| What makes you think such political botting even exists? 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. |