James Delingpole recently interviewed Alex Williams who has been analyzing Twitter bot traffic (among other things), I listened to the podcast yesterday and found it very interesting. Having been on Twitter for some time in the past I had been a little unsure about Elon Musk’s claims about the volume of bot activity on there, but Williams broadly confirms what Musk has been claiming about this (there might be some difference in the exact numbers of these estimations of course).
You may not care about Twitter, but this is important because public opinion is being influenced including over politics in our supposed democratic nations. One particular beneficiary of bot traffic according to Williams is Liz Truss, who it is generally expected will be the next UK Prime Minister - these claims seem to further confirm that expectation, she has been “chosen”.
Another beneficiary according to Williams is Elon Musk of all people (I’m not sure exactly what we should make of this)!
For those who have the time here is the podcast:
Here is a direct link to the website:
Williams uses the phrase “flooding the zone” frequently to describe the bot activity, that is the phrase that was also used frequently at Event 201 where all participants were advocating the same approach to what they called “countering misinformation”.
For those that prefer to read rather than listen, there is a web page at his site summarizing his findings in detail:
Key points:
A major bot operation working on Twitter to amplify the Great Reset policy agenda by increasing traffic of selected accounts by around 100x
Around about 30,000 bots amplify the comments on the relevant individuals that are “on message” and their traffic by a factor around 100x or more. Examples (UK politicians) Ed Davey, Chris Bryant, Gordon Brown (former PM), Dominic Cummings (Conservative). [Note certain individuals on both sides of the political spectrum are boosted, assumption is that this is to give the impression of a balanced debate Edit: It’s very important to note that these bots are not necessarily all being operated by the same causes/people/organizations in fact I think it’s more likely there are multiple operators].
There are two types of bots in the network, we call Overt – covered in symbols appealing to a group and another Covert – largely blank profile (likes only)
Tell-tale signs of fake accounts are - huge volume of activity (large number of tweets, likes of other accounts’ tweets) but hardly any followers. Human beings would soon get discouraged by the lack of responses, and the volumes suggest more tweets than a single person could ever post manually. [my words]
Also goes into a method of shadow banning which is simply to delay a tweet or reply until it is no longer such a relevant subject (e.g. yesterday’s news). [my words]
It does take that long to extract info. reliably from a podcast believe me, I am speaking from experience. No matter though, I found a page at his site so was able to do it more easily, see later comment.
This is your response to a topic on Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter:
Musk’s purchase of Twitter is suspended and possibly now won’t happen because he thinks that a substantial volume of Twitter activity is bot - generated, so if this doesn’t matter then neither does Musk’s purchase of Twitter. When did you change your mind?
OK I’m going to assume you have zero knowledge of how social media sites work and that you are unaware that Facebook and Twitter have routinely appeared in the top 20 websites in the world with the most traffic. Tweets are frequently re-published in news articles, sometimes they even become the subject of news articles - e.g. so and so said this in a tweet, there is no doubt at all that social media has become significantly influential in our political discourse, the only question is by how much and I doubt if anyone could accurately estimate that.
On Twitter (and also Facebook I believe) there is a thing called “trending”. What trending means is that if a certain tweet or hashtag (subject denoted with a #, this could be a political subject e.g. nationalisation of industry, Trump, Biden etc.) is getting a lot of likes and re-tweets then that tweet or hashtag starts to appear on everybody’s page in the right hand column - just as advertisements do. If a certain topic or tweet is trending then lots of people are going to see that, lots more than would otherwise see it, and it is going to appear as if the person making the tweet is very popular, or the subject is very important. Just as advertising really works to influence purchases (it must do otherwise companies wouldn’t keep paying for it) then trending really works to influence political opinion. Furthermore, a particular political argument may never be seen on these platforms if those promoting that argument are never the ones whose tweets are “trending”. If certain tweets are promoted with huge numbers of likes by bots then this has the effect of suppressing the opposition, because their tweets will never have enough likes to be the ones trending.
If Liz Truss’s tweets are getting many more likes than her rivals in a particular leadership contest, then she is going to appear to users of Twitter as the more popular contestant, and her rivals may well become demoralized, some people also may not even bother to vote as they think the contest is already a done deal. People want to be on the winning team, so probably some people will also be influenced to support her just because she is the most apparently popular candidate. Also as I explained above, if her opponent’s tweets are suppressed then the voters will never get to hear his arguments - .e.g. when he says that lockdowns were a bad idea. In other words, whoever is operating these bots is interfering in an election in a foreign country (probablly), an issue that previously has appeared as front page news in MSM sources but somehow attracts zero interest from the media when the candidate is favoured by the powers that be.
Regarding Musk’s takeover it could still happen I think, and this analysis supporting his stance on bot activity could strengthen his hand in the negotiations. It’s still in the news, this is from just 4 days ago:
If he wins the argument then he may be able to renegotiate the deal at a more favourable price, take over Twitter and turn it into a free speech platform, that’s why all this matters (although that’s quite a few ifs).
Yes, I’m quite sure that the “intelligence agencies” use Twitter in exactly the same way they use the media - as their propaganda tool.
Zuckerberg has already admitted that the FBI pressured him to suppress Hunters laptop, and it’s just come out that Biden had lots of meetings with them or Twitter(?). Obama met regularly with Google. All election interference!
You are wrong for a very simple reason, your statement implies that it is “totally incomprehensible” to everyone, and it is not “totally incomprehensible” to me (far from it), so therefore your statement is false.
What you should have said is that:
This link took me to a site that is totally incomprehensible to me.
It is immediately clear to me that those behind this website have invested a great deal of their personal time in producing this content (pro bono), probably at great risk to personal reputations and future prospects (and who knows what else further down the line), so please let us not dismiss their work in this way having merely failed to comprehend it. The issues they are raising go far beyond the question of Twitter as well (it is a platform that deserves to die in any case) but speak to the question of government interference in elections, and more importantly to freedom of speech more generally and the First Amendment. We need to know exactly who is operating these bot farms, and why, what is their agenda.
Forgive me but I was trying to publicize what looks to me like important research. I quite often come across people saying that we must go on these platforms to help persuade lefties of the error of their ways (I think someone even here made that suggestion recently), but if this research is correct then this is more evidence (on top of what we already know about shadow-banning) that they would be wasting their time.
I think some of the content looks rather poorly presented and may in places be hard to follow perhaps, there are also some grammatical errors, but when people are working on a shoestring budget and relying on voluntary contributions this is somewhat to be expected. I’m sure I wouldn’t necessarily agree with every conclusion they come to either, but there is no site or group of people that I don’t have some degree of disagreement with.
