the Alamo and we still remember it.

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

#137

Post by rustybelt »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #123
rustybelt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the entire narrative you laid out is the result of a propaganda campaign. I don't think it is in this case, but the presence of this quantity of bots pushing a certain perspective does make me question my assumptions and worry how I'm being influenced in cases that are not nearly as black and white as Ukraine vs Russia.

If you see Ukraine vs Russia as black and white, it means you are already manipulated. The conflict didn't start on 24th of February this year. Even if the press pretends it's all clear, there's a long history of events full of nuances going back hundreds of years that can paint the current events in one or other colour.

Trust me, I see your point. I was trying to be diplomatic considering the dominant perspective.

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

#138

Post by 20amxn20 »

joecot wrote: post #122
mhh__ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

Americans have been so indoctrinated to the idea that every issue must have two sides who should be equally considered, that when we have issues where one side is the obvious aggressor completely in the wrong, they don't know how to comprehend it. Our media has made everything a debate game because it gets viewers, and it's rotting people's ability to actually figure out what the right side of an issue is. There is n…

I'd argue that, yes, there can be a valid counterargument against everything you mention. The only dangerous trend here is pretending that there are undeniable consensus. Especially if they were forged in the last 0.5-0.05% of the lifespan of humanity.

Also nobody is critizing Ukraine from defending itself. We're critizing Reddit and redditors in general for being hypocrites. Never in history were "people of color denied from existing without harassment", etc. What does people of color even mean? Doesn't that group comprise the vast majority of human beings?

You've swallowed an entire package of propaganda and, more importantly, implying that that's The Truth (tm) and that it cannot be argued with. That's why I think people like you are our biggest pressing problem.

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

#139

Post by jevgeni »

bperki8 wrote: post #3
jevgeni wrote: post #2

Seeing how the hashtag form of #IStandWithUkraine is mostly a pro-Ukrainian thing, I'm not surprised. Russians use other hashtags.

I guess you, uh... missed the other hashtags? >The studies posts contained hashtags like “StandWithPutin”, “(I)StandWithRussia”, “(I)SupportRussia”, “(I)StandWithUkraine”, “(I)StandWithZelenskyy” and “(I)SupportUkraine”.

No, I haven’t. That’s why I used the term “hashtag form” instead of just “hashtag”.

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

#140

Post by ok123456 »

kiawe_fire wrote: post #87
unsupp0rted wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't let it get you down. I was recently banned from a subreddit after one (neutral) comment for being a white supremacist. If I'm a white supremacist, I'd hate to find out what actual white supremacists are. I messaged the mods asking which rule I'd broken (because I hadn't broken one). They responded by muting me for 28 days. Forget it Jake, it's Reddit-town.

It’s not just Reddit, either. This same story has played out for me on Anime News Network’s forums, some gaming forums, etc. Ultimately I just take my toys and go home - they don’t want me there, and it’s their legal right to say so. But it results in a forum of views that appear to show unanimous consensus that {x} is good or {y} is bad, which is potentially dangerous for society at large and certainly bad for an op…

I've always been against "hate speech" bans or modifiers for this reason.

Real, actionable incitement to violence and bodily harm is already covered by law as not legal speech.

You're left with either superficial hateful sentiment or someone who has a nuanced position. It's fine to say "don't do that here, thanks." But, it's being used as a cudgel from the top down to constrain public discourse and manufacture consent as what is "hate" becomes more and more abstract and more and more inclusive. If PETA is suddenly in control of the "community guidelines" on a site, would sharing the fact that I had eggs for breakfast be a form of hate speech?

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