The Same Twitter Bots That Helped Trump Tried to Sink Macron, Researcher Says

Since Twitter is at the forefront right NOW -- I found THIS article an insightful read.

The Same Twitter Bots That Helped Trump Tried to Sink Macron, Researcher Says

New research from Emilio Ferrara, the University of Southern California academic who exposed the role of bots in the 2016 US election, shows that many Trump bots went dark and later turned into MacronLeaks bots. This, Ferrara wrote in a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week (which is currently being peer-reviewed), suggests that there may be a "black market" for right-wing political bot that can lay dormant for months before being activated to promote the next conservative demagogue.

What's interesting is how these Twitter accounts WENT from "Pro Trump" to French-speaking:

"These accounts were tweeting their support for Trump for about a week in the run-up to the 2016 election and then they went dark for a very long time," Ferrara said. "These same accounts picked up again and some even started tweeting in French—but the alt-right narrative was the same."

TODAY people take what they read online far, far to literally. With over 48 MILLION fake Twitter accounts .. what you READ or see Retweeted MAY not be from a "REAL" person...Getting back to the "black market" stuff:

"To see a set of bots which had been pro-Trump in November targeting Macron in May could indicate a black market and that the use of those bots has been hired out to political actors," Nimmo said. "It could also be that the same actor who supported Trump in November decided to start supporting Le Pen."

The article CONCLUDES:

According to both Nimmo and Ferrara, more work is needed to investigate the true scope and scale of political bots supporting right-wing candidates around the globe. To that end, the algorithm developed by Ferrara to analyze millions of tweets and pick out a few bots could be a huge help to researchers.

"It's shown that you can do a credible and accurate analysis on a very large amount of traffic," Nimmo said. "That's a technique worth using many times over, because there are lots of possible botnets out there."

I'm SURE that the DNC/Democrats have "something" of their own ... but it SEEMS that the alt-right/Russia and conservatives are AHEAD of the GAME here with Twitter social influence campaigning.

And don't we ALL have a relative that 100% BELIEVES everything they read on Social Media, regardless of political party affiliation?

a reply to: DanteGaland

Tell me, did these bots get out and vote in November of 2016?

Did the bots vote in the French election?

No?

Waste of thread.

Next!

a reply to: DanteGaland

Ah, nvm. You saved it all for this thread.

Don't hate the player, hate the game - that they are all playing.

The french people will not any stupid twitter bots to kick Macron out of power.
We will see that if he starts to cover France with his neoliberal agenda.

The guillotines are sharpened, i guess!

It would be interesting to run the SAME research on the Seth Rich & Pizzagate Tweets.

My SUSPICION is that they were also involved!!!

a reply to: ColdWisdom

So you don't believe that people can be manipulated? It's funny how every other thread on ATS is about media "psyops" and CNN's "domestic terrorism."

If the thread was, "Random guy says CNN propaganda led to 3 million votes for Clinton," that'd be 100+ flags from Trump supporters all screeching in unison about media manipulation and going on about how traditional news media outlets were being supplanted by social media.

But bring up pro-Trump bots or any other Russian/other foreign influence and it's "blah blah did the bots make people vote?" or "did Vladimir Putin drive people to the polling station?"

In other words, to what degree a person is assumed vulnerable to influence is completely a matter of political expediency.

It's actually a very cost effective way to sway opinion and change minds. Actually hacking voting machines to alter the numbers is risky.

Change people's minds via social engineering and psychology/disinformation? That has a whole lot more "plausible deniability" to it.

It's also relatively cheap, something Russia's horrible economic situation could afford.

a reply to: theantediluvian

I think MANY may actually know the BOTS helped....but don't care.

WHY?!

They won. Period.

They don't care HOW they won...just that they did WIN.

a reply to: Kettu

Change people's minds via social engineering and psychology/disinformation? That has a whole lot more "plausible deniability" to it.

I have one hugely important and relevant question and a corollary regarding this idea though.

Given that the msm is becoming less and less relevant:

Who decided, and were they right, to believe that the general public were so completely and utterly controllable and easily influenced by social media?

People very often seem to forget that the whole social media experiment is barely a generation old. The old school media could control people pretty easily, given that was all we had to get our news from, now? Not so much.

So are we witnessing, to some degree, a rejection to the control that was previously taken for granted?

As has been expressed, we live in interesting times.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

Right. So because you can't see the implications of such things, it's all nothing.

Funny how that works.

originally posted by: DanteGaland
a reply to: theantediluvian

I think MANY may actually know the BOTS helped....but don't care.

WHY?!

They won. Period.

They don't care HOW they won...just that they did WIN.

That's exactly what it is. They know it, we know it, they know we know it and we know they know it. But they act like that's not it, but we all know that's exactly what it is.

It would be nice to see them be honest about it though. If they can't be honest about that then I doubt we can expect much honesty anywhere else.

Clearly most of the people on this thread don't understand how advertising works. And how effective it has been for the last 3+ generations. Social media is just another advertising channel.

a reply to: theantediluvian

So you don't believe that people can be manipulated?

Let's stop and talk about that for a second.

If you would like to have an honest & intellectual discussion about why people vote the way they do, by all means, go waste thirty minutes of your life typing up an articulate and well researched OP.

Because this OP is completely lacking in research, context, & articulation, not to mention that the OP doesn't even address such a complex question as the one you posed to me at the beginning of your reply.

In other words, to what degree a person is assumed vulnerable to influence is completely a matter of political expediency.

Oh look, now you're doing it, too!

You mean to tell me in the face of such an ignorant assertion as the one proposed in the OP and his sources, that it was my reply that needed to be struck down?

Your priorities are not in order.

Now.... onto the ignorant OP:

It would hardly be a stretch to call this presidential race the Twitter election. The social media site has played a critical role in the campaigns of both Trump and Clinton as a medium for voter engagement and personal embarrassment, their feeds an endless stream of 140-character quotables that are endlessly debated by the Twittersphere's armchair analysts.

That excerpt above is from the source within the OP.

Bot detection: Determining whether either human or a bot controls a social media account has proven a very challenging task (Ferrara, et al., 2016; Subrahmanian, et al., 2016). Our prior efforts produced an openly accessible solution called BotOrNot (Davis, et al., 2016), consisting of both a public Web site (truthy.indiana.edu...) and a Python API (github.com...), which allow for making this determination. BotOrNot is a machine-learning framework that extracts and analyses a set of over one thousand features, spanning content and network structure, temporal activity, user profile data, and sentiment analysis to produce a score that suggests the likelihood that the inspected account is indeed a social bot. Extensive analysis revealed that the two most important classes of feature to detect bots are, maybe unsurprisingly, the metadata and usage statistics associated with the user accounts.

That right there is an excerpt from the 'study' that was sourced in the link provided in the OP.

I'll summarize this quickly, though I do recommend the rest of you do your due diligence and actually investigate the claims made in the VICE article.

So the researcher(s) never actually verified if the tweets they were investigating were from bots, only that they resembled what some random person somewhere defines as a non human tweet.

Furthermore, VICE actually points out in the beginning of their article that both campaigns in the U.S. presidential election benefited from bots that were paid for by their campaign staff.

And yet, no mention of what all the Clinton bots were doing after the election. Maybe they were shilling for Macron? Or maybe they were spreading false Russian conspiracy theories related to La Pen? We know Obama gave a warm public endorsement of Macron after the first qualifying round in France.

And we know that Clinton actually had an army of real people that were paid by the DNC (correct the record) to shill for Hillary and to regurgitate unfounded accusations about her challenger on social media.

Even if we assume that this supposed researcher that was referenced in VICE is 100% correct about which tweets are bots and which are not, never in this researcher's paper, and never in the VICE article, and never in the OP, do they explain how these bots influenced votes.

This thread is a waste of my brain power. I'd much rather be spending my time watching snuff films on liveleak than to have to explain to the dunces on ATS why twitter bots are irrelevant to an election.

/end thread

a reply to: theantediluvian

... and here we are again. So when does campaigning become "manipulation"? Parties, Candidates, and I'm sure foreign interests have been pushing their message and agenda any way they can for 200+ years. If you've been around for any amount of time you know you have to sift everything you read and hear from a politician, unless you're a complete moron. CNN, on the other hand, is supposedly a "news" outlet which used to imply trustworthiness and impartiality. If this election accomplished anything it's that a whole lot more people now have a deep distrust of the "news" pushers. Trump merely benefitted from the collapse of trust in the MSM. I'm sick of the left labeling Trump voters as duped or "manipulated" fools. From my perspective, they were manipulated into voting for an even more repulsive candidate and still can't process the loss. Still grasping for anything to rationalize their defeat.

I don't think Macron will require any bot to sink himself, but besides that ...
During the 90s the EU has been babbling about all kinds of fancy stories related to the importance of capitaliasm and free market! So fancy free market EU capitalist have plundered and destroyed poorer countries such as Italy and eastern European o#ries leading them to powerty bankruptcy and social destruction.

Now I hear that the same capitalist heroes are forbidding Fincantieri s.p.a. to buy Stx ... I must have heard the wrong preaching during the past 25 years.