[native_samples]

There absolutely are major questions about that.

Most of the research and claims you see about bots manipulating people on social media fall apart when examined. For example they often rely on a badly trained ML model that labelled nearly half of Congress as "bots". This sort of thing is never admitted in the media - if you don't double check for yourself you'd never realize.

Here's a talk that goes into a lot of detail:

https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...

[freeflight]

Another version of this is extremely sloppy methodology where users are labeled "influencer bots" for merely having certain foreign IP ranges and being active in discussions about certain topics.

Twitter in particular has been banning tens of thousands of accounts based on that flimsy and circular reasoning.

And because the affected people are locked out of the only system, that would realistically allow them to draw attention to the problem, they are all out of luck in bringing attention to their situation and the problem.

[1shooner]

I was thinking most recently of Facebook's own internal reporting on the problem:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...

[native_samples]

That's a good example of the problem. Well, it's not about bots, but the same definitional and logic problems are evident. The story defines "troll farms" as "professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks". That description is so vague it could describe almost all news outlets and political parties, along with many charities. But, they aren't going to classify CNN, PETA or the White House itself as a "troll farm" although it would be easy to argue otherwise.

Facebook obviously has big problems with internal activists who are trying to convince the company to pursue an ever-spiralling purge against their ideological enemies, and good evidence of that is the unfalsifiable nature of the descriptions of the enemy.