| I'll try and find time to look at the papers you cite as high quality later today. > you conclude from that that all academic use of the Twitter API is garbage, which is nonsensical "All" no, a vast amount of it, yes. Is it nonsensical? Twitter themselves concluded this exact same thing even before Musk, both in public blog posts and internal emails (see the Twitter Files for examples). But we don't really need to cite Twitter as an authority here. Just try to answer this question: what mechanisms exist that are stopping bad science outside the field of social bot research, and why have those mechanisms failed within it? It can't be peer review, university hiring committees and so on because those are all existing within social studies as well. > Your hyperbolic language ... What language do you think is hyperbolic, exactly, and why? > Pointing out the scientific flaws of 'tools' like Botometer is wholly valid, but the effort to research and develop tools for bot identification are a response to the fact of systematic information pollution This is exactly the sort of problem I'm talking about: this justification is circular. We do bad bot research because we know there are bots, we know there are bots because we do bad bot research. If there were actually big problems with social bots then it would be easy to find them and research them; we wouldn't see this situation where basically all papers are seeing patterns in noise. Botometer is a good example of that. You admit that it's "scientifically flawed" but with respect, that language is not "hyperbolic" enough. It's not merely flawed, it's outright useless. It had an FP rate of 50% when tested against a known human dataset. Yet the Botometer paper has been cited over 900 times now (up from ~700 when I previously wrote about it). When exactly does the rest of the world get to call time on this bad behavior by the academy? These people are changing the opinions of world leaders on the back of misinformation, the exact problem they claim to be fighting. > It is not the fault of academics if media pundits over-simplify the fruits of their research. It wasn't media pundits that made academics cite the Botometer paper over 900 times, or write outright deceptive papers like the one I reviewed. The problem here is academia and the institutions need to start taking responsibility for it. Otherwise you're going to get situations like this one: academia will just get cut off from data. People don't have time to try and figure out which little subsections of the academy are following the rules to separate them from the rest. |