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Most Americans Can't Tell the Difference Between a Social Media Bot and A Human, Study Finds (theverge.com)
A new study from Pew Research Center found that most Americans can't tell social media bots from real humans, and most are convinced bots are bad. "Only 47 percent of Americans are somewhat confident they can identify social media bots from real humans," reports The Verge. "In contrast, most Americans surveyed in a study about fake news were confident they could identify false stories." From the report: The Pew study is an uncommon look at what the average person thinks about these automated accounts that plague social media platforms. After surveying over 4,500 adults in the U.S., Pew found that most people actually don't know much about bots. Two-thirds of Americans have at least heard of social media bots, but only 16 percent say they've heard a lot about them, while 34 percent say they've never heard of them at all. The knowledgeable tend to be younger, and men are more likely than women (by 22 percentage points) to say they've heard of bots. Since the survey results are self-reported, there's a chance people are overstating or understating their knowledge of bots. Of those who have heard of bots, 80 percent say the accounts are used for bad purposes.
Regardless of whether a person is a Republican or Democrat or young or old, most think that bots are bad. And the more that a person knows about social media bots, the less supportive they are of bots being used for various purposes, like activists drawing attention to topics or a political party using bots to promote candidates.
Regardless of whether a person is a Republican or Democrat or young or old, most think that bots are bad. And the more that a person knows about social media bots, the less supportive they are of bots being used for various purposes, like activists drawing attention to topics or a political party using bots to promote candidates.
I disagree. The problem is not that people are being falsely accused of being bots for holding contrary opinions - the problem is that, on social media, everyone looks and talks like a bot.
The format of most social media (Facebook and Twitter especially) pushes people towards bot-like behavior. The brevity pushes you to skip any supporting information, just blindly assert your position as correct. It tends to erode nuance - you don't say "evidence suggests that X probably causes Y", you just say "they proved X causes Y", if not just "X therefore Y". The rapid-fire structure of comment threads, and general lack of a good bio, makes it hard to look at someone's account and tell what they're really all about. And both tend to expose you to a massive wall of people who are shouting their opinions into the void, rather than any sort of community, especially when you choose to look at "trending" or "what's happening now".
And, on top of that, there are so many obvious bots, that having to consider whether every single person you're talking to is a bot or not is rational. Every single Elon Musk tweet, for something like a year now, gets swarmed by bots pretending to be Elon giving away some cryptocurrency, if only you download this sketchy app - and this is after Twitter put special protections in place to prevent just anyone from setting their name to "Elon Musk". The people running social media clearly don't care about keeping bots-impersonating-humans out, so it falls on each user instead to worry about it. We're not given enough information to decide accurately, so it's just inevitable that some people end up falsely accused.
And then, yes, there's the organized campaigns, of which the Russians are merely the most prolific. The "Internet Research Agency" (the one hit with Mueller indictments) didn't merely try to manipulate election news, they tried to stir up chaos. They'd organize two protests for opposing sides at the same place and time, hoping it would turn violent. They spread anti-vax stuff, just to erode trust in authorities. They've spread disaster hoaxes and fake hate crimes, just to get people to panic. And, as I mentioned, Russia isn't the only one. Remember the Chinese "50 Cent Party"? Or America's own "Operation: Earnest Voice"?
As always, there's an XKCD for it. You don't even need bots, per se - just a decent budget and enough people who will work for cheap, and anyone can manufacture not just a consensus, but a culture. Shout enough into a crowd, and some of them will take root, and now you've got another person shouting alongside you. It's not like it's a new phenomenon - how often, back in the day, did you or I accuse someone of being a Microsoft shill, or astroturfing for some corporation or another? A lot of those may have been true, but I'm sure many of them were not.
But what does it matter, whether someone is a machine or a human, when the opinion they shout is not their own? That is the real problem - social media has allowed too much pollution of the discourse. It's no longer about debate, building a logical case to support your position and poking flaws in your opponent's reasoning, but about who can state their position loudest and longest. It's about endurance, not smarts - forcing your opponents to waste so much time responding to a never-ending stream of lies and bullshit that they eventually give up.
I don't know if there's a solution. I used to think Slashdot's system protected it, but after seeing a spree of explicitly anti-democratic posts here in the past few weeks, I'm starting to think it just delayed it by a few years. Perhaps something that gave users the information they need to more accurately spot the bots and troll farms, coupled with a strict moderation team to purge them when spotted and confirmed. Or maybe it's just inevitable that any sufficiently-large social network site has a collapse of trust, and the solution is to fracture into smaller communities. I still use a bunch of old web forums, and they don't seem to have fallen victim, yet.