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by ren_engineer 1787 days ago
this, social media platforms really have minimal incentive to ban bots until it starts hurting their bottom line.
2 comments

I liked to assume destabilising democracies would hurt their bottom line, but reality seems to be the opposite.
It isn't until we have proper laws against that, and politicians themselves use these platforms to further their own agenda (if not spread outright misinformation) so it's unlikely to happen. Plus with the control that these platforms nowadays have on public discourse it's likely that any attempt at such a law will have public opinion swayed against it immediately.
I wonder if their thought-process is "if we don't, someone else will". But the fact that Gab, Parlor, et al. haven't gotten significant traction, I think, is proof against that.
Gab preaches to the choir - everyone there is already gone. Parler seems to be something between catastrophe and fraud against its investors.

They don’t differentiate from the dominant players enough to be considered categories on their own, the audience already has the desired views, and they aggressively moderate against conflicting discourse.

Parler was incredibly useful for uncovering the January 6th attack, however.

Eventually some service will take over Facebook and Twitter, but I doubt that it’ll be something that’s so targeted to the far-right.

kind of. it doesn't look good when all of the top comments on a famous person's posts are all bot spam.
Only if people recognize it as such though
This is true.

Back when I was still on Twitter, I remember folks in the office were having a game to see who had the most bots following them. I guess there was some online form that evaluated the people following you and determined if they were real or not.

I'm sure bots have gotten much better at avoiding detection, but it would be interesting to see if these programs could still ferret them out as real or fake. Likewise, to your point, it would be interesting if the users themselves could tell either.