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The Yang Gang and Its Bots

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Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#31

Post by roywiggins »

danShumway wrote: post #24
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 fee…

I'm half convinced that the thing that broke everyone's brains is Trump handily winning the electoral college but also clearly losing the popular vote.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#34

Post by aianus »

naveen99 wrote: post #18

Yang supporters believe expats should also get the freedom dividend. It would be funny if yang just declares a United States of earth and distributes the freedom dividend to every human on the entire planet...

If American expats pay US income tax, why shouldn’t they qualify? Maybe the US should stop taxing people that don’t even live in America like every other civilized country.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#35

Post by retsibsi »

baddox wrote: post #28
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.

It's also possible (and plausible to me) that negative messages tend to be more effective than positive ones, and that sowing doubt is easier than positively convincing people. In which case it would be very hard to elevate a random candidate into a winning position, but significantly easier to harm the reputation of a rival, or to muddy the waters on issues unfavourable to your candidate.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#36

Post by ConsiderCrying »

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 don't think we should be looking for a candidate who wins on the strength of Twitter bots, that's pretty much impossible (and that's a good thing.)

Instead, we should consider the fact that all these bots make a lot of information noise and that's a problem to how we view candidates. With enough bots spamming fake articles or posting links that favor the candidate/smear his opponents, they muddy the waters and make it harder to find real information. This alone won't win anybody elections but it brings prominence to smaller candidates, makes it harder to find legitimate dirt on others (bring certain links as evidence and people dismiss them, saying 'Oh, those are part of the bot campaign'), and makes any political discussion on Twitter a horrible idea. (Whether or not I think Twitter is already a horrible place for political discussion is another matter entirely.)

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#38

Post by ipsum2 »

baddox wrote: post #28
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.

> It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to.

Why? When people measure how ads perform, the null hypothesis is that the ad has no effect on the behavior of the viewer. Bots are sort of like ads that look like native content.

That being said, I don't think a single data point (Yang) is enough to be conclusive, but it does change my beliefs a little bit on the effectiveness of bots.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#39

Post by waisbrot »

proximitysauce wrote: post #8

That's a lot of narrative overlaid on the data. The author even says this about Democratic politician accounts: > All of them had bot activity of some kind. Given enough time to collect the data, bot networks would eventually appear for all of them. I think the analysis could be very interesting but they're injecting too much personal spin on the motivations of everyone involved. Why is the teenager who follows the Y…

> Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too?

Which party do you think Yang is running for?

Anyway, the article was clearly describing as "sad" that the teenager is trying to build an online following but his "following" is just bots using him to look less like bots.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#40

Post by godelski »

This is an interesting post if you also follow the subreddit for Yang[0].

There are a lot of people there that created Twitter accounts just to follow Yang and participate in those polls about who is more popular. So when the author mentions the creation of new accounts when Yang started, it actually doesn't surprise me. The campaign is very technocentric after all. Also, these people (a lot of them "true believers" types) do post A LOT on Twitter and get involved in any mention of Yang (go check any YouTube video about Yang). You have to "yang" everyone that you can. It is a really weird community to be honest. But one where they are actively telling one another to create social media accounts to promote Yang. What this post really tells me is that it is hard to distinguish real people from bots. Here's a post even about YouTube comments[1].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/esycun/...

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