it's an ongoing struggle
and to show just how difficult of a
struggle this is
one of the news articles that we have up
here nearly half of the twitter accounts
discussing reopening america
may be bots and this is a very similar
study
and it actually goes on to say many of
the same quotes that they use in the
actual journal article but essentially
research from the university of carnegie
mellon
has looked at over 200 million tweets
dating back to january of this year
on issues related to covet 19 and
they've shown that roughly half of the
tweets of 45 to 50
of them and retweets this is important
that are related to kovid
are produced by bots and this is an
increase of roughly 250 percent
relative to non 20 20 year or non 2020
day
previous analyses have shown that
between 10 and 20
of all twitter trending activity
is due to bots but more recently they've
been showing that since january 200
million tweets analyzed in the study
50 percent of all twitter activity
related to this
reopening america the covet cycle due to
bots
and clearly with everything that we're
putting out
it's just such a it's almost like we're
fighting a losing battle
i just want to add here at this point
quickly that you know as a guy who
really enjoyed science fiction as a kid
i'm really disappointed that our bots
you know are capable of distorting
mass societal values but they still
can't pick out a traffic light out of
nine pictures
dan throwing shade on those programs
i'm just gonna start screen catching
every captcha for you and be like
which one because like how many times
have you been doing one of those
sometimes they're hard
yeah i have a hard time sometimes
because i'm like well
what does the computer think is a
traffic light or
a bus yeah yeah and like
and like when you think about how like
visual representation starts from
whatever level and builds complexity as
it goes in the brain bringing it back to
neuroscience
at what level are are they operating
because like sometimes it's like oh
what if there's a what if there's a sign
of a stop sign what if there's a
sign of a stoplight well see that's that
comes down to what makes humans unique
right and
and you know the original in the 1950s
1960s they're like oh we'll be able to
have
you know robots that will be
indistinguishable from humans in the
next uh
you know x amount of years and we still
haven't gotten that yet because
humans there's so much nuances to the
way we see the world and somehow we all
see it
very similarly based on our
understanding of psychology how how
would one identify a bot like
so this is actually an interesting thing
bots because i've been kind of curious
about this myself like i've done
a bit of digging into this whole topic
so
bot detection can vary in terms of like
the difficulty behind it because uh
sometimes bots can be caught based on
the type of language being used so if a
computer
like so some bots are just
recapitulating things that actual people
have written and some bots are
generating
strings of sentences based on certain
input to a system so
sometimes you can kind of pick up
unusual phrasing of things
to suggest as a hint that it may not be
from some of likely human but
the other way too is you can't
necessarily do it in single tweets
sometimes you have to look at like
a course of accounts so actually like
typically the most successful bot
detection is you have to look at the
history of the account so
well the article that roger um posted it
kind of went into how they identified
bots and some of the things were that
they would
um tweet like unbelievable amounts of
tweets in such a small period of time
and that no human could do
and then the other thing was that they
tweet from very different locations
yes um like you know human can get from
like china
to canada in like five minutes no one
thing that i was thinking is you know
how do you really know it's from
different locations we have
ips scrambled
and it thinks it knows where i am it
thinks i'm not anywhere near i am
maybe that's part of they're trying to
throw you off paul putting two
area codes over all these things that
we're talking about like am i a robot
and i just don't know
are we when you find out paul hasn't
been able to log on to any account with
caption for like years now
this is so relevant too i think because
it's it's really becoming a problem in
determining what is a bot and what isn't
about online
in some cases it's easy of course um
there's lots of i guess
paul references
yeah when it becomes a little bit more
sophisticated you almost
need these bots to track down identify
the bots
yeah and because they you need to use
their own ai or their own algorithms
against them
and that's exactly what this study did
they in order to detect the bots the
university used artificial intelligence
which utilized a number of metrics
including frequency of tweets
several tweets and matters like you were
saying and all the different factors
different hashtags and of course there's
legitimate bots out there there's these
auto retweet uh auto hashtag retweet
bots that are
supposedly set up for legitimate
purposes but just bringing it back full
circle to this whole
narrative of misinformation and fake
news that we're surrounded with
they enable the rampant spreading of
misinformation if something is
retweeted automatically without any
insight into
whether this is true or not it's pretty
much doing the fake news distributors
job for them yeah i think the one thing
too that's kind of missed a little bit
like this article does a great job you
know covering
some ways to identify bots and kind of
talk with the bot presence on something
like twitter
but there's actually something more
insidious than just the bots because
the bots are a tool to spread the
information it's actually the targeting
of how to use this who's making the box
i mean even like who do you expose the
bots to like who are the bots
like showing me like a million twitter
bots all
saying you know like this thing i'm not
going to be convinced because i know
like if every if i see a million tweets
and say end the lockdown i'm not going
to be like oh
well you know they must be right
but there are a lot of the people that
will
the real humans that will endorse the
robot tweet and
messages that are being generated that
way and then in turn almost
sort of like almost like money
laundering but i guess you could call it
like an ideal laundry scam where it's
you know like
you have an idea you know the people who
will convert it for you
in whatever place you're trying to
spread the information to you use your
bot networks
across social medias target them blast
them with the information they start
exposing that information and then you
now have a legitimate source of
person-to-person
spread of misinformation that started as
a bot to person
or bought to people but now it's
spreading between actual people
cannot agree more and you know i guess
like we're just kind of running about
the point as well it's just it's so
difficult to identify which
of these are bots that they're getting
much more sophisticated over time
using strategies that at first glance
you would actually be fooled
having pictures of real people or having
videos associated with the profile
and you actually have to do some digging
in order to identify whether this is a
real person or whether
you know did they just join yesterday or
last month
well here's here's a good example for
you about that because like the idea
about new accounts and that that doesn't
always work
um a good example of it's actually the
website reddit
so reddit has a lot of bots and um
spreading activity but there's a clever
thing that was actually found on that
system which is that a lot of those
accounts
were actually people buying old people's
accounts you know who had inactive
accounts have been sitting for years
they
buy or hack or steal the credentials of
those accounts
take them for themselves figure out that
you know nobody's looking for these
accounts and then
repurpose them into their own agenda
that's right
there's a whole industry of that but i
mean the nice thing there is with those
accounts you can often pick up the gaps
in those cases
um and actually one thing that's the
weakness of that approach
is if you have an account that was
hacked bought or whatever and you now
have a new
robotic or human person that's writing
on the account and using its sort of
authority or
information there's going to be
different writing styles it's very hard
to kind of fabricate
the writing style of another human being
so yeah you could build a system to look
at like diversity of word maps
and see if the word maps line up
and this also comes back to my question
on how can we bridge the gap between
science and the media right
so to me there's two ways of either you
go with the media side or the science
side and
science becomes more like the media or
the media becomes more like science
i don't personally think that science
should become more like the media
um so i think maybe the key is to really
start to educate the general public
and turn everybody into a scientist
because at the end of the day you know
we're also
like science isn't some ivory tower
sitting on a hill
you know even when we talk about people
like the flat earthers and stuff like
that
like i watched that netflix documentary
on the flat earthers and one of the guys
came on he's like
you know these are people who are like
asking questions they're generating
hypotheses
um they're testing the hypotheses you
know they're
they're they're potential scientists
like you just don't let it go when
they're wrong
over and over yeah exactly and i mean
you know there's something to be said
about
people you know it's easier to fool
someone than to convince someone they've
been fooled right
yeah um especially once they have that
hard locked idea
already set in stone in their head yeah
you know confirmation bias and all these
things right
um but i think you know and i think
that's one of the benefits of what
what roger you know what we're trying to
do here is to really like get to the
average person
and and i think that's how we survive as
a society is
is to really create everybody to become
a scientist and just
basic science literacy and there's also
uh
some news sources that will pair um the
scientists involved in something or who
are experts in it with reporters like
the conversation
is often a great site for a lot of that
because they typically pair
do exactly that they take a scientist
who's an expert in the field and pair
them with
a reporter to get the writing and the
language right for the lay audience but
get the facts right on the other hand
i i would actually picture them or
envision them or categorize them as one
of our primary
competitors if anything in terms of
getting out accurate
scientific knowledge to the public and i
think in so many ways i don't i love the
conversation
but we are beating them in so many ways
in terms of getting that
out there because if an individual that
doesn't have a scientific background is
going on to the conversation
to get some insight into this topic of
course
it's possible with certain subjects to
do so within a very short period of
space that in a blog style kind of
article a thousand words or less
but these long-form style conversations
giving
uh members of the public access to the
data itself in order to judge with their
own judgment with their own eyes the
same data that the scientists use
to come to their conclusions i think it
just is very helpful to to give that
entire exploration process for the
scientific process
you
