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The Yang Gang and Its Bots

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Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#21

Post by hanniabu »

leptoniscool wrote: post #3

I'm surprised Twitter isn't doing more about political bots, since they've banned political ad dollars. On the other hand, if they banned an account and it turned out to be a real person, they could get some first amendment lawsuits.

What really pisses me off about bot accounts isn't the fake info simply because I analyze things based off my own opinions and research, although I understand how this is an issue for the general majority. My issue is that if I happen to retweet somebody opposite of that running a bot farm, then the bots are trigger to all report me and then I need to verify my account again the next time I'm on. And the sad thing is that it works, because I'll stop retweeting that person's tweets just to avoid that verification process since it happens consistently.

Whether there's other criteria that qualifies me for attack, such as the retweeting in combination with following that person, I'm not sure as I haven't tested that.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#22

Post by iudqnolq »

hadtodoit wrote: post #9
zachrose wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, if they banned an account and it turned out to be a real person, they could get some first amendment lawsuits. Access to post on Twitter is not a 1st Amendment right!

Some Senator who's name I can't recall was arguing otherwise. He said something to the affect of, if social media companies, or websites in general want protection under the law from content generated by their users, then they should not be able to dictate what their users can and cannot post barring illegal content. It's an interesting argument regardless of what you believe, but certainly your first amendment right…

Are you referring to platform/publisher?

If so, it has no legal basis for many reasons, including Twitter's first amendment rights to choose what they show. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no...

Also, isn't the whole reason we're on HN the moderation?

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#23

Post by thrower123 »

It's always bots and foreign influences when an organic populist movement that doesn't fit the blessed agenda grows.

The machine is showing it's rust more and more, and the more it flails the more credibility it loses.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#24

Post by danShumway »

aazaa wrote: post #11

The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process. It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills. The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those wh…

I think there's a little bit of dismissal on both sides here, because people want very clear narratives about what happened. Some people feel good saying, "Trump won because people wanted him." Some people feel good saying, "Trump won because the system was hacked."

Both of those claims are simple. Either the election was a farce, or nothing is wrong and all the criticism is fearmongering. That kind of simplicity feels good.

It doesn't feel as good to say, "Trump won in part because the system was hacked, but if a bunch of people hadn't also genuinely wanted him, hacking the system would not have been enough to make him win."

People are hardwired to look for clear, easy-to-reason-about patterns or rules that they can just universally apply to every situation. Real patterns like that are rare, usually uncommon events have multiple causes. Usually reality is more complicated than we expect.

I don't think that bots/plants are as big of an issue as people say. I certainly don't think they're an existential threat to democracy. I also don't think we should ignore them, I do think they have an impact. They're one element of many that can influence an election.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#25

Post by elfexec »

ngokevin wrote: post #13

It deems accounts as bots if they post and retweet a lot and are newly created? Being familiar with the Yang Gang, people are extremely passionate almost to an addiction of supporting Yang. They follow his every move, his surrogates words, and engage with any tiny bit of content they can. Many are new accounts because few have ever followed politics and want to keep separate from their main accounts. Yang has one of…

> While there may be a few bad actors

The question is are these bad actors acting in support of Yang or to undermine Yang? If you were against Yang, imagine how easy it would be to set up bots to "support Yang" and then have fellow operatives/journalists who are against Yang write about Yang "bots". It's just as easy for Yang's detractors to set up bots as it is for his supporters.

There seems to be a concerted effort by certain operatives/journalists/etc to undermine certain political candidates by tainting them with "russian asset" or "bot" labels.

Without a doubt, there have been bot activity starting with obama/ron paul/etc in 2008 and everyone since in political life. If the author ( who also submitted her own article here ) wanted to find bots, there are far better candidates to focus on. Why the focus on Yang?

As with bots, journalists, media and everything, we have to understand the context and agenda.

Since the author also has an account here, I would love to know what her political leanings are and who she is supporting. Has she work for any political candidate before?

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#26

Post by EdSharkey »

aazaa wrote: post #11

The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process. It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills. The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those wh…

The candidate straight outta Google is struggling? Too bad, Google. You could use more friends in high places the way things are headed.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#27

Post by comnetxr »

ngokevin wrote: post #13

It deems accounts as bots if they post and retweet a lot and are newly created? Being familiar with the Yang Gang, people are extremely passionate almost to an addiction of supporting Yang. They follow his every move, his surrogates words, and engage with any tiny bit of content they can. Many are new accounts because few have ever followed politics and want to keep separate from their main accounts. Yang has one of…

how do you know the passionate to the point of addiction Yang supporters are real?

I think its likely that many are, but that there are also many passionate supporters of the other candidates who just lurk on Twitter without posting due to social norms about how often you should chime in and how forcefully. The social norms around Yang supporters on twitter have changed by bots posting often and loudly, breaking the bubble and giving permission to people to do it too. If you then turn the bots off, the YangGang effect would last. (I'm sure this applies to not just Yang...)

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#28

Post by baddox »

aazaa wrote: post #11

The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process. It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills. The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those wh…

It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to. The fact that using Twitter bots hasn't caused one candidate to become the most popular doesn't seem like sufficient evidence. Perhaps he would be even less popular without the Twitter bots. And perhaps many of the other candidates are doing the same thing, but better or at a larger scale.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#29

Post by Communitivity »

I encountered this myself after responding to someone's comment about the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept, and got spammed with negative replies. I figured it was just ardent supporters, bots make sense though given the speed of the responses. Sadly, I think this may be the new normal of politics in the 2020s.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#30

Post by munk-a »

Barrin92 wrote: post #12
aazaa wrote: post #11

The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process. It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills. The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those wh…

even assuming that's true and all other things being equal, people passing bots off as natural users rather than clearly marking that they're bots is simply lying and detrimental to discourse if for the sole reason that these bots are being mistaken for authentic users. Given the crude tactics outlined in this article, with accounts making 400 tweets per day in regular intervals, duplicate accounts of the same allege…

I agree and bots should be banned... Now that we're passed the perfect being the enemy of the good, I'm also quite concerned about, instead of bots, just paying some people to have your opinion - that's also a problem we're definitely going to need to address since if you subsidize the cost of living of someone who agrees with you then you can basically turn them into a 24/7 advocate for your point of view. If that person happens to live in a remote part of the third world then the actual out of pocket cost to subsidize them could be a negligible portion of your earnings.
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