US Politics Mega-thread - Page 923

On November 10 2018 05:05 Ben... wrote:

I've been doing some data science-y work on 538's dataset of three million tweets from the Internet Research Agency (the Russian troll farm) and am in the process of writing a paper on it. Here's some fun stats about these tweets: based on 538's classification of the tweets, of the 2.9 million tweets in the dataset, about 700,000 are the typical obvious right wing tweets. The set also contains around 420,000 left wing tweets, a whole bunch of Russian tweets, and then the remaining tweets that are "other".

The right wing tweets are exactly what you'd expect; lots of linking to external sites/meme sharing, RTing of popular right wing pundits, and a ton of engagement with popular conservative hashtags (the top three being #MAGA obviously, #tcot which is top conservatives on Twitter, and #pjnet, which is similar to #tcot). Most of these accounts are the ones you think of when you see the obvious bot accounts on twitter. They're quite aggressively written and designed to fire people up.

Where things get much eerier and more uncomfortable are the left wing tweets and the "other" tweets. A lot of the left wing tweets are written in a completely different voice than the right wing tweets. They aren't nearly as transparent about their deceptiveness. The right wing accounts often literally only talk about politics, while the left wing accounts engage in different topics along with politics, like music, TV, and other forms of media. Reading through the tweets, I found it creepy how hard it was to tell that some of these accounts weren't real. While there are blatantly obvious accounts, for most, they seemed no different than any other unverified Twitter account except when engaging in political topics.

The "other" section is where things get weird. A whole bunch of the "other" section is literal fake news accounts, but not in the Trumpian "fake news" way but literally news accounts not associated with any organization posting mostly real-looking fake news, often interspersed with actual real news stories. There's an incredibly detailed New York City local news account that from what I understand posted news of events that actually happened in NYC for years but was run by the IRA. The tip off that these accounts are suspicious is that when there is politics-related news topics, they can sometimes seem fairly biased in their headlines. I downloaded Twitter's set of 9+ million IRA tweets and found a whole bunch more similar news accounts, but dating back a long time (most of them follow a template of sorts). Another common thing seen in the "other" section was tweets created purely to amplify hashtags and game Twitter's systems. There are thousands upon thousands of these tweets as well.

And that's just one platform. So yes, I do think you are right to be paranoid about them being on Reddit. They probably are on there and have been for a long time. Same with Facebook and a lot of other social media sites and comment sections. At this point, it suffices to say that anything you see on social media, reddit or forums, you should take with a gigantic grain of salt unless it is someone you know or is verified to be who they say they are.