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.

Comments

Begged question...

[argStyopa]

...this assumes there IS a meaningful difference.

Re:Begged question...

[Shadow of Eternity]

Maybe people can't tell the difference because so many real people have been smeared as "Russian Bots" that it's even been used to delegitimize anyone who didn't like The Last Jedi. They can't tell the difference because there isn't one... not because humans and bots behave the same, but because the term is applied to humans so much to dilute it beyond worthlessness.

Ironically the NPC meme provoked immediate outrage and accusations of literal fascism and genocide rhetoric.

Re:Begged question...

[gman003]

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.

Re:Begged question...

[AmiMoJo]

It's because so many people love to jump on bandwagons and repeat the same talking points with slight variations.

Check Amazon reviews on popular products, most of them are very similar to each other and written by people who have obviously only had to the item for about 5 seconds, or not even bought it at all but just wanted to get in on the action.

Go read the user reviews on IMDB for movies like Black Panther and The Last Jedi, for example, and a very large number of them are just repeating standard generic criticisms that have little to do with the actual movie.

People have started to act more like bots. Maybe deliberately in some cases, maybe unconsciously in others, but they realized that they can just pile in with bot-like comments and affect simple average scores or vote their opinion to the top of the list.

Re:Begged question...

[arth1]

A more interesting and change I have notices in language that those young people use is that they have been started to call people for bots as an insult.

People did that on IRC back in the mid 90s.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Re:Begged question...

[Shadow of Eternity]

Kotaku is pathological incapable of an honest or decent writeup of anything. They're a living example of some of the most dishonest, unethical, and misleading agitprop on the internet today. They're right up there with infowars, dailykos, and AJ+.

And like I called in my original post they immediately went straight to raising hue and cry over dehumanization and fascism when that's exactly what they themselves have been doing for years dehumanizing everyone that disagrees with them and spouting pro-violence propaganda.

Bad Headline (According the Summary)

[careysub]

It was an opinion poll about whether people were confident they could identify social bots. No study was done to see if they really could or not.

nobody can all the time

[RhettLivingston]

When it comes to the simplest statements, there just isn't enough content to tell whether it is a person or a bot. Many people pick up what bots say and amplify them and vice versa.

But, bots aren't just spreading simple messages. The better ones are spreading messages handcrafted for effect by people. The lobbyist, or whatever we want to call the person using the bot to manipulate, writes the initial messages. They aren't from a bot. Then bots are used to amplify the message as well as tie it in by linking both to it and to parties that the message will likely resonate with. The better bots may also search out similar messages and amplify them as well as use AI to paraphrase the message in new ways and spread it in different forms.

It is all under human control though and getting more and more difficult to recognize.

I launched my own bot once on irc in the 1990's

[mark-t]

It formed random "sentences" based on markov chains 3 words deep constructed from a word appearance database collected over about 4 months of irc logs that I had personally collected. Each "sentence" it created was based on a single word that was randomly selected from the channel chatter since the last comment, and it made one comment every two minutes. It was nothing more sinister than that.

Much of what it said seemed nonsequitor, and I think it was widely assumed to be trolling, although I had not coded it specifically to do so.

There wasn't a single channel that took it to where it was not banned. In retrospect, it was an interesting social experiment, although I hadn't intended it to be such.

Solution

[nehumanuscrede]

Stay off of social media and the problem mentioned in the headline is irrelevant.

Maybe the bots will get into and / or instigate arguments between themselves.

. . . if a bot makes a statement, and no one is there to read it, would anyone care ?

Conclusion

[OrangeTide]

People need to be certified before using a computer, because this has gotten more dangerous than driving cars. And luckily there is no digital equivalent of the 2nd amendment, so better to nip this one in the bud right now.