Bot Accounts - Disinformation and the removal of centre ground

mcmoustache

Tangatagamadda Chaddabinga Bonga Bungo wrote: »

How do you think Russia has been able to weaken or dismantle the EU in recent times? Are there examples?

One way is to finance anti-eu parties. An example would be France's Front Nationale. There are plenty of other examples but Brexit and Aaron Banks is a well documented case closer to home.

It stands to reason anyway that Russia would want to keep the EU more fractured. Russia would rather, and quite rationally I might add, not have a large unified US ally on it's border. It would prefer a less unified block that it can more easily manipulate.

Tangatagamadda Chaddabinga Bonga Bungo wrote: »

*If you mean the bigger picture in this is how the US has brought so much FDI and jobs into the Irish economy then fair enough. When it comes down to it Ireland has to take the Americans side in this. But from a neutral standpoint, I think it is fair to say this is a bigger problem than only Russianbot farms.

I'm more looking at it from a european perspective and currently, it looks like it's the Russians that are the more immediate threat right now, particularly along the border. They are also pioneers in the sense that this is an intelligence agency lead operation using social media in a fairly impressive way.

Your typical shinnerbot is most likely just an enthusiastic shinner with too much time on their hands. At it's most advanced, it could be someone employed by their publicity department to defend sin féin online. In either case, you know it's a shinnerbot because all they do is spew the usual shinner cráp that we're all familiar with.

The Russian campaign is far more impressive than that. It involves state media, fake websites, advertisements, trolls and bots acting together in an effort to influence targeted people who have been identified as susceptible to their messaging. It's the scale of the operation that's different here. This isn't some amateur Correct the Record campaign.

expectationlost

listermint wrote: »

I dont think i have ever really seen a thread on this so i thought i would open the discussion after bumping into numerous twitter bots on Twitter (obviously)

It can often be a handle that is thrown out, but sometimes other twitter users can open your eyes to it.

i read a thread earlier which was an article by RTE about a democrat senator race. and there was a classic out of hand comment about RTE being a democrat propaganda machine for the past 40 years.

So confused i read some of the comments below and then further into the details of that Twitter account noted that the account was 'joined April 2010' but i could not locate a single tweet it is history until Dec 2017 when it became superbly active.

How active ? it has over 90,000 Tweets to its name in less than a year.
The account dressed up as and Irish psuedonym from boggy somewhere or other. Started off lightly making non consistent comments on other peoples tweets and various articles. But eventually if you read the content it started grabbing articles and retweeting them. Articles from completely polarising viewpoints on very topical issues of the time. Global Warming / HPV Vacine / Vacines in general / Brexit race / Daesh / Terrorism / Robinson.

It would actually retweet extreme views from either side of the subject matter never sticking to one side or the other. Which led me to believe. This type of account is designed to Polarise. Its sole purpose is to remove middle ground. It wants to create a void of compromise on issues.

Who created it ?
Its clearly not Irish despite its profile.

It was created in 2010. So this shows me that this campaign was conceived over 8 years ago.

I think these are serious issues, that conventional politics still doesnt grasp the scale of. I dont think we have yet learned how to spot these, how to tackle them. And i believe Twitter is not robust enough either


Sure you can report them. But there is no followup, There is also no where to tell twitter why you think its a bot.

I would have assumed automation detecting dormant accounts that have been dormant for years and suddenly spring into 90,000 tweets in 10 months would be fairly easy for twitter to automate against.

But.... do they care ?


Anyway, i thought i would open this discussion up to discuss the implications of this information war. And has anyone else had similar experiences.

what account is it? as they say sunshine is the best disinfectant, found it https://twitter.com/boggywood

but i could not locate a single tweet it is history until Dec 2017

theres some in 2011 but then it goes quiet https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3Aboggywood%20since%3A2010-01-01%20until%3A2016-12-31&src=typd she doesn't like tubridy

then in march 2017 starts tweeting about american politics https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3Aboggywood%20since%3A2017-02-01%20until%3A2017-02-20&src=typd and contradictory stuff more recently, never underestimate the ability of human to waste time tweeting https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=ireland%20from%3Aboggywood%20since%3A2017-02-01%20until%3A2017-12-20&src=typd