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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the are-political-election-campaigns-a-danger? dept.

Normally, autonomous computer programmes known as bots trawl the internet, for example, to help search engines. However, there are also programmes known as social bots which interfere in social media, automatically generating replies or sharing content. They are currently suspected of spreading political propaganda. Scientists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have investigated the extent to which such autonomous programmes were used on the platform Twitter during the general elections in Japan in 2014. By using methods taken from corpus linguistics, they were able to draw up a case study on the activity patterns of social bots. At the same time, the FAU researchers gained an insight into how computer programmes like these were used, and recognised that nationalistic tendencies had an important role to play in the election, especially in social media. The results of the investigation have been published in the journal Big Data.

Prof. Dr. Fabian Schäfer, chair of Japanese Studies at FAU, was motivated to study the use of social bots after the general election in Japan in 2014. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, led by Shinzō Abe, won the election. Publicly and in the mass media, his election campaign focused predominantly on economic issues. It was a different story in social media. "Our analysis showed that Abe's hidden nationalistic agenda had a very important role to play in these channels," Schäfer explains. "The importance of the hidden agenda in social media is not, however, down to either the prime minister or the LDP itself." Rather, it appears as if social bots were widely used by right-wing internet users, ranging from far-right to more conservative right-wing circles. Prof. Schäfer's initial hypothesis was that the right-wingers used social bots to give indirect online support to Abe's nationalistic agenda, which had slipped into the background during the political campaign.

It seems that future elections will have to deal with such "bots" whether we like it or not. How much influence do you think such bots will have on future election campaigns?

Source: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität

Related: How great is the influence and risk of social and political 'bots?'

Schäfer Fabian, Evert Stefan, and Heinrich Philipp. Japan's 2014 General Election: Political Bots, Right-wing Internet Activism, and Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's Hidden Nationalist Agenda. Big Data. DOI: 10.1089/big.2017.0049


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  • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:01AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:01AM (#641744)

    Would he let this injustice stand? No. No. No! His eyes were filled with determination as he charged at the insolent woman who walked past him without acknowledging his superiority. Tool after tool elicited scream after scream, and finally there was silence. Justice had been wrought upon that wretched sow. Now, who would be his next toy...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:13AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:13AM (#641750)
      Bill!
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:12AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:12AM (#641748)

    What are you going to do about it? There is already an effort to uproot human rights with bots pretending to be humans, how are you going to apply rights to amorphous entities you can't even tell apart?

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:34AM (5 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:34AM (#641755) Journal

      There is already an effort to uproot human rights with bots pretending to be humans, how are you going to apply rights to amorphous entities you can't even tell apart?

      No worries, mate! At the next election you will be able to tell them apart: the bots will be more coherent and more convincing than the humans!

      (grin)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @12:46PM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @12:46PM (#641767)

        Oh they are coherent all right! That's how we spot them - bot posts are on line equivalent of uncanny valley humanoid mechanotronic dolls, no humor, no emotions, no errors, just empty praises for, or echoing of, whatever bot-supported politicians was cited saying. All of the posts are of similar length as well, probably optimized to catch most lazy readers' eyes. It gives you creeps when you see those batches and batches of bot posts. I wish to all manipulating politicians to rule only their bots.

        • (Score: 2, Redundant) by VLM on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:02PM (3 children)

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:02PM (#641790)

          no humor, no emotions, no errors, just empty praises for, or echoing of, whatever bot-supported politicians was cited saying

          Thats the first I've ever seen of that. Like most political BS the stated goal has little in common with the real goal.

          The real goal is to ban alt right memes from /pol/ or /r/the_donald which are influential and very funny, or more generally like colleges are doing today, to ban any speech to the right of Marx CNN or Lenin. Literally passing laws such as "Encouraging anyone to vote for any party other than Democrat is now a hate crime felony"

          The falsely stated goal will be to ban stuff that everyone doesn't want to see such as:

          10 PRINT "Hillary sux"
          20 GOTO 10
          30 END

          Its fairly similar to the gun control "debate" in that way. Sure the parents, teachers, police, social workers, and FBI all failed, so lets blame some harmless inanimate object instead. Sorta like "we don't feel like opposing or discussing illegal immigration so lets make fun of The Wall instead"

          • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:08PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:08PM (#641791)

            I wonder: Do you really believe that nonsense you just wrote, or are you only trolling (in the original sense of the word)?

            • (Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:33PM

              by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:33PM (#641802)

              BASIC-80 Rev. 5.21
              Copyright 1977-1981 (C) by Microsoft
              29523 Bytes free
              >RUN
              Syntax error in 70
              >LIST
              10 REM RUSSIAN BOT SOURCE CODE PLEASE KEEP SECRET NO MATTER WHAT DONT POST THIS TO SOYLENTNEWS
              20 REM THIS FILE IS BOT.BAS NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH CRISISACTOR.BAS OR SHITTYAUTOMOBILEANALOGY.BAS
              30 PRINT "Content-Type: text/nationalsocialist"
              40 PRINT
              50 PRINT "Thats the first I've ever seen of that. Like most political BS the stated goal has little in common with the real goal."
              60 PRINT
              70 PRINT "The real goal is to ban alt right memes from /pol/ or /r/the_donald which are influential and very funny, or more generally like colleges are doing today, to ban any speech to the right of Marx CNN or Lenin. Literally passing laws such as "Encouraging anyone to vote for any party other than Democrat is now a hate crime felony""
              80 PRIN^C
              >

              (Insert sound of boomer trying to program VCR timer) Can someone help me debug this thing? I'm out of Rubles and the Kremlin won't send me another check until after Orthodox Lent. Don't make me file a bug at https://github.com/SoylentNews [github.com] ...

              In the old days I think I use to abuse the hell out of CHR$(34) and concatenating strings, but that was like 40 years ago, so just like wearing cordoury bellbottom pants while listening to disco "wasn't the right thing to do" there's probably a less wrong way to embed quotes. Hey has you seen this cool new TV show, its called "Battlestar Galactica"?

              I'm just sayin, when the oppositions best attempt at well financed propaganda results in general public responses that are funnier and more influential than the expensive paid propaganda campaign, maybe its time to hang it up, its done, instead of looking sillier talking about Russian Bots and how many angels dance on the head of a pin. Progressive Leftism, meet trash heap of history, LOL.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:00PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:00PM (#641886)

              VLM treats "troll" as a pronoun not a verb.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @01:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @01:02PM (#641772)

    QED

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Geezer on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:30PM (4 children)

    by Geezer (511) on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:30PM (#641801)

    Clearly, fraudulent mass-produced automated one-liners on social media can have an effect on an appallingly-large segment of a shallow, gullible electorate. Weaponized social media technology is available to whatever candidate, advocate, or party with the means to do so.

    To make matters worse, the so-called fact checkers are often just as biased and inaccurate.

    Far more worrisome, to me, is the shallowness and gullibility of the electorate that makes it possible.

    Maybe we need a class of news editors similar to Heinlein's Fair Witnesses to act as truth-detectors. An AI wouldn't work because the programming would be just as subject to the programmers' biases as the social media bots themselves.

    Perhaps humans have finally conclusively proven ourselves, as a group, to be incapable of enlightened self-government.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:43PM (2 children)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 22 2018, @02:43PM (#641806)

      Its worth considering as a counternarrative that people have been overly concerned about technology's affects on politics since at least the Gutenberg printing press. Maybe all the way back to the written word. Social media is dying already anyway, I think we'll make it.

      An alternative shorter term counternarrative is normally after a failed election the loser kind of retires and disappears, but there's too much power in the Clinton crime machine to dissipate instantly, so we're stuck in a weird situation where we can't talk about the real problem, which was the losing candidate was a horrific crime boss scumbag, the intense human desire to rationalize means we have to talk about russian computer attacks and space aliens abducting and analy probing registered voters and all kinds of lunacy OTHER than the censored forbidden reality of why the other side lost. If the primaries hadn't been rigged against Bernie, well, first of all, Bernie might have won, and secondly not being a crime family boss after his loss he would have disappeared and instead of bizarre fantasy rationalizations we'd be able to talk about how Bernie lost because socialist policy XYZ didn't resonate with identity politics group ZYX and so forth for hours, but because Bernie would retire like a civilized human being we wouldn't need to talk about weird conspiracy theory fantasies.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Geezer on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:30PM

        by Geezer (511) on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:30PM (#641828)

        Historically some people may have been overly concerned about mass-communication technology, but I think on whole the benefits have out-weighed the risks. Like any tool, it can be used for good or ill. What worries me is that as the tool is becoming more effective, the material, that is, the electorate, is also becoming more malleable.

        The post-election ravings of sore losers and their die-hard fans are of far less importance than the practical impact of the winners, but do make for some entertaining bar-stool humor.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:12PM

        by Thexalon (636) on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:12PM (#641869)

        I'm pretty sure Bernie wouldn't have disappeared had he lost in the general election: My guess is that he would have done something fairly similar to what he's actually done, namely continue to be a senator and national political figure. In this respect, he'd be no different than Bob Dole, John Kerry, or John McCain after their failed presidential bids.

        One of the harmful ideas of American politics is "Either you're a presidential contender, or you're a nobody". That both encourages stupid presidential campaigns (e.g. Carly Fiorina), and gets people to stop paying attention to the actions of their senators, congressmen, governors, state legislators, mayors, judges (in places that elect them), etc. And that creates an environment where corruption and stupidity thrive at the lower levels of government.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @08:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @08:14PM (#641946)

      ...fraudulent mass-produced automated one-liners acting like they are a bunch of unconnected Joe Sixpacks...

  • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:01PM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:01PM (#641809) Homepage Journal

    Media can simply blanket ban Twitter as any kind of platform and this problem will start to solve itself.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday February 22 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday February 22 2018, @04:38PM (#641857)

    Sure, automated bots can and will astroturf for whichever candidate is funding them. But this is yet another instance of taking a concept that's been around for a very long time, adding "... with a computer", and claiming it's some brand new invention.

    When Roman politicians spoke at the Forum rostrum, they routinely paid a bunch of plebians to show up and cheer for them on cue, to make it look like there was lots of public support for their statements. That's exactly the same role that fake Twitter followers and fake Facebook accounts and fake FCC commenters have, they're just doing it on different scale and frequency.

    And of course the defense against this would be to teach Americans not to just blindly believe whatever they read or see, especially on the Internet, but there isn't going to be that effort anytime soon because, the people who would be making that decision want Americans to believe whatever they read or say so long as they are the ones writing or saying it. In short, right now they're trying to say "Russian propaganda! OMG!" while at the same time funding their own online propaganda. So the last thing they want is a population that understands the techniques of propaganda and resists them.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:23PM

      by JeanCroix (573) on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:23PM (#641876)
      Thank you for eloquently making pretty much exactly the post I came in here to make, so all I had to do was mod +1 insightful. Time saver!
    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:50PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:50PM (#641912) Journal

      Sure, automated bots can and will astroturf for whichever candidate is funding them. But this is yet another instance of taking a concept that's been around for a very long time, adding "... with a computer", and claiming it's some brand new invention.

      Agreed. And the non-computer term lying when money is involved is fraud.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Thursday February 22 2018, @08:41PM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Thursday February 22 2018, @08:41PM (#641962)

    It's just a matter of reaching the next logical step [youtube.com].

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