I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. They are contributing both to group psychosis and the destruction of democracy through the spread of disinformation.
Likely, they don't really care to stop it. Real people still use it enough that the advertisers don't really mind.
I'd suppose that they cannot really tell the difference between a bot and a real person, at least at scale.
I follow a few non-English speaking hashtags that act as local news sources for their areas. These hashtags have been active for a few years. Though Twitter has a lot of policies for English twitter, these languages really have no policies. By that I mean they live-stream executions, have drug sales, solicit sex-work, etc. Illegal isn't really a thing in these places to begin with. That said, these cases are somewhat rare and these hashtags are mostly used as genuine news sources. Granted, these are 'edge case' languages, but still, it's a free for all that Twitter doesn't care to dive into.
Based on the 'extreme' cases and their long lived incoherence to Twitter policy, it's not hard to conclude that Twitter really does not care to enforce policies unless forced to.
Geoff Goldberg has been analyzing and writing about this a lot[0], he is worth following on Medium, ironically Twitter suspending him from Twitter [1].
The point of these bots isn't to spread disinformation or to amplify political content (the article is wrong about this).
The point of these bots is to build up an account with credible behavior that you can use to make money (usually by scamming advertisers into buying paid tweets/followers, or by directly promoting scam products).
Political twitter is so formulaic and high volume that bot/sweatshop posts don't seem out of place compared to the usual traffic from real accounts.
If there were no politics on twitter they'd just send formulaic messages about pop culture or sports or something.
Wasn't this somewhat well documented during 2016 where most of it wasn't some coordinated attack from St. Petersburg but teens from south-eastern Europe making money from ads and therefore driving clickbait to its limit because they literally just wanted clicks?
>most of it wasn't some coordinated attack from St. Petersburg
This is completely false. A cursory search will yield results explaining Russia's massive effort on social media (and Twitter in particular) to interfere in the election.
Not sure if "completely false" is appropriate. There was some Russian activity. The scale of which appears somewhat underwhelming:
> Through our supplemental analysis, we have identified 13,512 additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period, representing approximately two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.
If that small of an effort can make that much of an impact on the core democratic process, then we need to consider a significant scale back of XXI century globalism to allow for second half of XX century democracy to survive. Not a popular opinion on a tech forum, where more users means more money, and there are always significantly more users outside one's national boundaries. Sigh.
>Through our supplemental analysis, we have identified 13,512 additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period, representing approximately two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.
The comparison of "50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content" to "the total accounts on Twitter at the time" makes no sense at all. It seems intended to mislead.
It would be more informative to know how many total accounts tweeted about the election, or how many politically active twitter accounts that bot army reached.
And in general, the election was decided by ~80,000 people [1]. To think that ~50,000 bots spamming Twitter with non-stop propaganda had no impact on that is extremely naive (especially when you consider that Twitter was just one piece in the overall interference).
That article says 50,000 accounts were "linked to Russia". Do you know who linked them to Russia and by what criteria? They weren't actually controlled by the Russian government because the article cites that figure at only 3,000.
The hysteria over Russia as an excuse to ignore the concerns of Americans who support populist positions is pretty transparent at this point.
>The hysteria over Russia as an excuse to ignore the concerns of Americans who support populist positions is pretty transparent at this point.
You're calling it "hysteria" to dismiss facts you don't like. "The Russian Hoax!", where have I heard that before?
But, to your second point, I completely agree that many on the left want to pretend it was _mostly_ because of foreign interference. I tend to think that had a pretty small impact, and the fact you pointed out is probably much more consequential: Americans are more receptive to a populist message than people think.
They have conflicting incentives, it's the same problem all social networks have. Bot accounts qualitatively detract from the real user experience, but substantially inflate quantitative activity metrics, if artificially.
Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick to optimize the latter rather than the former.
There's a good argument to be made that Elliot Management is right simply based on absence of stock growth over the past few years. Facebook has grown 200% while Twitter has had incredibly modest gains. That much of Twitter's little growth might be bot-related just compounds the validity of their argument.
Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this (hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect.
But they're making money from it. And that's all they (and their shareholders) care about. Same reason FakeBook won't ban false political advertising on their platform even though it's really obvious it's destructive to society.
I wouldn't begin to claim I have a solution, but I think there's steps Twitter can take to show they are acting in good faith. I believe often times, Twitter flags accounts for suspicious activity - for accounts to be reactivated, a phone number has to be provided. If Twitter wanted to, are they not capable of deploying an algorithm that serves as a dragnet to catch accounts that tick off multiple check-boxes for bot activity and flag them? This would not mean that the account would immediately be banned or shadow-banned, but they could provide some kind of visual indicator to other users that the account in question has recently been flagged for bot-like activity (on the account's comments, retweets, etc.).
Because number of users is a nice pr metric. Just pretend the 15% which are bots are real, and pretend the 15% of suspended and abandoned accounts are active.
I understand your frustration and share it, but I personally believe that we are at the point where this behavior (i.e., failure to act) should be expected of tech companies. The economic incentives of the companies who run the most popular social networks seem to be negatively aligned against robust responses to the propagation of bots and disinformation, and that doesn't appear likely to change.
I also wonder whether the mitigation strategy for this type of societal threat is not to be found via strictly technological means anyway since the line between bot and human actor appears to be blurring more and more as time passes and technology improves (artificial face generation, improved NLP, statistically-informed posting and behavioral modeling, etc.). Imagine how complicated the process of discriminating between automated and human-controlled accounts might become in ten or twenty years from now; it seems as though there will have to be some sort of public education component to reduce the credulity of human users in online environments - an adjustment of weights in the network of information sources among the general population, if you will, in a direction that de-emphasizes online content.
I'd suppose that they cannot really tell the difference between a bot and a real person, at least at scale.
I follow a few non-English speaking hashtags that act as local news sources for their areas. These hashtags have been active for a few years. Though Twitter has a lot of policies for English twitter, these languages really have no policies. By that I mean they live-stream executions, have drug sales, solicit sex-work, etc. Illegal isn't really a thing in these places to begin with. That said, these cases are somewhat rare and these hashtags are mostly used as genuine news sources. Granted, these are 'edge case' languages, but still, it's a free for all that Twitter doesn't care to dive into.
Based on the 'extreme' cases and their long lived incoherence to Twitter policy, it's not hard to conclude that Twitter really does not care to enforce policies unless forced to.