Social media bots

[plodder]

Don't understand why they aren't banned. Presumably they can be easily identified, if these researchers can manage it? And I'm struggling to see how they add anything positive to social media platforms?

e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... s-analysis

[dyqik]

Nothing of [url=https://twitter.com/katie_panda/status/ ... 79328?s=20]value[/ur] eh?


More seriously, twitter has an open API so that it can be used by multiple clients, including ones that do valuable work like send out scheduled tweets promoting events, sending out weather warnings, sending out train delay alerts, etc.

Those are all "bots".

[lpm]

Well, ban bad bots and keep good bots, then.

"Dear Twitter Department of Bot Approvals, I hereby submit my form requesting permissions for my weather alert bot and here is my $5 application fee."

[plodder]

It is polluting the platform and presumably in a competitive market there would be a bit more incentive for twitter to clean up its act.

What might work would be lots of new social media compatible "launchpad" platforms - i.e. I'd log in to my plodder twitter server, that cleans out all bots except the ones I approve, and then that interfaces with twitter. I could try and sell my launchpad platform to lpm, but she'd be perfectly happy with her dyqik platform. The kind of ads, interference, fees etc would be up to whichever launchpad we chose, with a fee going to twitter (or fb for that matter).

[plodder]

I could then have a social media dashboard of my own choosing.

[dyqik]

.

[dyqik]

That's called Mastodon, where you can run your own server, and integrated it into the wider federated Mastodon universe.


Of course, on Twitter, all you have to do is not follow the bots.

[nefibach]

It is polluting the platform and presumably in a competitive market there would be a bit more incentive for twitter to clean up its act.

What might work would be lots of new social media compatible "launchpad" platforms - i.e. I'd log in to my plodder twitter server, that cleans out all bots except the ones I approve, and then that interfaces with twitter. I could try and sell my launchpad platform to lpm, but she'd be perfectly happy with her dyqik platform. The kind of ads, interference, fees etc would be up to whichever launchpad we chose, with a fee going to twitter (or fb for that matter).

What you're looking for is Block and Mute.

[lpm]

How does block and mute prevent bots from spreading fake new? It doesn't, that's how.

[lpm]

That's called Mastodon, where you can run your own server, and integrated it into the wider federated Mastodon universe.


Of course, on Twitter, all you have to do is not follow the bots.

How does not following bots prevent bots from spreading fake new? It doesn't, that's how.

[Boustrophedon]

And there's no bots on here, no siree, no bots at all.

[dyqik]

That's called Mastodon, where you can run your own server, and integrated it into the wider federated Mastodon universe.


Of course, on Twitter, all you have to do is not follow the bots.

How does not following bots prevent bots from spreading fake new? It doesn't, that's how.

You don't receive the fake news because you don't see the bots posts.

[Gfamily]

How does not following bots prevent bots from spreading fake new? It doesn't, that's how.

You don't receive the fake news because you don't see the bots posts.

A lot of the FB problem is people like us NOT seeing the sh.t that f.ckers like them are promoting to people NOT like us.

Us receiving fake news is not the problem

[secret squirrel]

A lot of the FB problem is people like us NOT seeing the sh.t that f.ckers like them are promoting to people NOT like us.

Us receiving fake news is not the problem

People like us are definitely not the target of 'Boomer Trump Twitter' level fake news, but we are still heavily propagandized, and though the methods need to be more sophisticated, it works on us too.

[plodder]

The entire social media industry is based on advertising revenue and the figures are horribly skewed by millions of fake users. You’d think that people paying for advertising would care.

[plodder]

This represents a significant gap in the market: an advertising agency that only advertises to people.

[dyqik]

This represents a significant gap in the market: an advertising agency that only advertises to people.

But is that what the market wants? The marketing person at a company wants to be able to point at how many engagements with their marketing they had, to convince their boss that they are doing their job.

The metrics for comparing that to actual sales are hideously confounded, and there are many you can cherry pick from, so you can usually find one that tells you why marketing are doing a good job and the drop in sales is due to "market conditions", and how much worse it would be without marketing.

</Cult of the savvy cynicism>