California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose Bots

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California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose Bots

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:23 pm

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica expose and the ongoing Special Council investigation, the California State Legislature has proposed a bill that would require social media platform companies to identify automated accounts on their respective platforms, and will also make it illegal for bots to be programmed to interact with real people. In other words, no more spambots or weird-ass tweets like the ones that were demanding John McCain be charged and jailed for treason for voting "No" on the Skinny Repeal. This would be devastating to Twitter given the potential backlash from advertisers concerning the reduction of bot followers.
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Re: California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose B

Postby NathanLoiselle » Tue Apr 03, 2018 11:09 pm

While I agree with the first part involving disclosing automated accounts I completely disagree with the second half. Bots have been interacting with humans (ALICE anyone?) for twenty plus years and nothing horrible has happened. Plus they are only taking customer service jobs and who really wants a job in THAT industry? I mean, beyond me. Plus in this day and age how are you going to enforce bots not be programmed for a specific task? All the programmers will do is move to some place that allows them to program bots to interact with people. Like China or that damned Canada.
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Re: California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose B

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Wed Apr 04, 2018 5:26 am

Sorry, Nathan, it's spambots or democracy, and there's no going back! Well, unless the spambots form their own democracy, I guess.
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Re: California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose B

Postby RatElemental » Wed Apr 04, 2018 5:30 am

Are they planning to implement turing tests to distinguish bots from particularly annoying or repetitive people?
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Re: California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose B

Postby blehblah » Wed Apr 04, 2018 1:02 pm

random_nerd wrote:Are they planning to implement turing tests to distinguish bots from particularly annoying or repetitive people?


There is the crux of it. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse between bot creators and platform owners. If you really want to get fancy, you get into AI/machine learning, and other fancy-pants stuff, to make a bot sufficiently random and seemingly authentic. Likely, the best the law could do is call for a 'best effort' to identify them.

There are also click farms out there staffed by real people, because sometimes it's cheaper to hire a bunch of low-wage workers than actually create the automation.

The Russian efforts appear to use a combination of the two. Plenty of humans, along with plenty of retweets/posts/click generated by bots.

Here is an interesting story from CBC Radio about how Russian efforts made #releaseTheMemo skyrocket (it's a good listen). The original investigation was published on Politico here:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... emo-216935.

On the other hand, if there are platforms that have huge amounts of data, extreme expertise at mining said data, and using algorithms to classify user behaviour, it's the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so-on. I think the reality is they didn't detect and stop the questionable behaviour leveraged by Russian efforts because they didn't see it coming. To them, it probably looked a lot like the usual account/message boosting that happens all the time.

There are probably lots of folks who wish that they had recognized the problem earlier, because this isn't the kind of media coverage these platforms want (to say the least). That's not just because it is showing that they unwittingly helped Russia influence public opinion in many countries, about many things, but also because it's laying bare how many organizations (mostly advertisers) use the platforms to manipulate people. We all know manipulation is the whole point of advertising, we just don't like to be reminded about how effective it is.

It's also not entirely as clear-cut as 'blame the bots!'.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/twitt ... -1.4567691

As for the role of automated internet programs, or bots, the researchers are quick to point out that their findings shouldn't be taken to mean bots don't matter, or don't have an effect.

Rather, "contrary to conventional wisdom," they write, bots accelerated the spread of both false news and true news — but did so at about the same rate.

"When you remove them from your analysis, the difference between the spread of false and true news still stands," said Soroush Vosoughi, who also co-authored the study. "So they can't be the sole reason as to why false information seems to be spreading so much faster."

The study was published in the March 9 issue of the scientific journal Science.


The idea there is people are far more likely to pass-on novel information. It's a lot easier to come-up with fake novel information than real novel information.

An interesting point which the article notes is it is the result of undirected research at MIT which is funded by Twitter. The researches benefit by having access to all of Twitter's raw data. Most researchers don't. But then, there can be significant problems if the door for researchers is left wide open.
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Re: California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose B

Postby iMURDAu » Tue Jun 05, 2018 9:39 pm

But if you get rid of bot followers my army seems much less substantial.

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Re: California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose B

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Wed Oct 03, 2018 12:51 am

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