| The basic problem is astroturfing. In politics if I create a bot network to artificially boost the more divisive tweets, over time the entire political network may become more polarized and toxic. And it would necessarily elevate fringe candidates who are most equipped to deal with chaos. Its absolutely fascinating that you can create a real world riot just through a simple algorithm over time. And politics is probably small potatoes compared to the commercial applications. Imagine if you can make your product go viral, suppress all dissent and at the same time sabotage your opponent's user base. And all that for very little investment. That is an unbelievable competitive edge. So, the question is how do you stop this? The internet is designed for anonymity and is not easily traceable across national lines. So, if a Chinese/Russian company is involved in massive botting, what can you even do, except hire them yourself to stop your opponents gaining an advantage. I am struggling to see a solution or how government involvement doesnt make this problem worse. |
This Parliamentary report is extremely dangerous because the politicians writing it themselves appear to be victims of fake news, namely, deliberately created fake news about political bots on social media.
I used to work on anti-botting at Google and got suspicious about this story when the Times started pushing the idea that academics had found hundreds of thousands of "bots" pushing pro-Brexit views and that this is why Leave had won. Although this thread is full of people asserting that nobody fact-checks the media, some people do, and I spent a while tracking down the sources of this story and analysing them. I wrote up the results here:
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
I was quite shocked by what I found: the claims were based on an academic paper that was riddled with bad science and outright fraudulent claims.
Unfortunately the establishment very much wants to believe this narrative. After publishing this analysis I got in touch with the journalist at the Times who wrote the original article and let him know, but of course, nothing ever happened.
At the end of the article I wrote that the abuse these academics and journalists were engaging in was very dangerous because they were distorting the beliefs of politicians. We now see the results.