Slashdot Mirror
'Relatively Few' Twitter Bots Were Needed To Spread Misinformation and Overwhelm Fact Checkers, Study Finds (nbcnews.com)
A new study conducted by Indian University researchers found that "relatively few accounts are responsible for a large share of the traffic that carries misinformation," with just 6 percent of Twitter accounts identified as bots responsible for 31 percent of "low-credibility" content. "Bots amplify the reach of low-credibility content, to the point that it is statistically indistinguishable from that of fact-checking articles," researchers wrote. NBC News reports: The study analyzed 14 million tweets that linked to more than 400,000 articles from May 2016 until the end of March 2017. Of those articles, 389,569 were from "low credibility sources" that had been repeatedly flagged by fact-checking organizations for containing misinformation, as well as 15,053 articles that originated from "fact-checking sources." Of that sample, over 13.6 million tweets linked to "low-credibility sources" and around 1.1 million tweets linked to known fact-checking sources, leading researchers to attribute greater virality with "fake news." To achieve maximum exposure, the study found that "social bots" used two methods to manipulate users into trusting the linked article's validity.
"First, bots are particularly active in amplifying content in the very early spreading moments, before an article goes 'viral,'" researchers wrote. "Second, bots target influential users through replies and mentions." Users struggled to differentiate bots from other human users, as humans "have retweeted bots who post low-credibility content almost as much as they retweet other humans," according to the researchers. The researchers noted that social media platforms have moved to address the spread of misinformation by bots, but said "their effectiveness is hard to evaluate."
"First, bots are particularly active in amplifying content in the very early spreading moments, before an article goes 'viral,'" researchers wrote. "Second, bots target influential users through replies and mentions." Users struggled to differentiate bots from other human users, as humans "have retweeted bots who post low-credibility content almost as much as they retweet other humans," according to the researchers. The researchers noted that social media platforms have moved to address the spread of misinformation by bots, but said "their effectiveness is hard to evaluate."
Is this a north/south think or just campy humor? Or is it just a prank?
Who stated way back in the early 1900s that a lie could spread halfway around the world before the truth could get its pants on.
Or maybe not, I forget.
Gee, how'd I know this was posted by "Russia! Russia! Russia!"-fixated moron BeauHD?
JFC,
LET
IT
GO
Between this post, and especially the last Pai post, the trolling of slashdot is becoming worrisome.
It gets exhausting to sort through the obvious trolls, the repetitive trolls, and the obscure trolls.
Cannot something be done about this?
"just 6 percent of Twitter accounts"
Bad choice of wording: Could be "ONLY 6 percent of Twitter accounts". There is nothing "just" about it.
Bad choice of underlying idea: Should be "A HUGE number of Twitter accounts, 6 percent", are robots spreading dishonest information.
"relatively few" = one POTUS
Users post content they find internet they find interesting, funny, to be news worthy.
The social media brand is not a publisher.
Social media just connects users. The users create the content.
Users do not need "fact-checking organizations" as they are not publishers.
They find something funny, creative and want to share it.
It could be a political cartoon, a meme, an image of a politician not able to keep up with campaigning.
Should the internet not get a good LOL at that because of "fact-checking organizations"?
Should party political government and think tanks set limits on what users can link to as funny? As creative? As news?
A users failed political campaign cartoon is a thinks tanks party political investment.
Should a partisan think tank get to remove a funny political cartoon?
Should a gov get to remove user uploaded images about the results of their gov policy?
Why should a think tank and organizations get to censor the free and open internet?
Let social media publish its own news and have its own "fact-checking" for its own published news under it own news brand.
Let users get on with LOL at news, events, art, faith, culture, celebrities, bad movie scripts, computer games and politics.
What will "fact-checking" remove next? Any comments about DRM? A bad game review? Movie review? Music? A user created political cartoon? What a new OS patch does to a file system?
Let users publish and enjoy their social media internet. They pay for social media with the ads they view and ads they are tracked by.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
Supposedly inhabited by your mythical truth will do guess what to influence those who are opposed to your ideology?
NOT ONE DAMN THING!
The people who would share a falsity could care less what the truth is. Their mind is made up and you are just as big of a fool as they when you suppose you can influence them,
They already believe you are liars. No amount of "Snopes" is ever going to change that.
You are wasting your frigging time.
That my friend is the truth and if you cannot fathom it well that's your problem. Certainly not theirs.
Caution: Contents under pressure
And only a few TV stations and newspapers, as well!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I recommend to everyone that they read RAND Corp's PDF about 'the firehose of falsehoods'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
It goes into detail about the asymmetric nature of these kind of mass manipulation techniques.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Working of Error
Those who pushed it have no credibility indeed: New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, Buzzfeed, etc. The FAKE NEWS Industrial Complex.
Good point. But the article is VERY poorly written.
Instead of:
"... with just 6 percent of Twitter accounts identified as bots responsible for 31 percent of 'low-credibility' content."
It could be:
"Of the 6 percent of Twitter accounts that were identified as bots, 31 percent were responsible for 'low-credibility' content."
When I think about that, I am confused about what could be the underlying meaning. Does that mean 94% of the bots were doing something else besides giving dishonest content? What were the 94% doing? What is "low-credibility" content? Is that content that is only partly dishonest?
The issue is that the article is poorly written, and also that probably no one knows what percentage of Twitter accounts are robots, not reporters or Twitter managers.
From the article: "Twitter has removed tens of millions of accounts in 2018."
... it is twitter... it is the place you go to read drunken rants from celebrities or updates to a concert or something.
Twitter is a terrible information source and always was a terrible information source.
Who "honestly" thinks twitter even should be fact checked? And who would be crazy enough to pay someone to do that. Imagine that job listing "wanted 5000 people to fact check tweets"... No.
Most information sources shouldn't be fact checked because you can get to the same place just by exercising a little skepticism.
And really, a lot of the mainstream media guys deserve to be in the same boat. Look at mainstream media guys using anonymous sources. We're seeing that in the New York Times now. This was understood until recently to be a gold standard violation of establishment media. You don't do certain things.
1. You don't mix your editorials/opinions with straight news reporting. They violate that all the time now.
2. You don't use anonymous sources because they can't be fact checked by third party sources which means you could just make it all up. They do that all the time now.
3. You don't pay people for sources and you don't use information as a source that was bought. We've seen a few examples of that recently as well.
The above violations are what used to separate tabloids from the boring but accurate newspapers.
Well, what actually is the difference now? Seriously. What rule or code of ethics separates the two? I don't see it.
And on top of that to suggest Twitter of all things should be fact checked when they're clearly not upholding journalistic ethics in the mainstream newspapers?
The mad are running the asylum.
As it stands, fact checking organizations or processes seem to have entirely broken down. So, I have to fact check everything myself personally. And I suggest everyone do the same until this bought of unethical behavior passes. Keep an open mind, listen to what people have to say, but reserve judgment until you've checked it out. And until then... jump to no conclusions.
it is a little like your local water utility leaking sewage into the pipes. Which happens sometimes. Don't just drink it... boil it to kill the bacteria that might be in it and muddle through the mess. At some point, the media will fix itself. But at this point, the media won't even acknowledge it has a problem.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A day or so back the satanic js of Izreal broke the 'ceasefire' with Gaza for the millionth time- in this case a "one shot, two kills" j sniper took aim at a well identified AP reporter 600 meters from the 'border' fence, and disabled him for life by placing a bullet designed to shatter bone into his leg. The satanic j thought the reporter was an 'ordinary' palestinian. That he turned out to be an AP reporter caused them a tenny amount of trouble.
The ONLY people reporting this CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY on twitter are described by the satanic j-controlled mainstream media as 'bots'.
The js have always exploited the PUSH nature of mainstream media. In other words, media outlets that have a FIXED number of slots per day, so 'selective reporting' methods that dumb dumbs do not even define censorship, can be used.
When the j-ish atrocity mentioned above FAILS to appear in the news cycle on j-ish controlled outlets, the usual apologists say "well there isn't room for every story in the world- obvoulsy there has to be selection and priority'.
When a j sez "fake news" it means any news outlet a j does not control.
Alex Jones- a monster who began his carrer singing the praise of Izreal, built his empire on a radio outlet owned by js, and whose list of major ad sponsers is almost entirely j-ish AND married a j- was the JUDAS GOAT used to set the example for the co-ordinated targeting and banning of news outlets that actually do challenge the j-sh monopoly on 'news'. AJ 'sacrificed' himself in the service of his masters- the very people who fear what the Internet has brought to the concept of free access to unfiltered information.
AJ's own income source is bullet proof. But the tons of anti-war, anti-Izreal, anti-wahhabi voices that were silenced in the wake of the fake 'banning' of Jones made a real dent in the spreading of true news- and boosted the mainstream media control of their fake news machine.
World War is coming. America is now fully open in its intent to wage war on China and Russia in the foreseeable future, and America's holocaust in Iran, which will see the deaths of TENS of millions of innocent Humans, is right around the corner. These wars are j-ish wars to the extent that every powerful or significant j-ish groups calls for these wars and works to ensure they will happen. In this regard the js are too dumb to know they serve a far more powerful master, but that's a seperate issue.
What matters is that the Orwellian terms 'bot' and 'fake news', when applied by the mainstream media (like slashdot) mean any anti-war voice and any pro-Human voice. The tactic of demonising the opposing voice is as old as Humanity. But the tactic has never seen such co-ordination as it does today.
PS, Hollywood, AIPAC, Labour's 'friends of Izreal', Conservative's 'friends of Izreal', etc etc will all fight to bring that j-ish "one shot, two kills' sniper into America, Britain, Canada etc on fund raising activity to support satanic j-ish terror activity in the Middle East. Mass murdering j-ish butchers are granted places at the best universities in the West after their time in terror organisations like the IDF.
There are times when real satanic evil needs to keep a low profile for fear that Humanity will rise up and stamp it out for all time. Today is not one of those times.
If someone retweets fake news originally from a low-quality information source, it should affect someone's 'credibility score', which would be prominently shown as a percentage next to their name.
This'd make it easy to tell at a glance if someone retweeting something is likely to be retweeting fake news, and could prevent people from retweeting things from less-credible accounts. It'd also encourage people not to retweet crap since they'd be (potentially) shamed by having a low credibility score.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I wonder how many of these there are and what propaganda do they spread? If it's official, it isn't "fake news".
In other words, a grand total of about 0.008% of all tweets.
If it's so fucking easy to manipulate the world with such a minuscule effort, it's truly remarkable that ONLY the russians do it, while all the numerous twitter-obsessed American propaganda outlets just as desperate to influence the great unwashed masses are apparently just too damned ethical. God bless Jeff Zucker and his pure heart.
Somehow, I think you mean Indiana University.
The fact that the reality you see does not match the reality as reported by the news does not mean the news is wrong. It means that you are suffering a pathology that prevents you from seeing the truth.
No matter how old a decrypt the average white person is, we must accept the fact that white people are systematically oppressing the strong black youth because that is what is being reported.
When your observations conflict with the news it just means you are racist.
True: "What is important is how much misinformation is believed."
Also, it is important how much time is wasted trying to avoid the useless content.
Even more important: We need major social improvements.
Whatever happened to not believing or disbelieving anything you read online until you prove it through direct experimentation. special information they want to be a problem if people would stop using the net as an authoritative reference. Everything on the net is basically hearsay.
Oh look, a moron.
Most disinformation article I see spread around appeal to at least ONE of the part of the people : fun, hope, fear, political tribalism... Most fact based article are party pooper, hope killing, anti tribalism or at least makes the party of the reader (whichever) looks like ass, echo chamber killing, and are mostly downright going against the user feeling - reality is mostly like that after all. So yeah, MOST people will spread the disinfo and ignore the article not going their way. It is nice to see it confirmed by a study, though.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The truth that the powers that be don't want you to hear. Just remember how little control we had over the flow of TRUTH before the internet (although the internet is now being heavily censored by the likes of Google and Facebook) - nowadays anybody can video an event that the powers that be don't want the public to know about, but actually disagreeing with the Bolshevik (Jewish) narrative is not so easy, due to the endless censorship of so-called "hate" speech - i.e. anything that doesn't agree with what our unelected masters want.
Looks like my post whoooshed over the heads of the mods...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact