Well, it’s not even a month since I wrote that Scotland’s Hate Crime Act marked the death of the Scottish Enlightenment by alluding to the barbaric execution of Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy in 1697, and it looks like rumours of its demise may have been premature.
This isn’t completely down to the machinations of the MSPs, despite a few heroic efforts on the Tory and Alba benches, but rather to the wonderful, stubborn and doughty people of Scotland.
Now the Scots have many faults. I can say this because I am one of them. We are too quick to anger, our character has been influenced both positively and negatively by living in the shadow of a more powerful nation to the south, the latter expressed by a degree of insecurity we are all born with. We have our issues with sectarianism and have enough Celtic blood (together with Norse, Angle and Briton) to hold the blood feud of tribalism close to our hearts. (That’s Hearts, not Hibs… you see: tribalism!)
However we have some virtues and one we’re also rightly proud of is that we are a free people. This last point is often glossed over with Mel Gibson in a wig memes. However, it has a serious point, which goes way back to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. For my Saxon readers this was a letter sent to the Pope from the lords temporal and spiritual of Scotland (speaking on behalf of the people) in response to the excommunication of their King, Robert Bruce. The document conveniently ignores the reason for the excommunication, Bruce’s murder in a church of John ‘The Red’ Comyn in 1306, and instead argues for his communion with the Church on the basis that he is the King of a free and ancient people.
The particular words that are branded on the backside of every Scottish baby (figuratively speaking) are:
[Now, the context of these words was independence from England, in particular, independence from both the English Crown and the See of Canterbury. However, like that other great document of the British People, Magna Carta, the meaning and significance of the declaration has changed over time.It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.
‘Freedom’ changed after the emergence of the modern state of Great Britain in 1707, the union of two equals, the most successful union of two nations or peoples in the history of the world. Bereft of her seat of government, the intellectuals of Edinburgh threw themselves into philosophy, jurisprudence, science, engineering, medicine, art, architecture, economics and education. The light of the Enlightenment blazed brightly from this small northern city with a fervour that eclipsed others and which still shines to this day. ‘Freedom’ was no longer the freedom from England – union made that superfluous – it was freedom of thought, of speech, of ideas and conscience. This freedom fuelled the ideas that changed the world.
One of the things that non-Scots misread about us is to assume that our national pride comes from Mel Gibson, Robert Bruce and a thousand battles fought against Saxon, Norseman and, most often, each other. The main source of our pride actually comes from the huge contribution Scotland has made to the world, yes, it was spread by the Empire and the union with England, but it had to start somewhere. Arthur Herman’s somewhat tongue in cheek book How the Scots invented the Modern World makes this point. Modern economics, medicine, engineering and philosophy owe an awful lot to Scotland, never mind the inventions that poured out of Scots that have changed the world from the telephone to the television, tarmac, penicillin and even the Bank of England. Yes, we may get maudlin over a glass of the Water of Life about the heroes of old, but we are just as likely to get maudlin over our 1978 World Cup run. No, what Scots are most proud of, what is baked into our DNA is the huge contribution made to the modern world by a hairy, argumentative, somewhat aggressive, often resentful and frequently ginger haired people.
So it was this people whom Mrs Sturgeon and Mr. Yousaf fatally misread when they tried to do that very thing that the Scots despise more than anything else: take away their freedom.
No, not their freedom from mortgage, from responsibility, but the freedom to think, to ‘chew the fat’ (debate) and to ‘blether’ (talk). Mr. Yousaf decided to threaten this with spurious arguments around ‘harmful speech’. He wanted to sell our 400 year birthright to feather his own ego under the disingenuous claim that nasty words cause ‘harm’.
You would have thought that Yousaf would have known that ‘freedom’ is a thing very dear to the hearts of Scots. That we pride ourselves on being able to have robust debates in our pubs, no topic off piste, and to stagger home arm in arm at the end of the night, preferably past a chip shop for a deep fried haggis supper!
So it has been wonderful to see how the Scots reacted to the tyranny of the Hate Speech and Pubic Order Act 2021 (Scotland). Essentially with a colossal, national raspberry combined with the symbol of archer’s defiance borrowed from our English cousins: the two fingers!.
First off, the wonderful J.K. Rowling laid down the gauntlet – telling Police Scotland that they’d better come and arrest her as she wasn’t going to curtail her opinion. She followed this up by tweeting that if any woman was arrested for speaking her mind she would exactly mirror her words and share her fate. Before the Act had even gone live, she had trashed it, exposed it as unenforceable rubbish and, in the best Scots tradition stated those words dear to every British football fan: “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!” The Police whimpered in response.
Then came the complaints against Humza himself. Doing a bit of ‘offence archaeology’, thousands of Scots swamped the ‘Grass Lines’ with complaints about Humza and his appalling speech in the Scottish Parliament where he appeared to have a problem with ‘Huwhite’ people. So many complaints were made that Police Scotland issued a script to the call handlers claiming that the speech was not racist. But wait – racism is in the eye of the beholder, it doesn’t matter what the Peelers think, it’s whether or not the victim feels they have been abused. Offence is in the power of the offended and they don’t get to decide for us what we find offensive or otherwise. Of course, this was greeted with glee at the clumsy hypocrisy as the hapless Yousaf was once again hoist with his own petard.
So overwhelmed were the ‘polis’ by the number of people reporting mates from the pub, dogs from defecating on their lawn, deliberately out of context statements by celebrities that they had to say they were no longer going to investigate a slew of actual crimes. Their laughably childish promise to “investigate every instance of hate reported” was proven to be impossible to meet, as they were warned by anyone with a modicum of common sense. In fact, this is a thread throughout this whole sorry incident. It should have been no surprise to the SNP that this law would be as much of a disaster in its implementation as it was in its drafting. They were warned, repeatedly, by the ‘hiheidyins’ (bosses) of the Scottish Legal system and by Police Scotland, and yet they went ahead anyway. The arrogance and hubris of Mr. Yousaf and his Government as they paddled their canoe towards the rapids, ignoring calls to stop has been remarkable, particularly as the rapids are of their own making.
Then this week the figures are in. The Free Speech Union tells us that since the law went live on April 1st, 0.6% of reports have been recorded as actual crimes: 9,374 incidents were reported since April 1st with only 616 recorded as possible hate crimes and merely 79 as ‘Non Crime Hate Incidents’. That last figure is interesting because police guidance states that any incidents not found to be crimes should be recorded as Non Crime Hate Incidents. So why are Police Scotland not doing this? Could it be that they have abandoned their own guidance a mere three weeks into the farce?
I don’t want to beat up Police Scotland too much here. They were given a hospital pass by the SNP Government, one which they never wanted and indeed objected to as deeply flawed and unenforceable in a nation that polices by consent. It seems extraordinary that the SNP Government seems to be at a loss to understand what that means, ‘policing by consent’, and the damage to the authority of the police through making hapless plod a laughing stock of the nation.
So I was wrong. It seems that it will take a lot more than ham-fisted, ideologically captured, arrogant in their certitude and deeply ignorant of the mood and culture of those they profess to govern to destroy the Scottish Enlightenment. No, that is in safe hands, the hands of the Scottish People who will fight “for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself”.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack.
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Very interesting article from an expert in the field. Thanks Mike!
My only problem with this is that Mike Hearn proclaims himself an expert. I am not suggesting he isn’t, but as it stands it is an uncorroborated assertion.
I’ll provide direct evidence in a moment, but do you think I should have left that part out? As the article notes, no actual expertise is required to spot or understand these problems. The part about my background adds a bit of human interest and perhaps makes the article more convincing to some people, but the first articles I wrote for the site were anonymous, exactly to stop people getting distracted by irrelevant credentialism. Now I see your comment I’m starting to regret mentioning my bot related expertise at all because, after all, if there’s a theme to the articles on this site it’s that credentials don’t seem to mean much – at least not academic credentials.
Anyway.
In 2013 I was published on the official Google blog. That article discusses a different system I led the design on. It uses the bot detector as part of blocking account hacking, but additionally does many other things, so it doesn’t dwell on bots specifically. I also gave a talk on stopping spam, in a formal capacity as an employee, at an internet engineering conference in 2012. The bot detector is obliquely mentioned at one point along with various other spam fighting techniques, but again I don’t dwell on it or provide many details because it was at that time a rather unique technology that provided competitive advantage to the firm.
I’m curious though. Now you know that, does it really affect your opinion of what the article is about? Or were you just objecting to the lack of provided evidence (i.e. you don’t trust Toby to vet writers for the site).
I have read all your articles, whether anonymous or not; it is patently obvious to me, not being a programmer but having a serious interest in business and the truth, that you know what you are talking about. Maybe people should look at your biography online – Google allows one to look at your credentials for writing the reports that you do. That is unless everything one reads on the internet is spam and a false representation of reality, which it probably is in certain areas.
Thanks.
I found your article compelling and your criticisms chimes with the ones I have of the broad swathe of corrupt “scientific” opinion.
I have no doubt that Toby does an admirable job in vetting contibutors to the full extent of his capbility.
But you miss my point, you state that other bot “experts” use “their self-proclaimed insights” and yet your insights are also self-proclaimed. Do you not see the contradiction?
At the end of the day it has to be an act of faith, whether to believe you or not. I happen to believe you but I don’t want you to weaken your case.
I see your point. I think it’s hard to satisfy everyone with something like this.
The article has two parts. The first part, about why social bot papers aren’t reliable, should stand alone and be equally convincing without any attribution because all the claims have links, so you can directly explore the evidence, if you so wish. No acts of faith should be necessary. In fact you could make your own list of human Twitter accounts and see what the Botometer makes of it. That might be interesting.
The second part only makes one claim of any significance, which is how “state of the art” bot detectors really work. Indeed, because modern anti-bot techniques are proprietary this is difficult to provide any citations for and relies on my (ex-)institutional credibility. You could read actual spammers talking about it, because I gave a link that shows you some of those discussions. Or you can assume that part is all false if you like, or take it on faith: it’s not really important. It might be interesting for other programmers, and some people would find it enhances the credibility of the article, but is actually irrelevant to the core argument about the reliability of social bot research.
I’m not sure there’s any contradiction in assertions of the form, “those people aren’t experts, we are the real experts” as long as some compelling evidence is provided. If you read carefully, I’m not actually self-proclaiming expertise. The proclamation is via past employment. Whilst universities sort of ambiently imply that their academics are always experts, university administrations don’t directly judge the quality of that expertise due to the doctrine of academic freedom. In some sense academic expertise is self-proclaimed: nobody outside other academics in the same field is judging it. In contrast, any tech firm directly assesses the expertise of its employees, and the market directly assesses the expertise of the firm. There’s no equivalent of academic freedom to protect employees if they go off the rails and start making untrue claims.
In the end though, all this is not really here or there. I threw in that bit because it’d be kind of weird to write an article about bots without mentioning at all that I used to do it as a job. But apparently it’s just acting as a distraction and putting people back in “credentials mode”. That’s a pity.
OMFG. Haven’t you heard of Kees Cook’s crusade against the non-existent problem of erroneously omitted break statements in switches in the Linux kernel? That’s the kind of expertise one can expect from large companies like Google. It’s called academic groupthink.
I basically stopped reading LWN regularly because these gushing statements about nothing where too annoying and the all-out personal attacks on anyone criticizing one of it’s golden calves the OSS-community is rightly (in-)famous for, too.
I would be interested in seeing a subsequent article to this one with some mroe technical insights, whilst not all of DS’s audience might appreciate them i think some of us would be fascinated to hear more.
Try watching the talk I linked to above. It is for a technical audience and covers a variety of spam fighting topics. It’s not specific to detecting bots but you might find it interesting anyway.
so a bit like Climate Change science then?
Glad you write here Mike. Very insightful. I am now at the point where it’s almost impossible to know what is fact or fiction with these people.
“….and once again not being peer reviewed, the authors were able to successfully influence the British Parliament….”
And this is where the whole paper above falls down.
It is NOT THE CASE that bots, live people or anyone are able to “successfully influence the British Parliament”. The boot is completely on the other foot.
It is not the case that people are looking for real evidence. The people making the policy are activists looking for ‘evidence’ to support what they want to do anyway. Doesn’t matter if its fake or real – it just has to be something they can say.
Whether it comes from a robot, or whether you smear it by claiming it is from a robot – these are irrelevant questions. the point is that you are driving a policy and you need some story to back it up.
Truth is so last century….
If Damian Green was driving a policy of believing that the Russians were responsible for the decision by the British public to vote to leave the EU, if follows that the use of fraudulent, or false, Botometer data to support his position clearly demonstrates that Parliament HAS been influenced; if it was not so, why did Damian Green mention it in support of his view that the referendum was targeted by Russia?
In the end, the crap that is the majority of Twitter and other social media balances out – Bot or Not. It’s just like the rain from heaven. As a problem, its one of of education (in the widest sense), not of source. The total capture of the MSM is, in my view more problematic, because it insidiously creeps into every corner.
… but I do agree that any censorship assault does need opposition.
> the crap that is the majority of Twitter and other social media balances out
Censorship is there to ensure that it does not…
One of the creepy parts is they don’t even need to censor hard, whilst all of us converted sceptics can thankfully find sceptical content without much effort (for now), people in the mainstream never get that initial exposure to a diverse view which they need to start breaking their bubble.
Sounds very similar to the ‘research’ that said people like Tim Pool, Joe Rogan and Carl Benjamin (amongst many others who obviously weren’t) were alt-righters because they debated or called out those (IMHO) nutbags.
Part of me would suspect that for bot vs human diagnostics at the behavioural level the real thing to look for is:
a) accounts which only or almost only post messages which are exact repeats of those on other accounts
b) accounts set up just to make a brief series of posts then ceasing activity, typically as part of a large number of similar accounts in the same timeframe
c) accounts which post the same message every time with one or two variabels changed, these are usually bots which announce themselves to be bots and say things like “weather station at cross fell reports 12 celsius” or “tomorrow’s times headline will be…”
d) accounts where they only action they ever take in resposne to other accounts trying to communicate with them is a simple form of reply generated either according to randomness (likely irrelevant responses) or some sort of chatbot (picking on a key word and just commenting on that)
I’d love to see a proper analysis of the bot problem on Twitter, in particular the role of China (e.g. what happened with lots of accounts clamouring for lockdown).
A couple of times I’ve got replies on Twitter from random accounts – usually when I’m replying to an (anti-lockdown) tweet. When I check the profile of the person who sent the reply to me, they haven’t got many tweets / followers. There’s definitely a bot problem on Twitter.
It wouldn’t matter so much if politicians and the media didn’t confuse Twitter with the rest of the country!
For better or worse nobody outside the tech firms themselves would be able to do such an analysis reliably, and it’s unlikely they’d publish anything.
Defining bots as any accounts without many followers or tweets is the sort of problem that undermines these academic papers. Those accounts are much more likely to just be people who don’t use Twitter much.
There certainly have been bots on Twitter, but bots normally have commercial aims. They aren’t the sort of bots being talked about in these papers. Gallwitz & Kreil point out that the underlying assumption driving accusations of botting is that people’s political beliefs can be significantly altered by simply being exposed to tweets or retweets of hashtags. That is ultimately a rather large ideological assumption about human nature. At the very least, these papers never seem to show actual experimental evidence proving that artificial tweeting can change people’s politics. The effectiveness of the strategy is just taken for granted.
I’ve seen a couple of tweets shared where people gather evidence of lots of duplicates posted by various accounts. I think it would be interesting to investigate duplicate tweets like that. But that would be a hard job. I do agree that it would be a hard problem to really get to the bottom of apart from those tech firms.
And yes, completely agree about the ideological assumptions about human nature. It’s what the last 18 months have been about really. Ideas are dangerous, if people think about them they might change their minds – and that would never do!
Blimey, I’m a bot! Who knew?
Interesting article.
BTW my main criticism of the current “ReCAPTCHA” system is that it sometimes asks you to identify, for example, all the images of traffic signals. The trouble is sometimes some of those images are of such crap quality it’s almost impossible for me as a Brit. (and probably others) to know whether it is indeed a US type of traffic signal, or is some bracket or other type of lamp etc – then comes the need to “do it again” when you get it wrong!
Maybe it’s just me…
It’s not just you. The fact that some people fail CAPTCHAs is a well known problem with them. They’re meant to be puzzles that humans can solve but AI can’t. Lots of problems here: blind people can’t solve them, modern AI easily can, cultural differences (“click the school buses” etc), bad image quality, mistakes and so on.
We realized a decade+ ago that advances in AI would render these sorts of silly intelligence tests irrelevant. That’s why I started designing a new type of bot detector, the one that’s mentioned in the article. The challenges you’re talking about are ReCAPTCHA version 2. ReCAPTCHA v3 doesn’t use click-the-images tests at all, in fact, it doesn’t use any visible task. Separating humans from bots by asking the user to complete some sort of intelligence test is dead, and the industry is phasing it out.
Unfortunately CAPTCHA puzzles will probably never go away completely because the concept behind CAPTCHAs is easy to understand and open. Therefore they’re quite easy to make. The techniques behind polymorphic VM based bot detectors are proprietary trade secrets and they’re very difficult to make work well. So, to use them sites have to rely on Google or a few other companies.
Thanks Mike – glad it’s not just me. Lol!
https://txti.es/covid-pass/images
Found this description of living in Lithuania under a stringent covid pass law terrifying.
The author seems to hope that Lithuania has behaved eccentrically in imposing so many ruthless laws against the unvaxxed, but sadly the situation bears out the truth of the Canadian Report leak we read eighteen months ago – the unvaxxed will live under lockdown forever, and be treated as a threat to the rest of society.
The necessary document that allows you your limited “freedoms” is called “the Opportunity Pass.”
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Credit to the reddit group for finding this
https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSceptics/comments/plwof5/todays_comments_20210911/