[bcoates]

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.

[dobleboble]

You make a bold claim, do you have any supporting evidence?

[luckylion]

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?

[chance_state]

>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.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-elec...

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Ru...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a...

etc....

[pacala]

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.

[chance_state]

>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).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/do...

[pacala]

Using a very rough ballpark estimate, it costs $1 / month to run a twitter bot using readily available technology, see, for example, https://jarvee.com/get-now pricing list. To think that for $50k / month anyone in the world can have a [significant?] impact on US elections is bizarre.

In practice, there is a negligible probability that posting a tweet from a random bot will end up in the feeds for a target demographic. The feed space of the 80k people WP claims decide the election is finite, and it costs significantly more money to reach them than setting up small scale botnets. Ultimately, Twitter is in control of the feeds, and it's their business model to happily direct any message from the highest bidder to the critical demographic, regardless of who or where the highest bidder is.

[nradov]

Most of those 80K voters weren't active Twitter users so your analysis is invalid.

[cvwright]

In comparison, Mike Bloomberg totally failed to take over a US presidential primary, and he spent almost half a billion dollars.

[bronipstid]

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.

[chance_state]

>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.

[HenryBemis]

I 'like' it so much (not really) when people from the USA say/write "left" when they have absolutely no idea what left/communism is, apart from what they HEAR. I don't think that more than 1mil people in the USA have lived in the USSR block or the countries of their influence, or have studied communism thoroughly.

And you can recognize the trolls when one says/writes "Left" in the most capitalistic country on this planet. And by "Left" they mean the very minimal/basic social services, such as don't let people lose two legs but only one because the $1k insurance per month doesn't cover that. I wonder how failed is the USA when countries in EU have achieved that with $100 contributions per month. Miracle!!!

Americans live with the dream that they are all billionaire but somebody is blocking them (the commies, the socialists, the left, the Cubans, the anarchists, and in general "they" some without ID).

Russia always plays the looooong game, they try and succeed to sabotage a little bit every step of the way (antivaxers, interference with elections, oil price), you name it, they are in it.

I think I vented/ranted enough. I sometimes feel sorry for the 30-40% of USA citizens, they are confused and haven't read more than 10 books in their lives.. it's a potty for such a prosperous coubtry to suffer like this.

[FillardMillmore]

Not to be too pedantic, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think "The Russian Hoax" more specifically refers to the beliefs/claims by some that Trump or his campaign was colluding with Russia directly to interfere with the election rather than simply the belief/claim/fact that Russia (or Russians) interfered in the election of their own volition.