Since 2016 automated Twitter accounts have been blamed for Donald Trump and Brexit (many times), Brazilian politics, Venezuelan politics, skepticism of climatology, cannabis misinformation, anti-immigration sentiment, vaping, and, inevitably, distrust of COVID vaccines. News articles about bots are backed by a surprisingly large amount of academic research. Google Scholar alone indexes nearly 10,000 papers on the topic. Some of these papers received widespread coverage:
Unfortunately there’s a problem with this narrative: it is itself misinformation. Bizarrely and ironically, universities are propagating an untrue conspiracy theory while simultaneously claiming to be defending the world from the very same.
The visualization above comes from “The Rise and Fall of Social Bot Research” (also available in talk form). It was quietly uploaded to a preprint server in March by Gallwitz and Kreil, two German investigators, and has received little attention since. Yet their work completely destroys the academic field of bot research to such an extreme extent that it’s possible there are no true scientific papers on the topic at all.
The authors identify a simple problem that crops up in every study they looked at. Unable to directly detect bots because they don’t work for Twitter, academics come up with proxy signals that are asserted to imply automation but which actually don’t. For example, Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project – responsible for the first paper in the diagram above – defined a bot as any account that tweets more than 50 times per day. That’s a lot of tweeting but easily achieved by heavy users, like the famous journalist Glenn Greenwald, the slightly less famous member of German Parliament Johannes Kahrs – who has in the past managed to rack up an astounding 300 tweets per day – or indeed Donald Trump, who exceeded this threshold on six different days during 2020. Bot papers typically don’t provide examples of the bot accounts they claimed to identify, but in this case four were presented. Of those, three were trivially identifiable as (legitimate) bots because they actually said they were bots in their account metadata, and one was an apparently human account claimed to be a bot with no evidence. On this basis the authors generated 27 news stories and 323 citations, although the paper was never peer reviewed.
In 2017 I investigated the Berkley/Swansea paper and found that it was doing something very similar, but using an even laxer definition. Any account that regularly tweeted more than five times after midnight from a smartphone was classed as a bot. Obviously, this is not a valid way to detect automation. Despite being built on nonsensical premises, invalid modelling, mis-characterisations of its own data and once again not being peer reviewed, the authors were able to successfully influence the British Parliament. Damian Collins, the Tory MP who chaired the DCMS Select Committee at the time, said: “This is the most significant evidence yet of interference by Russian-backed social media accounts around the Brexit referendum. The content published and promoted by these accounts is clearly designed to increase tensions throughout the country and undermine our democratic process. I fear that this may well be just the tip of the iceberg.”
But since 2019 the vast majority of papers about social bots rely on a machine learning model called ‘Botometer’. The Botometer is available online and claims to measure the probability of any Twitter account being a bot. Created by a pair of academics in the USA, it has been cited nearly 700 times and generates a continual stream of news stories. The model is frequently described as a “state of the art bot detection method” with “95% accuracy”.
That claim is false. The Botometer’s false positive rate is so high it is practically a random number generator. A simple demonstration of the problem was the distribution of scores given to verified members of U.S. Congress:
In experiments run by Gallwitz & Kreil, nearly half of Congress were classified as more likely to be bots than human, along with 12% of Nobel Prize laureates, 17% of Reuters journalists, 21.9% of the staff members of U.N. Women and – inevitably – U.S. President Joe Biden.
But detecting the false positive problem did not require compiling lists of verified humans. One study that claimed to identify around 190,000 bots included the following accounts in its set:
The developers of the Botometer know it doesn’t work. After the embarrassing U.S. Congress data was published, an appropriate response would have been retraction of their paper. But that would have implied that all the papers that relied upon it should also be retracted. Instead they hard-coded the model to know that Congress are human and then went on the attack, describing their critics as “academic trolls”:
Root cause analysis
This story is a specific instance of a general problem that crops up frequently in bad science. Academics decide a question is important and needs to be investigated, but they don’t have sufficiently good data to draw accurate conclusions. Because there are no incentives to recognize that and abandon the line of inquiry, they proceed regardless and make claims that end up being drastically wrong. Anyone from outside the field who points out what’s happening is simply ignored, or attacked as “not an expert” and thus inherently illegitimate.
Although no actual expertise is required to spot the problems in this case, I can nonetheless criticize their work with confidence because I actually am an expert in fighting bots. As a senior software engineer at Google I initiated and designed one of their most successful bot detection platforms. Today it checks over a million actions per second for malicious automation across the Google network. A version of it was eventually made available to all websites for free as part of the ReCAPTCHA system, providing an alternative to the distorted word puzzles you may remember from the earlier days of the internet. Those often frustrating puzzles were slowly replaced in recent years by simply clicking a box that says “I’m not a bot”. The latest versions go even further and can detect bots whilst remaining entirely invisible.
Exactly how this platform works is a Google trade secret, but when spammers discuss ideas for beating it they are well aware that it doesn’t use the sort of techniques academics do. Despite the frequent claim that Botometer is “state of the art”, in reality it is primitive. Genuinely state-of-the-art bot detectors use a correct definition of bot based on how actions are being performed. Spammers are forced to execute polymorphic encrypted programs that detect signs of automation at the protocol and API level. It’s a battle between programmers, and how it works wouldn’t be easily explainable to social scientists.
Spam fighters at Twitter have an equally low opinion of this research. They noted in 2020 that tools like Botometer use “an extremely limited approach” and “do not account for common Twitter use cases”. “Binary judgments of who’s a “bot or not” have real potential to poison our public discourse – particularly when they are pushed out through the media …. the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve.”
Many fields cannot benefit from academic research because academics cannot obain sufficiently good data with which to draw conclusions. Unfortunately, they sometimes have difficulty accepting that. When I ended my 2017 investigation of the Berkeley/Swansea paper by observing that social scientists can’t usefully contribute to fighting bots, an academic posted a comment calling it “a Trumpian statement” and argued that tech firms should release everyone’s private account data to academics, due to their capacity for “more altruistic” insights. Yet their self-proclaimed insights are usually far from altruistic. The ugly truth is that social bot research is primarily a work of ideological propaganda. Many bot papers use the supposed prevalence of non-existent bots to argue for censorship and control of the internet. Too many people disagree with common academic beliefs. If only social media were edited by the most altruistic and insightful members of society, they reason, nobody would ever disagree with them again.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Very true. But as Richard Eldred’s interview this morning remarked, there was a lot less actual rioting than is commonly mentioned in the obligatory, “Of course, violent rioters need to be in jail, but…” caveats.
In fact the narrative is a bit like COVID – there was quite a lot of minor dis-ease in the form of people on the streets, and much hype about violent rioting which, on close examination, was pretty exaggerated, and in many cases entirely engineered by heavy-handed policing.
Furthermore, even at the time it looked as though rent-a-mob in balaclavas was bussed in to turn over cars in full view of news cameras, but well away from risk of arrest. Agents provocateurs was written all over them. As we saw in the Downing Street affair, the protesters were mostly remarkably well-behaved, given their outrage at the Southport massacre and its cover-up.
Since many amongst the public are well aware of the gaslighting, that outrage has become even more deep-seated, widespread, and quite liable to erupt at some stage in civil unrest the nudge units and riot police will no longer be able to crush.
This cauldron must be added to the background in this article of economic vandalism, poverty and hopelessness. The description of “a very poor country attached to a very rich city” is perceptive, but usually disguised by reassuring GDP figures. The very rich suppressing the increasingly poor is never a good recipe for civil order.
I agree. The picture depicted by media, establishment or independent, of riots and violence is a distortion of a much more mundane reality.
What I see much more of is a demoralised, beaten down public that doesn’t really understand why things are done the way they are but feel there’s no point even complaining about it because it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference.
Exercise for the reader: Assuming that, in a certain state, a party is in government because about ⅕ of the electorate voted for it and then sets forth to ruin the lives of the other ⅘ as hard as it can, oftentimes claiming that these ⅘ deserve nothing better because they’re all right-wing extremists, can this country realistically be considered a democracy? Or should it perhaps rather be called a dictatorship of the post-marxist quangoriat?
That’s pretty good, except the fifth that is voted in doesn’t set about doing anything.
The post-marxist quangoriat, as you name it, run the show regardless of who a fifth, a quarter, half, or a majority of the population vote into so called “power”.
All people are voting in are the people who are going to do the PR for the quangoriat. The elected have the power to sell us the crap that has been prepared for us, or get replaced.
Our institutions are corrupted by systemic anti-racism.
Excellent analysis Jon.
Kisin is way off the mark in stating that increased lawlessness is simply down to the economy not growing, there are multiple factors not least of which is the deliberate destruction of our patriotism. Too many people simply have negative views of this country and therefore our old values have been lost.
Jobs have been lost and with them aspirations.
Education has been practically inverted with wokeness, trans this that and the other and our evil British Empire. Pride has been shattered.
Our institutions have grown into monolithic monsters – NHS, pretty much every department of the Civil Service, even our once venerated RNLI is now nothing more than a laughing stock.
The police forces make the Keystone Cops look like serious crime fighters.
Our Christian religions have been made to give way to the heathens of Islam and we wonder why the country is rapidly approaching Turd World shit hole status?
I could go on but the bottom line is that governments these last fifty or so years have deliberately sought to undermine all that combines to make Britain great and the final destruction is to occur in this decade ending 2030.
Just one contentious response, Hux: at least the “heathens of Islam” are Muslims, for better or worse. But the population of our country had, for the most part, already succumbed to a previous ideological usurper – secularism – and abandoned actual Christianity.
It seems to me that, so far, many who perceive the collapse of the country are trying to wave the flag for “Christian values” whilst hanging on to the secularist illusion of “the view from nowhere.” In other words, they think Christianity is useful, whilst regretfully remaining uncommitted themselves.
But Christianity is Christ, or it is as toothless as “conservatism” or “common sense.” Islam just requires submission to praxis: Christianity is exclusively fuelled by faith in a Saviour-King.
Net Zerotard is part of the collapse agenda. It is just one program of many designed to ruin us.
etc. etc.
If anything, the EU is the French Empire¹. The Germans are just ‘allowed’ to pay for it.
¹ That’s probably a bit beyond the horizon of the average US politard, but a French Empire encompassing all of continental Europe proper up to the eastern border of Poland composed of French provinces (including large parts of Germany), French vassal states (like the kingdom of Westfalia) and states forced to an alliance dominated by France by a series of military defeats inflicted onto them actually existed under Napoleon I. During its heyday, just before his Russian campaign, only Austria and Russia were still really independent states although both had suffered humiliating defeats as well.
Von der Leyen – unelected – German.
EU Central Bank – Frankfurt.
Terms of Trade – all in Germany’s favour.
Euro = a devalued DM.
It is the German empire with the French used as a beard.
I happen to know this better than you because I’m more familiar with actual circumstances in Germany and don’t just have my prejudices played to by politics people.
The biggest part of the EU is the common agricultural policy. It’s purpose mostly to subsidize the otherwise hopelessly loss-making traditional French rural economy.
Accepting the Euro with the inevitable consequence of ending up underwriting the sovereign debts of all of Europe was a condition imposed on Germany in exchange for the so-called re-unification. Maggie Thatcher was a driving force behind that (who would personally have preferred for this to never happen, the quote by [from memory]: We did our best to conquer the Germans. And now, they want to come back!).
The reason why the AfD is so vitriolically opposed by the German establishment parties is that it either wants to reform the EU such that the Germans stop paying its bills or get rid of it altogether. That’s why they’re accused of being reckless German nationalists and closet-nazis.
The EU grew out of the European Coal and Steel Union, a project by Adenauer and Schuman with the goal to intertwine the French and German steel and coal industries to such a degree that Germany would never again be able to go to war against France.
To this date, the so-called UN treaties contain a clause which states that Britain, Russia, the USA or France may chose to invade Germany whenever they’re unhappy with German domestic politics.
I could continue this for a while but it’s probably pointless. You’ve been drilled to hate Germans from early childhood on. And the people who want to control you just need to say “German!” to trigger the reflexes which enable them to do.
Agenda 2030 Riots you mean. Maybe the transition to Stakeholder Capitalism that they are at a halfway point, might have something to do with it. That could also explain the attacks on private LTD businesses:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CAiTHWBM18&t=2695s
One bit of good news. All the big American investment companies have ditched ESG funds. The $130 trillion promised by them in Glasgow is not going to happen. A final realisation that they will loose money and anti trust lawsuits in the US have finally done for this particular cartel.
As pointed out by Ben Pile earlier today.
Spending on policing has not slowed all that much. One problem is that the whole public sector is spending vast amounts on pensions for people who stopped working years ago.
But a big issue needs to be addrssed on efficiency. The public sector never seems to be able to reduce its costs or improve performance using tech. It is only ever an additional cost.
In the private sector things are very different. Not only does investment (and current spending) on tech enable costs to be reduced and efficiency improved but the entire business is often re-engineered with almost an order of magnitude of cost are taken out.
“One problem is that the whole public sector is spending vast amounts on pensions for people who stopped working years ago.”
The problem with public sector pensions is the same as with the Old Age Pension – contributions have never been invested. Successive governments have spent money that they didn’t have and wasn’t theirs in the first place for political ends. And this crisis is now in its death throes.
It makes me wonder what state public services/pensions would be like if government had never been allowed to borrow money, and to invest pension contributions. It would have been short term pain for very long term gain.
The Establishment is delivering the UN’s objective of “levelling down” the UK; the WEF’s Agenda of transferring what wealth we have from “the peasants” to Corporations and the EU’s objective of keeping the UK trapped within its regulatory orbit.
The solution to all three is to destroy the power of the Establishment, starting with their Uni-Party in Westminster and the MSM.
Why are there no people like Konstantin Kisin, Douglas Murray and Andrew Doyle in UK politics?
Because politics in Britain is utterly corrupt, and any “non-receiver” is instantly cancelled by very dubious means. Do you notice how rich all our “alleged politicians” have become? Very strange. The WEF hardly noticed to accounting error!
And yet we still pay their council tax on their second homes, even after the media scandal in 2009.
A friend of my wife went to Oxford Street a couple of days ago. It was very crowded, particularly by a jostling crowd around her. Her purse was stolen from her “safe” handbag, carefully mounted in front of her and the purse and money stolen, including her cards. She called the bank within 2 minutes and they said that £2500 had been stolen from a card! It was recovered but the speed says “organised crime” in no uncertain terms, because such a withdraw without pin, 2 factor authorisation etc. is surely not possible? Don’t mention the Police, they basically said don’t come too London, the streets are very unsafe! Eh Khant??? The crowd were your “friends”!
That’s why I don’t see the point of going abroad to do the shopping. She should have stayed in England.
They warn when traveling to any third world country don’t wear any fancy watches or bling, but now you can’t in the so called developed West.
Williamson “describes how last summer’s riots weren’t really about immigration.”
FALSE! They were ENTIRELY about Third World Immigration destroying Britain.
They were about the Globalist Importation of a Muslim Army raping and murdering children.