The Yang Gang and Its Bots • Hacker News Board

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#91

Post by raz32dust » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. She makes that inference very quickly, and from then on, they are just referred to as "bots". I am 100% sure there are bots, but I am highly skeptical that Yang Gang is the worst offender here or stands out in any way compared to other campaigns. In fact a quick check on twitteraudit.com tells that he might be better than others, although I don't know how good their fake follower detection works.

I have been following this campaign since a few months, and I can attest that it has pulled in a large number of voters who were not politically inclined, the members are very passionate, and also that Yang Gang is quite cliquey and live in an echo chamber. Given those facts, I won't be surprised if those accounts were mostly real people.

Full disclosure: I like Yang.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#92

Post by shiftpgdn » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

raz32dust wrote: post #91

The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. She makes that inference very quickly, and from then on, they are just referred to as "bots". I am 100% sure there are bots, but I am highly skeptical that Yang Gang is the worst offender here or stands out in any way compared to other campaigns. In fact a quick check on twitteraudit.com tells that he mig…

The whole time I was reading this I was thinking that she almost certainly has my account flagged as a bot. I only use Twitter for infosec and politics and lately about all I do is RT Yang (and Zach) tweets.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#93

Post by fenomas » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:24 AM UTC

backupcavalry wrote: post #74

proximitysauce wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An anonymous account is not the same thing as a bot. As acrimonious as the current state of politics is, I wouldn't blame anyone for using a pseudonym online to voice their opinion.

Touche. But you'll have to pardon me for being distrustful of anyone that walks in just to defend a politician of any kind (without hard proof, anyway).

This is understandable, but nonetheless HN guidelines ask that you suspend that distrust. Every legit account starts with a first comment, and it's natural that a person's first comment would be on a topic they feel strongly about.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#94

Post by turtlecloud » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

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…

Yang campaign is actually seeing exponential growth. Thus the increase in smear articles.

The establishment is running through mental gymnastic excercise to rationalize these results. Thus them calling all supporters bots

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#95

Post by lasagnaphil » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:36 AM UTC

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…

The twitteraudit service says they determine if an account is fake or real as:

“Each audit takes a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”

It seems that the service would determine a lot of plain lurker accounts as fake. (And I’m a lurker on Twitter who almost never tweets and has a really low followed/follower ratio, so I would probably get flagged as a bot. Actually I think Twitter flagged me as one before, because my account got suspended once even when I didn’t really post anything at all, and I heard someone being unable to see one of my comments) Most bots have probably evolved a lot from simply lurking and following, so I don’t think the service provides an accurate picture of bots on Twitter.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#96

Post by turtlecloud » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #84

ilaksh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$16.5 million raised last quarter and steadily rising polls. Dave Chappelle is doing a fundraising show at/near Iowa State in a few days. Oprah's "spiritual advisor" is helping Yang campaign. Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit. "Struggling" is not accurate.

why isn’t he doing well in the polls then?

Polls have outdated models that don’t accurately reflect the age of social media. Prior polling models don’t work with the changing environment. For example most the people they poll are in landlines and 65+ yrs old.

Also polls are politicized now.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#97

Post by turtlecloud » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:44 AM UTC

How many startup people have actually read “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel?

Yang has gone from 0 to 1 and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. All these articles are people who have a distorted views of reality and chalk up his support as bots in order to fit their world view. The most likely reason from my observation is bias against Asian American men in leadership positions.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#98

Post by aww_dang » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

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 remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate.

If an army of Twitter bots could change voter's minds, why is it suddenly an illegitimate tactic? How is it different than any other form of political speech? Are politicians and political campaigns only dishonest when presented through new mediums?

Is this a problem with Twitter, free speech or just a timeless flaw within democracy which has been known since antiquity?

I would suggest that it is the latter. Misunderstanding the underlying principles results in the alarmist blaming of social media. This is nothing new, aside from a new opportunity to opine for regulation.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#99

Post by kevitivity » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:48 AM UTC

ci5er wrote: post #48

godelski wrote: post #40

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"…

Seems (to me) to be similar to the Ron Paul bots (fanatics, I should say, because they certainly weren't mechanical war-bots; They seemed like what the right calls NPCs these days, but they were just so ... into it! 24/7! It's actually kind of nice to see groups of new/young people get excited about politics - I think they might learn a lot through the process (maybe)) all over Reddit in 2008 (not just /r/politics, b…

So true, the "Paulestinians" as I called them were the first thing that came to my mind while reading this.

There is too little detail of methodology in this article to take it too seriously, but still interesting.

Re: The Yang Gang and Its Bots

#100

Post by vjeux » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #92

raz32dust wrote: post #91

The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. She makes that inference very quickly, and from then on, they are just referred to as "bots". I am 100% sure there are bots, but I am highly skeptical that Yang Gang is the worst offender here or stands out in any way compared to other campaigns. In fact a quick check on twitteraudit.com tells that he mig…

The whole time I was reading this I was thinking that she almost certainly has my account flagged as a bot. I only use Twitter for infosec and politics and lately about all I do is RT Yang (and Zach) tweets.

> “ For example, my bot tracker focuses on bots that post on average 70 times a day or more. While a human being can certainly post to Twitter a hundred times in a day, it’s unlikely that a real human being would post a hundred times a day every day without some kind of automation helping out.”

If that sentence is correct, you’re unlikely going to get flagged by the bot.