Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by delecti on Saturday January 23, 2021 @12:04PM
(#25883947)
I ran my account through it and got a 0.0 rating, and ran it against my followers, and got similarly low scores for the accounts that I know to be real people (the highest score for a follower I know to be a person was 0.8). I saw higher scores for either accounts that followed me out of nowhere (I'm not interesting enough to draw real strangers), or for accounts that are run as public profiles (an artist with a public account for their comics). I'm inclined to assume that you likely have either atypical or impersonal twitter habits.
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Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by Zuider on Saturday January 23, 2021 @12:56PM
(#25884537)
You may need to test for confirmation bias. I am sure you and people you know are well behaved and courteous on twitter and social media in general, and so would not trigger any alarms. Have you tried the bot-test on more contentious accounts that you know to be human?
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by delecti on Saturday January 23, 2021 @01:40PM
(#25884923)
I just checked a few of the more abrasive people I know, both of whom also do a lot of non-quote Retweets, and both also scored quite low (0.4 and 0.1).
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by true_religion on Saturday January 23, 2021 @03:34PM
(#25885799)
If only this was 2 weeks ago, we would know a certain contentious presidents' account to bot tests... but as of now, why follow anyone who is not well behaved?
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by jacquesm on Saturday January 23, 2021 @12:14PM
(#25884088)
Or maybe that's just buggy software.
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by freeone3000 on Saturday January 23, 2021 @01:04PM
(#25884596)
It's not buggy: it detects patterns like the majority of posts being retweets instead of new posts; any new post consisting of an image and accompanying text instead of a message or thread; replies being short comments on top responses to popular posts; and a high degree of connectivity to other accounts that are likely bots.
False positives are generally curated accounts, corporate accounts, and government accounts (which are really bots with their software in managerial documents); porn accounts; and people who reblog the news but don't really "use" twitter.
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by tetromino_ on Saturday January 23, 2021 @02:17PM
(#25885208)
And if it's anything like some other naïve bot detection algorithms I've seen, it might be viciously biased against non-English-speakers. To the extent of, say, labelling anyone primarily using Arabic or Cyrillic alphabets as a bot.
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by jacquesm on Saturday January 23, 2021 @03:23PM
(#25885701)
Or that writes a lot in Dutch.
Just the other day a prominent dutch account got auto-blocked on twitter for saying 'Die Rutte toch.', where 'Die' (a pretty common dutch word, which in this case translates as 'That') was mistaken for a threat to our prime minister.
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by jacquesm on Saturday January 23, 2021 @02:08PM
(#25885140)
If it detects my account as a bot I would say it's buggy, because I've done none of that stuff.
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by pixl97 on Saturday January 23, 2021 @03:20PM
(#25885671)
Or you just post a lot of misinformation.
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by jeffbee on Saturday January 23, 2021 @04:36PM
(#25886356)
When I was in the spam blocking business we joked about the problem of the Russian urologist. Somewhere, there must be someone who really is trying to buy Viagra from a Russian e-commerce site. But the other 99.99999% of the time it's spam. Perhaps this person's Twitter suffers a similar fate: all the classification features align with robot traffic, but they aren't a robot.
Re:Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
by SwanRonson on Sunday January 24, 2021 @07:21PM
(#25897636)
That would nullify the study entirely since the criteria in the test directly overlaps the criteria of the results.
There are multiple people in this thread that have been incorrectly tagged as bots, I’d like to see proper tests done with the software identifying the level of accuracy. It shouldn’t be too much to ask since their entire study is hinged on the accuracy of this software.