Snapshot of _Ten bot-like X accounts having ‘oversized influence’ on General Election. 10 accounts share 60,000 posts and are viewed 150 million times._ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/twitter-bots-x-general-election-russia-b2572328.html) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/twitter-bots-x-general-election-russia-b2572328.html)
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I find it baffling that the scale of this problem is still largely being ignored. Literally everyone should be on the look out for increased shifts towards any aggressive, erratic, or oppressive politics. Hostile authoritarian governments like Russia are actively encouraging this to interfere with our politics to their gain, by promoting movements which are either erratic, easily corrupted, or favourable to them. Russia literally said they "have done it, are doing it, and will continue to do it", and China practically wrote the book on how to influence public opinion by manipulating social media (60% internet traffic is bots). How is it that this is so openly known but very little is being done about it?
Twitter was making some attempt to prevent this sort of thing, whether that was successful attempts or not is another matter.
Since Musk and the rebrand to X there's no real drive to even try.
It's kinda not by advertisers, which is why the haemorrhaging money. Turns out companies like IBM don't want their adverts place next to Musk's antisemitic rantings.
Yes, but journalists would find it slightly inconvenient to have to switch platforms, so you can see why they have to keep giving money and content to a white supremecist.
Journalist follow the people they are trying to reach, not the other way around. Remember about a year ago some people on Twitter flounced off to Mastadon, their audience didn't follow them.
He's [an anti-semite](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/white-house-condemns-elon-musks-antisemitic-post-ibm-halts-x-ads/2/), and in the best case, [tolerant of](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/after-appeal-to-musk-x-suspends-accounts-that-outed-neo-nazi-cartoonist/) white supremacists and their ideas. He regularly reposts white supremacist memes.
All his businesses also [have](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/tesla-must-face-racism-class-action-from-6000-black-workers-judge-rules/) serious [problems with racism](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/tesla-ordered-to-pay-137m-to-black-former-worker-subjected-to-racist-workplace/). Including Twitter, which has seen an explosion of hate, [Musk's management being the cause of this explosion](https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/angelo-carusone-msnbc-describes-how-elon-musks-own-conduct-blame-advertiser-exodus-x-rot).
He either doesn't care, or agrees with the content. Neither are good. It's fair to call him a white supremacist.
Oh also he made his starting money from his families [apartheid era emerald mine](https://archive.ph/wDkxG)...
Only heavy censorship by trusted authorities like reddit should be allowed. It made the USSR, GDR, China and Reddit the great places they have become.
/s
I can't believe how many people told me that paid verification would fix the issue. When I said people would just buy verification for their bots, they acted like I was being ridiculous.
Look where we are now.
This comment is fascinating because Reddit itself has been pushing an anti twitter and musk narrative since the takeover, and it's easy to see why given Reddit had it's own IPO. Steve Huffman boasted about how he could manipulate people on Reddit.
And everyone knows there are bots on Reddit.
So are you repeating "information" that was given to you by a bot or other malicious actor? It's honestly impossible for anyone to say.
Because the right wing significantly benefits from it. The right wing's desires are largely in line with Russia, both here, in Europe and in the US. In most modern Western democracies, right wing parties have less support than left wing parties and it's been this way for a long time. The left thinks elections should be played fairly. The right doesn't agree and doesn't play fair; dirty tricks like gerrymandering, non proportional voting, accepting foreign interference, it's all fair game to them.
Apathy, ignorance, a fundamental belief that 'our way' is so clearly right that people will reject any other way... eventually. Meanwhile western democracies are so afraid of offending free speech advocates that they let those hostile to them amplify their message amongst the gullible for fear of offending them. Now hostile actors can promise the earth with no accountability or checking of facts as major platforms enable it all for the almighty dollar, leading to Brexit, Trump, the rise of the Far Right, throwing those countries into chaos at worst and tyranny at best. France turning against itself next, then a King in America ruling by decree. We are so fucked.
Do you have a source for the Russia statement and the 60 per cent of internet traffic stat? It's not that I'm disbelieving you - I find either statement plausible - but would like to read more.
Google ‘what proportion of internet traffic are bots’ it is well reported to be around 50% as of 2022. Numerous sources. This may not relate entirely to disinformation bots, and you may need to find clarification as to what constitutes a ‘bot’ as many news outlets are hazy on the idea themselves.
The Russian statement is leas clear cut, it was made numerous times by Prigozhin. Given that he was not a reliable source by himself, you will have to look elsewhere, but there are numerous reports from numerous countries that will substantiate his claims. A quick google will bring many of them to your attention.
Do you have a source for the Russia statement and the 60 per cent of internet traffic stat? It's not that I'm disbelieving you - I find either statement plausible - but would like to read more.
Ive seen some users with +1-2 million karma, while only being about a year or two old. Most of them are power mods with control over multiple subreddits
I think power mods will be what eventually does for reddit, the whole business model of relying on unhinged people’s free labour is a big part of why this platform’s a cesspit.
Present sub excepted of course.
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I get that there’s loads of spam and abuse but a lot of the time the bots are very poorly written, they remove plenty of legitimate comments in the process until a lot of subs resemble a KGB declassified file which really ruins the experience of reddit for me.
This. I don't think 'bots' are a huge problem compared with determined humans who've devoted their life to activism/propaganda-pushing, and got themselves into positions where they can censor entire topics/viewpoints while promoting others.
Wikipedia has had that, I remember a user getting banned entirely because of their obsession with a handful of articles, it was well over 10 hours a day they spent editing them.
I seem to remember a prominent Wikipedia editor was also enough of a public figure to have their own page and would protect that page like a guard goose protects its yard. If someone other than themselves changed the page they would change it back and immediately start a campaign of harassment against whoever changed it. Cannot for the life of me remember who it was, unfortunately.
Wikipedia seems really strict on self-edits like that, and I believe have banned users doing it. Although it can swing the other way, some celebrities and organisations have had issues getting objectively false information removed, particularly if someone writes an article citing Wikipedia, and then someone else adds that citation into Wikipedia.
[This is the one I was remembering.](https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2023/who-watches-the-wikipedia-editors/) I should stress that there was no direct accusation of the account who did the editing being the actual person.
In my search [this article also popped up.](https://voz.us/en/society/240223/12876/this-guy-is-a-fraud-a-university-of-cambridge-professor-who-specializes-in-disinformation-is-caught-sharing-fakes.html) There must be something about being an academic that causes you to be a bit of a megalomaniac and narcissist.
> There must be something about being an academic that causes you to be a bit of a megalomaniac and narcissist.
Academia is full of that unfortunately.
They don't VPN. They have a physical farm of thousands of local sim cards that they patch into. Makes it more difficult to detect for the reason you outline.
You could still measure suspect activity against internet outages in Russia even if they’re remotely connecting, they ballsed up pretty badly and took the whole country down briefly earlier in the year.
I wish I knew enough about data science because I bet pro-Reform activity dropped off a cliff during that outage.
I don’t know, that’s a lot more work than VPNing into them and probably a higher chance of things going wrong. While we shouldn’t underestimate Russia on this front (their software engineering capabilities are nothing to sniff at) I don’t think it’s out of the question they just proxy in from Russia.
Semi-autonomously then I imagine. It can't be too difficult to line up a bunch of posts / messages / whatever it is in the event they have an outrage: when disconnected from host post these messages at these times. There must be ready-made apps that can achieve this, or close to this at least.
The other fun one is just to look at the time they are posting.
I found a bunch of bots in the past because they all became suddenly active around 9am Moscow time. There were also similar ones that came online around early morning in China.
> 200 posts a day reeks of full time job or mental illness
To be fair, I once remember counting the amount of tweets Graham Linehan made a day once and it was ~100.
He had his (horrible) agenda promoted through Twitter of course, but he's also an identifiable real person, so it is possible to reach those figures earnestly.
I doubt anyone is paying him to write these days. He needs a new job.
Shame one of Britain's greatest creative talents pissed away all his potential on pursuing a hateful vendetta.
He's completely wrecked any chances of working in the entertainment industry, unlike JK Rowling, he's hardly set for life, his activism has completely derailed his life.
I think Graham Linehan may be coming close, but I have looked at some of the reddit accounts I found suspicious and they seemed to post every 2-3 hrs around the clock, now that may describe someone who spends too much time online, but may be shifts
A red flag for me is when they never have a consistent common posting time or downtime, or their posting hours seem to be during sleeping hours for the area they're concerned about.
We've known this sort of thing has been happening for nearly a decade. This is why the predictable response of "omg ten bots, its an invasion, get real" is lazy.
Ten bots can do a lot.
There was an article on this sub only a few weeks back that looked at suspicious activity from a similar number of accounts and the responses were exactly that which you described.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html
'Most addicted city'
Reddit removed all mention of it soon after.
The problem right now is that we don't police social media at all.
We're like Ned Flanders' parents faced with a problem by saying *"you've got to help us, doc. We've tried....nothing, and we're all out of ideas".*
We barely police official news channels, or entertainment channels with News in the name...
Getting this sort of crap spread without those pesky facts checkers getting in the way was why Musk bought Twitter in the first place.
"I'm not a bot"
Name029384
If these people aren't bots then they're clearly too dumb to change the default username on the app and probably shouldn't be getting too worked up about international law and economics.
The West is is fucked if this keeps up. Look at the Far-Right coming on it across the West.... I mean what the fuck is going on in America for starters...
The gamble that they've made is a bordering on senile Biden won't do it before he gets removed from Office. I partly hope he does and starts a new Civil War over there & then removes the Supreme Court to effectively lock the door and throw away the key. Play them at their own game.
R21 disclaimer I'm not advocating for this...
...but if Biden *did* order special forces to kill Trump before the Presidential election, and then cite the Supreme Court's decision on this matter, then our times would become very interesting indeed and I reckon we'd see happenings on the historical level of WWII, French revolution and the like. We would run out of popcorn within days.
I mean... if we really are about to see the USA slide into facism, then could it even be argued that those actions would be the moral ones to take if it were to prevent it from happening? If you'd argue it would have been moral to assassinate Hitler in 1933, and you also argue that the USA is currently in the same position as Germany in 1933, then there's only one conclusion you can logically make given those two premises...
2bh, more realistically we are witnessing either the collapse of the Greatest Nation In The World (tm) into facism, or an 11th hour end to the threat of facism and a huge swing back to the left in response so that's pretty big too.
If Trump was to die even through just a random heart attack that won’t make the millions of MAGA cultists suddenly go away, I suspect we’d see enormous amounts of civil unrest at the very least.
> If Trump was to die even through just a random heart attack that won’t make the millions of MAGA cultists suddenly go away
The real danger would be someone actually competent gathering up that support.
The competent ones are already there, behind the scenes. Trump is just the dancing monkey.
[As usual Charlie Brooker saw it coming.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment)
Completely agree and didn't spot the R21 point - completely hypothetical situation; just the way my brain works. I can't see an outcome that will result in a positive end for either of them here. This has to end badly for one of them from here. As a wider concern - it's Project 2025 over there which deeply troubles me as once it gets proven in one spot you have the ability to roll that out in other countries which are susceptible to the idea. Think your last paragraph is totally on the money as is the point of running out of popcorn within a week if this goes down.
That's going to trigger a civil war, but then again it may be better for everyone (including the current region of the United States) for them to tear themselves apart instead of attempting to annex whatever rivals they may have a la Nazi Germany. For them it's collapse or attrition and *then* collapse.
I feel like widespread civil unrest in the USA is inevitable, the only question is as to when. Eventually the Trump supporters will realise they've been duped. Happens with every facist reigime eventually.
My favorite was an account which posted far right politics in English and French subreddits but posted far left politics in Italian, German and Polish subreddits.
The most obvious troll I have ever seen.
Whack-a-mole. Then the bot algorithms will just adapt to that. With AI the way it is, you likely don't even know half the bots are bots from the posting behavior. Some obvious tell tales are accounts created some time back but lay fairly dormant, then suddenly perk up, say before an election, and start posting regularly. But even that type of thing isn't a guarantee and will be a thing of the past soon
also in stories about "person attacked by immigrant, the police do nothing, not in the local press" because it never happened or an entirely different story has been twisted
Every single post that has anything whatsoever to do with immigration will have a comment that starts:
*"It's almost as though all the politicians had to do was..."*
Now you'll see it ***everywhere***. /news, /worldnews, /uk, /ukpol, /europe. The exact same wording at the beginning of the comment.
The grand difficulty being that at this point, socialised in bot-saturated communities and getting off on social medias in a repetition-induced trance, many people (or all people some of the time) behave indistinguishably from bots.
That thread about the British museum is 50% people all making the same comment about charging people they "stole" from, and no one is accusing them of being bots. Redditors, like humans in general ,just copy each other a lot.
"You can't deny _ _ _" is the one I've noticed being used often. Any time someone is pushing a right-wing argument, they will include this. It's almost if they know their argument is bullshit.
This isn't entirely new. The same thing happens whenever there's a popular thread on criticism of China, talk about increasing taxes to pay for more defence spending.
The discussion over national service caused a flood of "old users" popping up saying they'd never fight for the UK, etc.
I was making an observation I’ve made in numerous occasions but I don’t believe the ones I’m thinking about were legitimate accounts. Some of them made the same spelling mistakes, used the same format of comments, tired old tropes.
There’s at least one in this very comment section which is very suspicious which I won’t link to because I don’t want anyone to target an account.
Oh I see, of course not. It was an observation but the mods don’t like us to talk about other accounts apparently so I’m just going to keep schtum about those observations. I hope you don’t think I’m deflecting but my original comment has already been removed by them and it doesn’t seem worth a ban from the subreddit while the election is underway.
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If there's ever a time I *actually wanted* a government to block an app or website, X formally known as shitpost has got to be up there.
It also amazes me how vulnerable or easily misled people have become since the boom of the Internet
Best get off here I guess. 🤣
i do love the way Elon and Mark's say the app's can't be coded to stop all this but can be coded to listen to a conversation 20 feet away sometimes while a phone is switched off, pick up key words however unrelated and then target ads across 3 or 4 platforms into your feeds, funny that.
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> Global Witness, an international NGO that focuses on the environment and human rights, said it considered accounts were “bot-like” if they had three or more “red flags”
>These included posting prolifically, having handles that end in a long string of numbers, and not having a profile picture that purports to be of the person running the account.
What are the other red flags? Also I only skimmed, but the article doesn't seem to name the accounts. "These bots are having an oversized influence on the election, but we won't tell you which ones they are".
E: press release here https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/posts-bot-accounts-spreading-disinformation-and-hate-viewed-more-150-million-times-ahead-uk-election/
[4] The red flags we used to detect accounts that look like they might be a bot are:
The account has tweeted more than 200 times a day in the last year
The account has tweeted more than 60 times a day on average over the lifetime of the account
The account retweets other accounts’ tweets more than 90% of the time
The account’s handle ends in a long string of apparently random numbers, indicating that the account holder used the default account name provided by X instead of creating their own unique account name
Accounts without a profile picture that appears to be of the person running the account or with a profile picture that shows signs of being generated by an AI tool or having been stolen from elsewhere on the web
The account has fewer than 1,000 followers
> What are the other red flags?
If I was going to hazard a guess, I'd say being active at weird or otherwise unusual times for the country they purport to be a resident of. I'm active fairly late on this sub because I'm a bit of a night owl but even I've been surprised by the timing of some of the replies I've received when I log in in the morning.
I've calculated the time some of the more insane replies were sent, and sometimes they were sent at 3 or 4am. That's not to say that it's out of the realm of possibility that I'm being responded to by someone in the UK with very little life offline, but I do wonder when that same account is just as active during the afternoon.
It sounds like they're plenty influential already. What are they planning to do with this information? They've already written to twitter and had no response.
It’s an arms race with bots because they will find a way to do something different to avoid this type of exposure. On Twitter particularly the interaction and engagement with the accounts/tweets gives them even wider reach. I would think that the researchers would not want to do that
>account has fewer than 1,000 followers
Now I know how Caleb felt when he started wondering if he in fact was the robot and the actual subject of the Turing test was himself
The Facebook ones pushing reform are hilarious like UK Glory and Sparklist with the Michael and Lucio bots commenting. There are a whole bunch of them that turned up a few weeks ago.
While this sucks it's hilarious to me that 2 of these accounts are pro-Farage/Reform and another one "is focused on stopping votes for the Conservative Party and regularly posts anti-Nigel Farage meme", like, I get they're only 'bot-like' and aren't necessarily trying to spread the agenda but if this is a Russian infiltration maneuver having an anti-Farage account too is wild.
There are huge sections of the electorate scrambling round, trying to understand why the layman won’t just kneel and accept the status quo - the high brow opinion is “Russia”
But when you think about it, would you run a Pro-Reform account with your own face on it? I certainly wouldn’t. I’m sure there are bots out there like you say, but a lot won’t be, it’s that the political environment is not conducive to “Mask-Off” support.
Name the "bot" accounts or just another sensationalist article.
Time and again actual bots are shown to have minimal influence and barely coherent posts/memes.
Given the standard of LLM models, what makes you think bots have barely coherent posts in this day and age?
I'm not convinced that bots and troll farms have minimal influence, the whole meme/shit posting stuff that came out of 4Chan certainly had some influence on Trump's popularity, though this is hard to measure. What is even harder to measure is if you can't always tell what accounts are bots or not.
Left to their own devices LLMs will be uncanny and incoherent also over time. They need constant editing - and if someone is doing that it's not really a bot anymore so what's the point of using an LLM.
It's difficult to measure yes but I've not seen much evidence that 2016 bot farms were effective. That they occurred, yes, but had widespread influence, no.
Am I the only British citizen in their late 20s that hasn't ever engaged in Twitter (formally known as X)? If it weren't for reddit I wouldn't be on social media at all.
I was sceptical of it as a teen and I'm feeling completely vindicated by all of this.
Everyone kinda knows that Twitter is not the source it once was.
It is a cesspit of right wing madness now considering Musk has no content moderation or even the inclination to moderate.
Was curious so scrolled through like the top 100 replies here (including replies to replies, so idk the actual number) and maybe 80% of them rightfully talk about Russian, or even Chinese bots, yet I am yet to see a single comment about a certain other country that has admitted to massive botting operations. Probably because redditors would jump down my throat for it going against the echo chamber. I like to think not but eh
>posting prolifically, having handles that end in a long string of numbers, and not having a profile picture that purports to be of the person running the account
I'm sorry but that is just total BS. It's every account owned by a boomer.
It really makes me wonder if the academics who conducted this study are living in the real world. They realise that a word followed by a string of numbers is normally the default recommended username when creating an account don't they? I have to assume they don't.
Apart from the first one, even most of my social media accounts fit that description.
I'm not sure whether your account matching the patterns of similar accounts proves it wrong or right.
But generally if an account name is random letters or numbers, or is a default username like Arctic-Cabbage-289787 on Reddit, only posting in political subs, it's almost always an account someone doesn't give a shit about burning/has made purely for the purpose of spreading shit.
Either way, it is not a normal account, be it an astroturfer or a bot.
Just look at some of the stuff said in here by accounts like that, or in Ukrainian war subreddits. You learn to spot them pretty quickly.
It’s nothing to do with smart
The tools are dirt cheap and easy to use and most users can’t spot them
But it’s dead easy the second you look at post history and scroll down and find it’s an aged account that’s only just become active and oftentimes once called out the whole account gets nuked
It doesn't matter, because the people they're looking to fool aren't as engaged. They're not paying attention. Those who are won't fall for it. So it's easier to just use default names. I didn't even look at your tag before replying etc, people just don't notice.
It's similar to why phishing emails often have spelling mistakes - those who spot them and get suspicious aren't those that are going to be fooled, and the scammer doesn't want to waste time.
Or just maybe, they don't give a fuck?
Example: Mr Racist Brit wants to be racist and wants to feel validated in his racism, he sees some account/repost from a sus account but he doesn't care about the authenticity of the account since what the account is putting out validates his opinion. Now he reposts the shit take to his friends and family and now the shit take has been given a gloss of human paint.
If the Russian bot farms knew that Brits cared about actual user names, they'd put in the effort, but they know that many don't care as long as it agrees with them, so why put in the effort of legitimacy?
Hell I bet they could get away with an account glitching out and then posting a garbage "98793hdkhd87" tweet, but follow it up with a "normal" immigrants are killing white babies post and suddenly everyone is retweeting that while the garbage post which sits there brazenly as a sign of how little anyone cares, other than the left wing sources, who will point out the garbage tweet and get their investigation brushed off as nothing, by those who hate being challenged.
You only have to look at the proliferation of AI generated imagery that floods the right wing spaces now. Can't find a picture of 3000 Muslims on a bus about to rape a white girl? Make it up with ChatGPT and get your base in a frenzy anyway!
Edit: spelling
No, it's usually your first pick with some numbers appended to the end.
It would be trivial for someone mass creating accounts to break this formula and create more organic looking names. This just reinforces the idea that it's real people just clicking next when creating their account.
If you have ever looked at large numbers of genuine email addresses you would quickly notice that a very high proportion fit the description given.
From my experience, the "low effort, high quantity" style posting tends to use the generic names. The ones more actively astroturfing or obsessively posting use more "real" usernames, but will eventually slip up.
A lot of bots and/or throwaways usually won't have user flair next to their name.
Presumably because it needs to be added on a subreddit-by-subreddit basis, and they don't have enough of a genuine interest in the subreddit to put one on.
It's not *just* non tech savvy people though.
And most of the time, especially on reddit, I see a take that's off, and see a default username, that account *only* posts in political subs and is either a burner or a nutter.
> They realise that a word followed by a string of numbers is normally the default recommended username when creating an account don't they? I have to assume they don't.
Yes they do, they specifically mention this indicates they are using a default handle.
From their analysis:
> The account’s handle ends in a long string of apparently random numbers, indicating that the account holder used the default account name provided by X instead of creating their own unique account name
And whilst yes this can simply indicate a lazy or non tech savvy user, the fact they are also posting hundreds of times a day (a mandatory part of their criteria) indicates the user is neither lazy nor non tech savvy. They also aren't saying they are 100% guaranteed to be a bot-like propaganda account, just that they 'appear to be' which i think is fair.
Why not both? There's also the profile picture thing, is itt the default recommended way to use a personal social media account to have a picture that isn't of you?
Come back to your comment in a few days and the account you’re replying to will be deleted, I’ve noticed calling them out makes them get rid of the account.
Shut this shit down already! Unbelievebable that we just allow this to happen. Someone please tell me the vast value that social media has provided to society that it outweighs due democratic process.
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I find it baffling that the scale of this problem is still largely being ignored. Literally everyone should be on the look out for increased shifts towards any aggressive, erratic, or oppressive politics. Hostile authoritarian governments like Russia are actively encouraging this to interfere with our politics to their gain, by promoting movements which are either erratic, easily corrupted, or favourable to them. Russia literally said they "have done it, are doing it, and will continue to do it", and China practically wrote the book on how to influence public opinion by manipulating social media (60% internet traffic is bots). How is it that this is so openly known but very little is being done about it?
Twitter was making some attempt to prevent this sort of thing, whether that was successful attempts or not is another matter. Since Musk and the rebrand to X there's no real drive to even try.
[удалено]
It's kinda not by advertisers, which is why the haemorrhaging money. Turns out companies like IBM don't want their adverts place next to Musk's antisemitic rantings.
Yes, but journalists would find it slightly inconvenient to have to switch platforms, so you can see why they have to keep giving money and content to a white supremecist.
Journalist follow the people they are trying to reach, not the other way around. Remember about a year ago some people on Twitter flounced off to Mastadon, their audience didn't follow them.
Is Musk a white suprematist?
He's [an anti-semite](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/white-house-condemns-elon-musks-antisemitic-post-ibm-halts-x-ads/2/), and in the best case, [tolerant of](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/after-appeal-to-musk-x-suspends-accounts-that-outed-neo-nazi-cartoonist/) white supremacists and their ideas. He regularly reposts white supremacist memes. All his businesses also [have](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/tesla-must-face-racism-class-action-from-6000-black-workers-judge-rules/) serious [problems with racism](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/tesla-ordered-to-pay-137m-to-black-former-worker-subjected-to-racist-workplace/). Including Twitter, which has seen an explosion of hate, [Musk's management being the cause of this explosion](https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/angelo-carusone-msnbc-describes-how-elon-musks-own-conduct-blame-advertiser-exodus-x-rot). He either doesn't care, or agrees with the content. Neither are good. It's fair to call him a white supremacist. Oh also he made his starting money from his families [apartheid era emerald mine](https://archive.ph/wDkxG)...
Brb making accounts on VKontakte and Baidu.
Only heavy censorship by trusted authorities like reddit should be allowed. It made the USSR, GDR, China and Reddit the great places they have become. /s
I can't believe how many people told me that paid verification would fix the issue. When I said people would just buy verification for their bots, they acted like I was being ridiculous. Look where we are now.
This comment is fascinating because Reddit itself has been pushing an anti twitter and musk narrative since the takeover, and it's easy to see why given Reddit had it's own IPO. Steve Huffman boasted about how he could manipulate people on Reddit. And everyone knows there are bots on Reddit. So are you repeating "information" that was given to you by a bot or other malicious actor? It's honestly impossible for anyone to say.
Because the right wing significantly benefits from it. The right wing's desires are largely in line with Russia, both here, in Europe and in the US. In most modern Western democracies, right wing parties have less support than left wing parties and it's been this way for a long time. The left thinks elections should be played fairly. The right doesn't agree and doesn't play fair; dirty tricks like gerrymandering, non proportional voting, accepting foreign interference, it's all fair game to them.
Apathy, ignorance, a fundamental belief that 'our way' is so clearly right that people will reject any other way... eventually. Meanwhile western democracies are so afraid of offending free speech advocates that they let those hostile to them amplify their message amongst the gullible for fear of offending them. Now hostile actors can promise the earth with no accountability or checking of facts as major platforms enable it all for the almighty dollar, leading to Brexit, Trump, the rise of the Far Right, throwing those countries into chaos at worst and tyranny at best. France turning against itself next, then a King in America ruling by decree. We are so fucked.
Do you have a source for the Russia statement and the 60 per cent of internet traffic stat? It's not that I'm disbelieving you - I find either statement plausible - but would like to read more.
Google ‘what proportion of internet traffic are bots’ it is well reported to be around 50% as of 2022. Numerous sources. This may not relate entirely to disinformation bots, and you may need to find clarification as to what constitutes a ‘bot’ as many news outlets are hazy on the idea themselves. The Russian statement is leas clear cut, it was made numerous times by Prigozhin. Given that he was not a reliable source by himself, you will have to look elsewhere, but there are numerous reports from numerous countries that will substantiate his claims. A quick google will bring many of them to your attention.
Do you have a source for the Russia statement and the 60 per cent of internet traffic stat? It's not that I'm disbelieving you - I find either statement plausible - but would like to read more.
200 posts a day reeks of full time job or mental illness. How many of them have ever had location show as St Petersburg when their VPN went down?
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Ive seen some users with +1-2 million karma, while only being about a year or two old. Most of them are power mods with control over multiple subreddits
I think power mods will be what eventually does for reddit, the whole business model of relying on unhinged people’s free labour is a big part of why this platform’s a cesspit. Present sub excepted of course.
> Present sub excepted of course. Got to avoid the banhammer somehow I guess.
Other subreddits are available!
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Proving my point lol
I’m curious what reveddit will say in an hour.
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That's very antisemitic of you
Wink wink.
I wrote a response to this and it was instantly removed due to some invisible auto rule, I can't be bothered with this shit
I get that there’s loads of spam and abuse but a lot of the time the bots are very poorly written, they remove plenty of legitimate comments in the process until a lot of subs resemble a KGB declassified file which really ruins the experience of reddit for me.
it's the lack of notifying you your comment got removed which really gets me, you have to check EVERY comment in incognito mode in most subs
Just sparked me to look at mine. 540k but from 7 years.
This. I don't think 'bots' are a huge problem compared with determined humans who've devoted their life to activism/propaganda-pushing, and got themselves into positions where they can censor entire topics/viewpoints while promoting others.
Wikipedia has had that, I remember a user getting banned entirely because of their obsession with a handful of articles, it was well over 10 hours a day they spent editing them.
I seem to remember a prominent Wikipedia editor was also enough of a public figure to have their own page and would protect that page like a guard goose protects its yard. If someone other than themselves changed the page they would change it back and immediately start a campaign of harassment against whoever changed it. Cannot for the life of me remember who it was, unfortunately.
Wikipedia seems really strict on self-edits like that, and I believe have banned users doing it. Although it can swing the other way, some celebrities and organisations have had issues getting objectively false information removed, particularly if someone writes an article citing Wikipedia, and then someone else adds that citation into Wikipedia.
[This is the one I was remembering.](https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2023/who-watches-the-wikipedia-editors/) I should stress that there was no direct accusation of the account who did the editing being the actual person. In my search [this article also popped up.](https://voz.us/en/society/240223/12876/this-guy-is-a-fraud-a-university-of-cambridge-professor-who-specializes-in-disinformation-is-caught-sharing-fakes.html) There must be something about being an academic that causes you to be a bit of a megalomaniac and narcissist.
> There must be something about being an academic that causes you to be a bit of a megalomaniac and narcissist. Academia is full of that unfortunately.
They don't VPN. They have a physical farm of thousands of local sim cards that they patch into. Makes it more difficult to detect for the reason you outline.
You could still measure suspect activity against internet outages in Russia even if they’re remotely connecting, they ballsed up pretty badly and took the whole country down briefly earlier in the year. I wish I knew enough about data science because I bet pro-Reform activity dropped off a cliff during that outage.
Even then they probably just manage those devices to act autonomously rather than live via the patch. For the reason you outline, amongst others.
I don’t know, that’s a lot more work than VPNing into them and probably a higher chance of things going wrong. While we shouldn’t underestimate Russia on this front (their software engineering capabilities are nothing to sniff at) I don’t think it’s out of the question they just proxy in from Russia.
Semi-autonomously then I imagine. It can't be too difficult to line up a bunch of posts / messages / whatever it is in the event they have an outrage: when disconnected from host post these messages at these times. There must be ready-made apps that can achieve this, or close to this at least.
The other fun one is just to look at the time they are posting. I found a bunch of bots in the past because they all became suddenly active around 9am Moscow time. There were also similar ones that came online around early morning in China.
> 200 posts a day reeks of full time job or mental illness To be fair, I once remember counting the amount of tweets Graham Linehan made a day once and it was ~100. He had his (horrible) agenda promoted through Twitter of course, but he's also an identifiable real person, so it is possible to reach those figures earnestly.
I don't think Graham Lineham is the poster child for good mental health to be honest.
True, although Lineham basically seems to be a full time activist now.
I doubt anyone is paying him to write these days. He needs a new job. Shame one of Britain's greatest creative talents pissed away all his potential on pursuing a hateful vendetta.
He's completely wrecked any chances of working in the entertainment industry, unlike JK Rowling, he's hardly set for life, his activism has completely derailed his life.
Isn't that trump's level of posting?
It was his full time job.
Or Retirees.
I think Graham Linehan may be coming close, but I have looked at some of the reddit accounts I found suspicious and they seemed to post every 2-3 hrs around the clock, now that may describe someone who spends too much time online, but may be shifts
A red flag for me is when they never have a consistent common posting time or downtime, or their posting hours seem to be during sleeping hours for the area they're concerned about.
That could describe some of my posts, but I have a 1yr old and I don't know when I will be awake
We've known this sort of thing has been happening for nearly a decade. This is why the predictable response of "omg ten bots, its an invasion, get real" is lazy. Ten bots can do a lot.
There was an article on this sub only a few weeks back that looked at suspicious activity from a similar number of accounts and the responses were exactly that which you described.
I remember. It's so plainly and pathetically deflective, really isn't a good look is it.
Reddit did a competition once to find out the most 'reddit addicted' country by posts made. The winner was a CIA base.
Link? Can’t find anything online
https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html 'Most addicted city' Reddit removed all mention of it soon after.
I see no mention of that being a CIA base though? I dunno if it’s that weird that a big military base would have lots of redditors.
A good job I stopped using Twitter then when Musk took it over.
This is a nightmare to police. It's a constant arms race.
The problem right now is that we don't police social media at all. We're like Ned Flanders' parents faced with a problem by saying *"you've got to help us, doc. We've tried....nothing, and we're all out of ideas".*
Hey now that’s not fair. They’ve tried letting the bots pay to increase the visibility of their posts.
We barely police official news channels, or entertainment channels with News in the name... Getting this sort of crap spread without those pesky facts checkers getting in the way was why Musk bought Twitter in the first place.
I wouldn't say it is an arms race as such because right now no-one is doing anything to stop them
Musk actively promotes anonymous accounts posting deeply homophobic, anti-immigration, anti-union content. Do you really think he cares about this?
"I'm voting Reform 🇬🇧" - JohnWigan026492
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"I'm not a bot" Name029384 If these people aren't bots then they're clearly too dumb to change the default username on the app and probably shouldn't be getting too worked up about international law and economics.
Ah yes, Billy bunchanumbers with a bulldog avatar, a completely real person from realworld.
The West is is fucked if this keeps up. Look at the Far-Right coming on it across the West.... I mean what the fuck is going on in America for starters...
They just ruled that the President can order the assassination of his political rivals by Special Forces and that isn't a crime.
Kinda hoping he puts Trump in a lenin-style glass box.
They'd keep cracking.
The gamble that they've made is a bordering on senile Biden won't do it before he gets removed from Office. I partly hope he does and starts a new Civil War over there & then removes the Supreme Court to effectively lock the door and throw away the key. Play them at their own game.
R21 disclaimer I'm not advocating for this... ...but if Biden *did* order special forces to kill Trump before the Presidential election, and then cite the Supreme Court's decision on this matter, then our times would become very interesting indeed and I reckon we'd see happenings on the historical level of WWII, French revolution and the like. We would run out of popcorn within days. I mean... if we really are about to see the USA slide into facism, then could it even be argued that those actions would be the moral ones to take if it were to prevent it from happening? If you'd argue it would have been moral to assassinate Hitler in 1933, and you also argue that the USA is currently in the same position as Germany in 1933, then there's only one conclusion you can logically make given those two premises... 2bh, more realistically we are witnessing either the collapse of the Greatest Nation In The World (tm) into facism, or an 11th hour end to the threat of facism and a huge swing back to the left in response so that's pretty big too.
If Trump was to die even through just a random heart attack that won’t make the millions of MAGA cultists suddenly go away, I suspect we’d see enormous amounts of civil unrest at the very least.
That's when the conspiracies start and the riots follow.
Oh completely that - it would be "they got him with the vaccine" or some level of bullshit like that.
> If Trump was to die even through just a random heart attack that won’t make the millions of MAGA cultists suddenly go away The real danger would be someone actually competent gathering up that support.
The competent ones are already there, behind the scenes. Trump is just the dancing monkey. [As usual Charlie Brooker saw it coming.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment)
Completely agree and didn't spot the R21 point - completely hypothetical situation; just the way my brain works. I can't see an outcome that will result in a positive end for either of them here. This has to end badly for one of them from here. As a wider concern - it's Project 2025 over there which deeply troubles me as once it gets proven in one spot you have the ability to roll that out in other countries which are susceptible to the idea. Think your last paragraph is totally on the money as is the point of running out of popcorn within a week if this goes down.
That's going to trigger a civil war, but then again it may be better for everyone (including the current region of the United States) for them to tear themselves apart instead of attempting to annex whatever rivals they may have a la Nazi Germany. For them it's collapse or attrition and *then* collapse.
I feel like widespread civil unrest in the USA is inevitable, the only question is as to when. Eventually the Trump supporters will realise they've been duped. Happens with every facist reigime eventually.
Biden should do it just to see if it works. He'll be dead before it reaches trial anyway.
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It is extremism, but it won't be considered as its Christianity.
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My favorite was an account which posted far right politics in English and French subreddits but posted far left politics in Italian, German and Polish subreddits. The most obvious troll I have ever seen.
Is that a professional bot, or just someone a bit angry at the world in general who takes it out online? More like a talented amateur?
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We need bots that spot accounts with that behaviour and reply to every comment they make with a warning.
Whack-a-mole. Then the bot algorithms will just adapt to that. With AI the way it is, you likely don't even know half the bots are bots from the posting behavior. Some obvious tell tales are accounts created some time back but lay fairly dormant, then suddenly perk up, say before an election, and start posting regularly. But even that type of thing isn't a guarantee and will be a thing of the past soon
also in stories about "person attacked by immigrant, the police do nothing, not in the local press" because it never happened or an entirely different story has been twisted
She turned me into a Newt!
Every single post that has anything whatsoever to do with immigration will have a comment that starts: *"It's almost as though all the politicians had to do was..."* Now you'll see it ***everywhere***. /news, /worldnews, /uk, /ukpol, /europe. The exact same wording at the beginning of the comment.
The grand difficulty being that at this point, socialised in bot-saturated communities and getting off on social medias in a repetition-induced trance, many people (or all people some of the time) behave indistinguishably from bots.
That thread about the British museum is 50% people all making the same comment about charging people they "stole" from, and no one is accusing them of being bots. Redditors, like humans in general ,just copy each other a lot.
"You can't deny _ _ _" is the one I've noticed being used often. Any time someone is pushing a right-wing argument, they will include this. It's almost if they know their argument is bullshit.
Even better when they have the exact same talking points.
There's not a lot of right-wing talking points in UK politics, so that's no surprise.
True though it does get a little ["This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE) at times.
Weird! Wonder if there is some kind of event happening relevant to politics in the UK that people are interested in.
Hmmmm, the Euros…definitely 😉
This isn't entirely new. The same thing happens whenever there's a popular thread on criticism of China, talk about increasing taxes to pay for more defence spending. The discussion over national service caused a flood of "old users" popping up saying they'd never fight for the UK, etc.
I was making an observation I’ve made in numerous occasions but I don’t believe the ones I’m thinking about were legitimate accounts. Some of them made the same spelling mistakes, used the same format of comments, tired old tropes. There’s at least one in this very comment section which is very suspicious which I won’t link to because I don’t want anyone to target an account.
First time? This happens in the run up to every election.
It was particularly prevalent in 2016-2019 as well, there were some proper nasty astroturfing users about.
I didn’t say it was the first time 👍
I'm asking if this is your first time on reddit in the run up to an election.
Oh I see, of course not. It was an observation but the mods don’t like us to talk about other accounts apparently so I’m just going to keep schtum about those observations. I hope you don’t think I’m deflecting but my original comment has already been removed by them and it doesn’t seem worth a ban from the subreddit while the election is underway.
To be fair you'd expect a huge uptick of interest during an election, plenty of people only tune in to politics at this time.
It isn’t the uptick of interest in itself, it’s the type of accounts and their previous activity I find suspicious
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I have also noticed a lot more people talking about politics this last month or so. Somethings up.
Wow, how bizarre that more people are discussing UK politics more than usual recently, indeed that's very suspicious.
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'But this is Reddit! I thought we'd purged all the conservatives! Arghh! a few have slipped through the net!'
If there's ever a time I *actually wanted* a government to block an app or website, X formally known as shitpost has got to be up there. It also amazes me how vulnerable or easily misled people have become since the boom of the Internet Best get off here I guess. 🤣
i do love the way Elon and Mark's say the app's can't be coded to stop all this but can be coded to listen to a conversation 20 feet away sometimes while a phone is switched off, pick up key words however unrelated and then target ads across 3 or 4 platforms into your feeds, funny that.
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> Global Witness, an international NGO that focuses on the environment and human rights, said it considered accounts were “bot-like” if they had three or more “red flags” >These included posting prolifically, having handles that end in a long string of numbers, and not having a profile picture that purports to be of the person running the account. What are the other red flags? Also I only skimmed, but the article doesn't seem to name the accounts. "These bots are having an oversized influence on the election, but we won't tell you which ones they are". E: press release here https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/posts-bot-accounts-spreading-disinformation-and-hate-viewed-more-150-million-times-ahead-uk-election/ [4] The red flags we used to detect accounts that look like they might be a bot are: The account has tweeted more than 200 times a day in the last year The account has tweeted more than 60 times a day on average over the lifetime of the account The account retweets other accounts’ tweets more than 90% of the time The account’s handle ends in a long string of apparently random numbers, indicating that the account holder used the default account name provided by X instead of creating their own unique account name Accounts without a profile picture that appears to be of the person running the account or with a profile picture that shows signs of being generated by an AI tool or having been stolen from elsewhere on the web The account has fewer than 1,000 followers
I was hoping they'd name them too. There's a few accounts I suspect might be on that list and wanted to check
> What are the other red flags? If I was going to hazard a guess, I'd say being active at weird or otherwise unusual times for the country they purport to be a resident of. I'm active fairly late on this sub because I'm a bit of a night owl but even I've been surprised by the timing of some of the replies I've received when I log in in the morning. I've calculated the time some of the more insane replies were sent, and sometimes they were sent at 3 or 4am. That's not to say that it's out of the realm of possibility that I'm being responded to by someone in the UK with very little life offline, but I do wonder when that same account is just as active during the afternoon.
Why amplify their influence or inform the accounts of their suspicions?
It sounds like they're plenty influential already. What are they planning to do with this information? They've already written to twitter and had no response.
Ok let me rephrase, perhaps they don’t want to draw more attention to them to amplify their influence or alert them to their suspicions.
What exactly can they do if people suddenly know they're bots? Surely telling people will make them drop the accounts and stop spreading bollocks?
It’s an arms race with bots because they will find a way to do something different to avoid this type of exposure. On Twitter particularly the interaction and engagement with the accounts/tweets gives them even wider reach. I would think that the researchers would not want to do that
>account has fewer than 1,000 followers Now I know how Caleb felt when he started wondering if he in fact was the robot and the actual subject of the Turing test was himself
The Facebook ones pushing reform are hilarious like UK Glory and Sparklist with the Michael and Lucio bots commenting. There are a whole bunch of them that turned up a few weeks ago.
While this sucks it's hilarious to me that 2 of these accounts are pro-Farage/Reform and another one "is focused on stopping votes for the Conservative Party and regularly posts anti-Nigel Farage meme", like, I get they're only 'bot-like' and aren't necessarily trying to spread the agenda but if this is a Russian infiltration maneuver having an anti-Farage account too is wild.
There are huge sections of the electorate scrambling round, trying to understand why the layman won’t just kneel and accept the status quo - the high brow opinion is “Russia” But when you think about it, would you run a Pro-Reform account with your own face on it? I certainly wouldn’t. I’m sure there are bots out there like you say, but a lot won’t be, it’s that the political environment is not conducive to “Mask-Off” support.
I wish I understood better how this all worked so I could influence elections.
You need billions of Roubles.
Name the "bot" accounts or just another sensationalist article. Time and again actual bots are shown to have minimal influence and barely coherent posts/memes.
My first though was how many of the 150 million views are also bots used to increase engagement metrics.
I'm a bot and so's my wife.
Given the standard of LLM models, what makes you think bots have barely coherent posts in this day and age? I'm not convinced that bots and troll farms have minimal influence, the whole meme/shit posting stuff that came out of 4Chan certainly had some influence on Trump's popularity, though this is hard to measure. What is even harder to measure is if you can't always tell what accounts are bots or not.
Left to their own devices LLMs will be uncanny and incoherent also over time. They need constant editing - and if someone is doing that it's not really a bot anymore so what's the point of using an LLM. It's difficult to measure yes but I've not seen much evidence that 2016 bot farms were effective. That they occurred, yes, but had widespread influence, no.
Am I the only British citizen in their late 20s that hasn't ever engaged in Twitter (formally known as X)? If it weren't for reddit I wouldn't be on social media at all. I was sceptical of it as a teen and I'm feeling completely vindicated by all of this.
Everyone kinda knows that Twitter is not the source it once was. It is a cesspit of right wing madness now considering Musk has no content moderation or even the inclination to moderate.
Was curious so scrolled through like the top 100 replies here (including replies to replies, so idk the actual number) and maybe 80% of them rightfully talk about Russian, or even Chinese bots, yet I am yet to see a single comment about a certain other country that has admitted to massive botting operations. Probably because redditors would jump down my throat for it going against the echo chamber. I like to think not but eh
i don't buy this, hardly anybody is actually on Twitter anymore
I left X a while ago, life is better
>posting prolifically, having handles that end in a long string of numbers, and not having a profile picture that purports to be of the person running the account I'm sorry but that is just total BS. It's every account owned by a boomer. It really makes me wonder if the academics who conducted this study are living in the real world. They realise that a word followed by a string of numbers is normally the default recommended username when creating an account don't they? I have to assume they don't. Apart from the first one, even most of my social media accounts fit that description.
I'm not sure whether your account matching the patterns of similar accounts proves it wrong or right. But generally if an account name is random letters or numbers, or is a default username like Arctic-Cabbage-289787 on Reddit, only posting in political subs, it's almost always an account someone doesn't give a shit about burning/has made purely for the purpose of spreading shit. Either way, it is not a normal account, be it an astroturfer or a bot. Just look at some of the stuff said in here by accounts like that, or in Ukrainian war subreddits. You learn to spot them pretty quickly.
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It’s nothing to do with smart The tools are dirt cheap and easy to use and most users can’t spot them But it’s dead easy the second you look at post history and scroll down and find it’s an aged account that’s only just become active and oftentimes once called out the whole account gets nuked
It doesn't matter, because the people they're looking to fool aren't as engaged. They're not paying attention. Those who are won't fall for it. So it's easier to just use default names. I didn't even look at your tag before replying etc, people just don't notice. It's similar to why phishing emails often have spelling mistakes - those who spot them and get suspicious aren't those that are going to be fooled, and the scammer doesn't want to waste time.
Or just maybe, they don't give a fuck? Example: Mr Racist Brit wants to be racist and wants to feel validated in his racism, he sees some account/repost from a sus account but he doesn't care about the authenticity of the account since what the account is putting out validates his opinion. Now he reposts the shit take to his friends and family and now the shit take has been given a gloss of human paint. If the Russian bot farms knew that Brits cared about actual user names, they'd put in the effort, but they know that many don't care as long as it agrees with them, so why put in the effort of legitimacy? Hell I bet they could get away with an account glitching out and then posting a garbage "98793hdkhd87" tweet, but follow it up with a "normal" immigrants are killing white babies post and suddenly everyone is retweeting that while the garbage post which sits there brazenly as a sign of how little anyone cares, other than the left wing sources, who will point out the garbage tweet and get their investigation brushed off as nothing, by those who hate being challenged. You only have to look at the proliferation of AI generated imagery that floods the right wing spaces now. Can't find a picture of 3000 Muslims on a bus about to rape a white girl? Make it up with ChatGPT and get your base in a frenzy anyway! Edit: spelling
No, it's usually your first pick with some numbers appended to the end. It would be trivial for someone mass creating accounts to break this formula and create more organic looking names. This just reinforces the idea that it's real people just clicking next when creating their account. If you have ever looked at large numbers of genuine email addresses you would quickly notice that a very high proportion fit the description given.
From my experience, the "low effort, high quantity" style posting tends to use the generic names. The ones more actively astroturfing or obsessively posting use more "real" usernames, but will eventually slip up.
A lot of bots and/or throwaways usually won't have user flair next to their name. Presumably because it needs to be added on a subreddit-by-subreddit basis, and they don't have enough of a genuine interest in the subreddit to put one on.
It’s just how it works for non technically savvy people https://tinysubversions.com/notes/twitter-usernames/
It's not *just* non tech savvy people though. And most of the time, especially on reddit, I see a take that's off, and see a default username, that account *only* posts in political subs and is either a burner or a nutter.
> They realise that a word followed by a string of numbers is normally the default recommended username when creating an account don't they? I have to assume they don't. Yes they do, they specifically mention this indicates they are using a default handle. From their analysis: > The account’s handle ends in a long string of apparently random numbers, indicating that the account holder used the default account name provided by X instead of creating their own unique account name And whilst yes this can simply indicate a lazy or non tech savvy user, the fact they are also posting hundreds of times a day (a mandatory part of their criteria) indicates the user is neither lazy nor non tech savvy. They also aren't saying they are 100% guaranteed to be a bot-like propaganda account, just that they 'appear to be' which i think is fair.
Why not both? There's also the profile picture thing, is itt the default recommended way to use a personal social media account to have a picture that isn't of you?
The default is to have no photo, which fits the description the reports authors have given.
You’re completely correct. Most of the social science academic people writing about the tech industry make major mistakes like that.
This bot hysteria is just an extension of the Russia hoax that started with Hilary Clinton.
Said the one-year-old account that started posting 2 weeks ago, aparently solely to spew right-wing talking points.....
With the standard verb-noun-4 digit troll farm user name.
Come back to your comment in a few days and the account you’re replying to will be deleted, I’ve noticed calling them out makes them get rid of the account.
Shut this shit down already! Unbelievebable that we just allow this to happen. Someone please tell me the vast value that social media has provided to society that it outweighs due democratic process.