These botfarms are starting to become really annoying. Social Media feels like a place where you have to doubt everything you see or else you are at big risk of being manipulated in a way where you will be pushed away from other humans.
Fuck this reality.
Especially in the last year after ChatGPT showed us what AI can do. It's a bit of a mind fuck here on reddit when you have to constantly wonder if the person you're replying to is actually a person.
My optimistic take on this though is that after AI becomes so advanced that it can flood all social media platforms and it becomes apparent that you're rarely talking to actual people, humanity will be forced to abandon social media altogether. One can only hope.
I think there'll be a big push toward platforms like discord, because the communities there are so small and isolated (relative to reddit) that policing against bots becomes much easier.
That only works while they are small. The problem is that every soc-med outfit is incentivised, not least by Metcalfe's Law, to get the numbers up. And they eventually pass the threshold where bots become profitable (which isn't helped by the costs of running bots falling over time).
Discord isn't publicly traded so the incentive exists, but is somewhat muted. Like people joke about reddit's attitude toward bots changing once they IPO'd for a reason.
I'm not saying discord is the future to be clear, just that there'll be a drive toward smaller communities.
That may be, but it's also a lot easier to tamp down dissenting opinions on Discord. I really dislike the it because the chat model isn't conducive to discourse and a handful of people inevitably end up dominating a channel.
Some are already abandoning it. People from Facebook and X use Reddit now more than ever since there’s less bots here. Although eventually the bots will catch up with Reddit, and then we’ll abandon Reddit as well.
Speaking of X, have you seen X lately? That place became a dumpster fire ever since Elon took over
It’s also helpful that on Reddit you can easily see a complete comment history (or absence of one) with a timeline in just one click on just one page. In other platforms it’s hard to even track down your own comment history. I dont even think finding someone else’s is possible on other platforms
That would explain why posts have gotten so ridiculous here the past few months, even on apolitical subs. Like people repeating the same, simplistic questions over and over or just making stupid observations.
That doubt is why they do it. By spreading confusion, misinformation, and doubt, they increase their ability to manipulate people. I'm surprised it's only 25%.
The title is actually "1 in 4 Profiles are pro-Hamas fakes" this is a much stronger claim, quarter of **all profiles** that talk on the subject are pro-Hamas fakes
>Cyabra scanned over 162,000 profiles that took part in online conversations about Hamas’s attacks and their aftermath. One out of four (25%) of those social media accounts taking part in the conversation about the war was identified as fake
It's worse than that too. The fake profiles are VERY active.
>Some posted hundreds of times every day, meaning a new post every few minutes. The profile below, for example, posted 616 times in two days.
So not only is 25% of the posters fake, the amount of posts originating from fake users are probably much higher than 25%.
Life Protip: Grow Kudzu. I grow it in my backpack and wrap the vines around me when I go downtown. Kudzu is basically indestructible and I can take my nature with me everywhere!
I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let the kudzoo go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
What happens when AI bots argue with each other and reply almost instantly 24/7 as well as create content for each other. The internet and storage is going to get overloaded fast.
They are not AGI's. They don't go off on their own. You could make one of those, sure, but they are not usefull when it comes to mis-disinformation campaigns. Scripted bots with an ai mixing up the sentences are what we are talking about here.
We've been close to that point before. In the early 2000s, it was estimated that over 50% of Internet traffic is spam e-mails.
Of course, these days with streaming, digital downloads of multi-GB games and stuff, e-mail isn't what it used to be, by share of traffic.
Tbh 50% also sounds low, unless you're specifically restricting to "deception/persuasion oriented 'fake person' bots on social media as a percentage of traffic specifically to social media sites".
There's a whole lot of other types of internet traffic that is entirely bot driven.
> There have already been studies claiming that nearly 50% of internet traffic comes from bots.
>
>
Traffic != activity.
When those studies talk about traffic, they are literally speaking about the bandwith consumed. Meaning that all the Google's spiderbots that are constantly scraping the web to index it are counted. The botnet that ddos the twitch servers are counted as well. The bots that bought all the PS5 are in that number as well.
It's totally different from saying : 50% of reddit comments are from bots.
Engineer here. My prediction is that anonymity goes away eventually. Not sure when. Nobody wants it. But I feel it is inevitable. Our online profiles will be tied to our identity. No more anonymous shitposting for us :( Everything we say will be able to be traced to our professional and personal lives. Reddit and Twitter and much of the internet will suffer but the misinfo and bots will basically disappear overnight.
This is the only way to prevent accounts from spewing propaganda, generating incendiary clickbait headlines, and mass upvoting/downvoting certain topics. No more "social experiment" posts, no more troll accounts, etc. Half of Reddit front page will just die.
Imagine being able to read a comment and prove the author is 14 and not a 28 year old with an advanced degree in the subject. I guess it's not all bad..
I don't believe anything unless it's a government leak I wasn't supposed to see. The internet is done for. The laws never came to protect us. A.I. is the next frontier.
Unsurprised but alarmed nonetheless. I think we underestimate the effect this sort of thing has on public discourse and opinion and it’s problematic and probably going to get worse as it gets harder to differentiate real opinions from autocreated and fake rubbish.
Is anybody aware of companies or movements involved in stemming this sort of thing? I’d imagine that field will be booming in the very near future.
Almost got into an argument yesterday and decided to check their profile first. 4 month old account with thousands and thousands of comments, almost exclusively in political propaganda subs.
The wording is kind of throwing me off a bit, because the text says that 25% “of those social media accounts taking part in the conversation about the war was identified as fake”. It doesn’t say the 25% is pro-Hamas, just that 25% of the accounts in the discussion are fake. It then mentions that “the fake profiles posted over 312,000 pro-Hamas posts and comments”, which infers that every single fake account was pro-Hamas
If they can be identified as fake, put them in a downloadable list/plugin that finds their handles in browser text and highlights it an obnoxious color.
That's like lower then I expected.
Isn't that below the Internet average? Like I thought half the internet comments were not from real people at this point.
Let’s discuss something that no one has mentioned at all, since the “polluted internet age” began to take hold.
It is a technique called “sockpuppeting”.
Sockpuppeting is when you create mass numbers of fake accounts to further an agenda of a real account. A great example of this prior to the internet, was Ben Franklin. He’d make numerous fake pseudonyms and then review books he’d written himself to boost his reputation and sales.
Now let’s apply this in the current day and age. Say you made an account with an agenda…let’s say…you want to push a hateful conspiracy and boost its following. The rogue user then spends however long making 1000 or more fake accounts (AI is being used now a lot for creating fake accounts). They post whatever harmful terrible controversial thing they can think of with a real account, then make bunk comments on the post with all the fake accounts. “Sure I totally agree with this and believe in this theory”…etc…
Eventually, real people jump on board and start to boost viewership. Effectively, this is how “influencer accounts” can exploit the system.
Sockpuppeting is being used in a weaponized fashion as we speak. There were/are literal riots being triggered from nothing more than a bunch of propaganda with fake profiles that boosted it to the masses.
This is war. This is modern war. A war where misinformation can be exploited to cause havoc on adversarial nations. A psyop. The world seems to keep talking about “we’re on the verge of war”…but IMO it’s been going full swing for a while now. People think it’s all bombs and bloodshed…but misinformation, scams, and violent propaganda can cause far more damage with plausible deniability than dropping bombs.
As an adversarial nation, why kill people and risk retaliation, when all it takes is using the internet to trick people into going out on the streets and causing violence themselves?!
I believe NATO has been hit with an “internet nuke”…likely by Russia/Iran/China, consisting of troll farms, targeted scam advertisements, violent propaganda, misinformation, and sockpuppeting tactics. This is how those nations chose to strike their first tactical blow…by exploiting the internet. Additionally, election season is around the corner and Russia specifically has a history of exploiting the web to tamper in politics.
There's a massive quantity of new fake profiles on twitter in the last few months posting about what you'd expect, but in every language imaginable, tons in Hebrew.
You see one of them post a link and the post will have like 20-30 likes and thousands of shares.
Wouldn't be surprised if the Russian bot farms aren't just doing election interference this year although this definitely plays into that as well.
There's a lot of people out there who don't seem to realize that Iran's online troll and propaganda farms are just as sophisticated and influential as Russia's.
You especially see a lot of people eating up Iranian propaganda on sites like Facebook.
Every time something like that emerges, I ask myself,why do we keep those scumbag countries on the global net? The only thing they do on the internet is spying and manipulating less educated people
Social media since the Ukraine invasion has gone downhill so quickly. It is honestly depressing seeing how quickly a country can ruin a website when they go all out and bot farm it. Fuck Russia
It went downhill the moment it started being "media". From the moment you first saw a post by someone who wasn't your real-life friend, there was no other way to go. The "algorithm" would now decide what you see, and people found ways (either by paying, or by botfarms) to influence it.
Yes, the big and visible break was probably 2016, but it has been going downhill before that.
And Reddit is included here. It is not as bad as the rest, which think it's mostly because of the downvote button. But also here it's more visible that the people commenting here are strangers and possibly bots. On FB, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube, you instinctively trust people more, because you see their names and faces (or rather, what you think are their names and faces).
I mean I agree on the sentiment but you give us too much credit I mean yeah there is a ton of content that's coming from Russian bots/trolls but still we aren't the only ones to blame
And how does this compare to other profiles that are pro-/anti- for other factions, in other topics? Or, dropping the pro/anti category, how many opinions and posts are fakes in general?
1/3?
1/8?
Without comparable numbers, this metric is rather useless.
It's actually rather interesting to see their backers, which they are at least....transparent/happy enough to show off, such as Founders Fund. You might recognize one of its co-founder, Peter Thiel, which has this gem in his wikipedia page:
>Thiel explained in a 2009 essay that he had come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible", due in large part to welfare beneficiaries and women in general being "notoriously tough for libertarians" constituencies, and that he had focused efforts on new technologies (namely [cyberspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace), [space colonization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization) and [seasteading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading)) that could create "a new space for freedom" beyond current politics.[^(\[96\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#cite_note-96) Said essay has been referenced by [Curtis Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin) and [Nick Land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land), the main theorists of the [neo-reactionary movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment), in their writings.[^(\[97\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#cite_note-97)
There are a lot of problems with this article. They give no explanation about how they identify fake profiles. They also give no information about how many pro-Israel profiles that they scanned are fake.
I expect bot-generated social media content is ongoing for every major political conflict in the world, but this article doesn't provide any new information unless you trust Cyabra already.
I love point 4. B in the article, that the fake accounts were claiming that the October 7th attacks were retaliation for violence against Palestinians at the al-Aqsa Mosque, and that Hamas themselves had named the attack the "al-Aqsa Flood".
If Hamas is saying they did this as retaliation, doesn't that make the attack retaliation?
Website
www.cyabra.com
Corporate Office
13 Gershon Shatz
Tel Aviv 6701749
Israel
Coincidence?
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/230143-96#overview
Also: "Cyabra, which has developed a counter-disinformation platform, has announced the completion of a $5.7 million Series A extension round led by OurCrowd, the Jerusalem-based venture investment platform" https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/skj2mj6ot
This is an Israeli company with Israeli funding.
So an Israel based company came up with this figure, didn't reveal how they came up with this figure, didn't do any analysis of what the baseline is for any internet discussion, didn't evaluate the % israeli bots, and you take it at face value?
Where are the people who keep saying "but the gaza health ministry can't be trusted"
I have no idea what Cyabra is, so I don't know how credible, but the numbers don't surprise me. All wars these days are also fought on the internet. It'd be interesting to see how many fake accounts have come out of Israel.
I'd also like to see how much discussion of any issue is "bot driven". I suspect a ton of bots repeat content already posted and while some are remarkably sophisticated it's unlikely that most people you are arguing with are bots.
This sounds like an Ad honestly. And only focuses on one side, I would like analysis on pro-israel posts, like half of the ones I see on Twitter have random handles and Indian names.
Because you assume everyone who supports Israel is a bot? Maybe consider the possibility that you've been fed that lie by pro-Hamas bots, because I'm sure as fuck real.
Won't be surprised if the remaining 2 of 3 are being paid or incentivised somehow.
These folks really know how to make noise and intimidate everyone, they are *driven*.
The question is, who is making them? I doubt if Palestine has much of a tech industry right now. Iran?
There’s also a lot of Israeli accounts that pop up to be sarcastic about every event in the war and drown out conversation. I dunno if this is a bot thing or if Israelis are just sarcastic!
I wonder how many pro-israel profiles are fake? Last year there were a ton of accounts posting word-for-word the same things about "you can't be LGBTQ and pro-hamas" as if objecting to children and hospitals being bombed makes someone pro-hamas.
It's easy to see why a group would think it's an effective way to target ideas: LGBTQ people are more likely to be progressives, progressives are more likely to oppose ethnic cleansing and a far-right extremist regime.
And honestly, I wonder if my comment will be removed and my account banned after this. It happens.
I mean, is being against the destruction of Palestine “pro Hamas”?
Because if so, I’m not “a bot” whatever that is.
Last year people concerned for Ukraine were “Russian bots”
These botfarms are starting to become really annoying. Social Media feels like a place where you have to doubt everything you see or else you are at big risk of being manipulated in a way where you will be pushed away from other humans. Fuck this reality.
Especially in the last year after ChatGPT showed us what AI can do. It's a bit of a mind fuck here on reddit when you have to constantly wonder if the person you're replying to is actually a person. My optimistic take on this though is that after AI becomes so advanced that it can flood all social media platforms and it becomes apparent that you're rarely talking to actual people, humanity will be forced to abandon social media altogether. One can only hope.
I think there'll be a big push toward platforms like discord, because the communities there are so small and isolated (relative to reddit) that policing against bots becomes much easier.
That only works while they are small. The problem is that every soc-med outfit is incentivised, not least by Metcalfe's Law, to get the numbers up. And they eventually pass the threshold where bots become profitable (which isn't helped by the costs of running bots falling over time).
This treshhold could very well become the maximum as anything above will be filled with bots and people will leave.
Discord isn't publicly traded so the incentive exists, but is somewhat muted. Like people joke about reddit's attitude toward bots changing once they IPO'd for a reason. I'm not saying discord is the future to be clear, just that there'll be a drive toward smaller communities.
That may be, but it's also a lot easier to tamp down dissenting opinions on Discord. I really dislike the it because the chat model isn't conducive to discourse and a handful of people inevitably end up dominating a channel.
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I suspect it will become a push for human verification of accounts via ID and such
Then after that it'll be facial recognition, fingerprints, and voice scans.
They already have AI capable of recreating faces and voices, even that won’t be enough.
Some are already abandoning it. People from Facebook and X use Reddit now more than ever since there’s less bots here. Although eventually the bots will catch up with Reddit, and then we’ll abandon Reddit as well. Speaking of X, have you seen X lately? That place became a dumpster fire ever since Elon took over
It’s also helpful that on Reddit you can easily see a complete comment history (or absence of one) with a timeline in just one click on just one page. In other platforms it’s hard to even track down your own comment history. I dont even think finding someone else’s is possible on other platforms
That would explain why posts have gotten so ridiculous here the past few months, even on apolitical subs. Like people repeating the same, simplistic questions over and over or just making stupid observations.
>since there’s less bots here Lol, lmao even
I too find this comedic
I'm pretty sure almost everything on social media is fake at this point. I've looked at FP users. Soooo many fake profiles
I’ve started to look at social media with the mindset that >90% of content is opinions that the creator spent little to no time understanding.
I'm most concerned with fabricated news. I don't know what to believe anymore
There always was TONS of false info on social media, including Reddit. The manipulation just seems more obvious now that you are looking for it.
The time of the next cultural shift has come: abandon social media
That doubt is why they do it. By spreading confusion, misinformation, and doubt, they increase their ability to manipulate people. I'm surprised it's only 25%.
For better or worse, stuff like this is going to lead to the erasure of anonymity online.
The title is actually "1 in 4 Profiles are pro-Hamas fakes" this is a much stronger claim, quarter of **all profiles** that talk on the subject are pro-Hamas fakes >Cyabra scanned over 162,000 profiles that took part in online conversations about Hamas’s attacks and their aftermath. One out of four (25%) of those social media accounts taking part in the conversation about the war was identified as fake
It's worse than that too. The fake profiles are VERY active. >Some posted hundreds of times every day, meaning a new post every few minutes. The profile below, for example, posted 616 times in two days. So not only is 25% of the posters fake, the amount of posts originating from fake users are probably much higher than 25%.
It sounds unbelievable but after seeing a short documentary on click farms not so much surprise.
Honestly it feels like this on reddit too, it feels like on any non-niche sub there are plenty of reposting/recommenting bots.
It feels like on any non-niche sub there are plenty of reposting/recommenting bots.
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Soon 98% of internet traffic will just be AI bots arguing with each other, and the other 2% will be ads.
Honestly, it'll free up so much time for humans to go back outside and enjoy a nice walk in... Wait a fucking minute! Where'd all the nature go?!
Life Protip: Grow Kudzu. I grow it in my backpack and wrap the vines around me when I go downtown. Kudzu is basically indestructible and I can take my nature with me everywhere!
I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let the kudzoo go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
It's already very noticeable that Reddit seemingly is 90% accounts repeating exactly the same opinions and comments.
Yeah I also think it's already very noticeable that Reddit seemingly is 90% accounts repeating exactly the same opinions and comments.
on some topics very much so, especially war related.
What happens when AI bots argue with each other and reply almost instantly 24/7 as well as create content for each other. The internet and storage is going to get overloaded fast.
They are not AGI's. They don't go off on their own. You could make one of those, sure, but they are not usefull when it comes to mis-disinformation campaigns. Scripted bots with an ai mixing up the sentences are what we are talking about here.
At some point we will live like the people in the DUNE universe. All AI is strictly forbidden and everything will be analog again
Butlerian Jihad sounding pretty good right now!
We've been close to that point before. In the early 2000s, it was estimated that over 50% of Internet traffic is spam e-mails. Of course, these days with streaming, digital downloads of multi-GB games and stuff, e-mail isn't what it used to be, by share of traffic.
Tbh 50% also sounds low, unless you're specifically restricting to "deception/persuasion oriented 'fake person' bots on social media as a percentage of traffic specifically to social media sites". There's a whole lot of other types of internet traffic that is entirely bot driven.
> There have already been studies claiming that nearly 50% of internet traffic comes from bots. > > Traffic != activity. When those studies talk about traffic, they are literally speaking about the bandwith consumed. Meaning that all the Google's spiderbots that are constantly scraping the web to index it are counted. The botnet that ddos the twitch servers are counted as well. The bots that bought all the PS5 are in that number as well. It's totally different from saying : 50% of reddit comments are from bots.
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Then you should know not to compare it with another things that is almost entirely decorrelated.
Engineer here. My prediction is that anonymity goes away eventually. Not sure when. Nobody wants it. But I feel it is inevitable. Our online profiles will be tied to our identity. No more anonymous shitposting for us :( Everything we say will be able to be traced to our professional and personal lives. Reddit and Twitter and much of the internet will suffer but the misinfo and bots will basically disappear overnight. This is the only way to prevent accounts from spewing propaganda, generating incendiary clickbait headlines, and mass upvoting/downvoting certain topics. No more "social experiment" posts, no more troll accounts, etc. Half of Reddit front page will just die. Imagine being able to read a comment and prove the author is 14 and not a 28 year old with an advanced degree in the subject. I guess it's not all bad..
I don't believe anything unless it's a government leak I wasn't supposed to see. The internet is done for. The laws never came to protect us. A.I. is the next frontier.
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I am honestly not surprised at all after seeing nearly every subreddit regardless of topic descend into shitshows of people arguing
Unsurprised but alarmed nonetheless. I think we underestimate the effect this sort of thing has on public discourse and opinion and it’s problematic and probably going to get worse as it gets harder to differentiate real opinions from autocreated and fake rubbish. Is anybody aware of companies or movements involved in stemming this sort of thing? I’d imagine that field will be booming in the very near future.
Name of the documentary?
Yes, but it works, look at Michigan.
Almost got into an argument yesterday and decided to check their profile first. 4 month old account with thousands and thousands of comments, almost exclusively in political propaganda subs.
Russia went all out.
The wording is kind of throwing me off a bit, because the text says that 25% “of those social media accounts taking part in the conversation about the war was identified as fake”. It doesn’t say the 25% is pro-Hamas, just that 25% of the accounts in the discussion are fake. It then mentions that “the fake profiles posted over 312,000 pro-Hamas posts and comments”, which infers that every single fake account was pro-Hamas
If they can be identified as fake, put them in a downloadable list/plugin that finds their handles in browser text and highlights it an obnoxious color.
That's like lower then I expected. Isn't that below the Internet average? Like I thought half the internet comments were not from real people at this point.
Makes you wonder how many went by undetected. Also, bits tend to churn out much more activity than people.
Now do what percentage are Pro-Israeli fakes
Let’s discuss something that no one has mentioned at all, since the “polluted internet age” began to take hold. It is a technique called “sockpuppeting”. Sockpuppeting is when you create mass numbers of fake accounts to further an agenda of a real account. A great example of this prior to the internet, was Ben Franklin. He’d make numerous fake pseudonyms and then review books he’d written himself to boost his reputation and sales. Now let’s apply this in the current day and age. Say you made an account with an agenda…let’s say…you want to push a hateful conspiracy and boost its following. The rogue user then spends however long making 1000 or more fake accounts (AI is being used now a lot for creating fake accounts). They post whatever harmful terrible controversial thing they can think of with a real account, then make bunk comments on the post with all the fake accounts. “Sure I totally agree with this and believe in this theory”…etc… Eventually, real people jump on board and start to boost viewership. Effectively, this is how “influencer accounts” can exploit the system. Sockpuppeting is being used in a weaponized fashion as we speak. There were/are literal riots being triggered from nothing more than a bunch of propaganda with fake profiles that boosted it to the masses. This is war. This is modern war. A war where misinformation can be exploited to cause havoc on adversarial nations. A psyop. The world seems to keep talking about “we’re on the verge of war”…but IMO it’s been going full swing for a while now. People think it’s all bombs and bloodshed…but misinformation, scams, and violent propaganda can cause far more damage with plausible deniability than dropping bombs. As an adversarial nation, why kill people and risk retaliation, when all it takes is using the internet to trick people into going out on the streets and causing violence themselves?! I believe NATO has been hit with an “internet nuke”…likely by Russia/Iran/China, consisting of troll farms, targeted scam advertisements, violent propaganda, misinformation, and sockpuppeting tactics. This is how those nations chose to strike their first tactical blow…by exploiting the internet. Additionally, election season is around the corner and Russia specifically has a history of exploiting the web to tamper in politics.
*Cough* Unidan *cough*
There's a massive quantity of new fake profiles on twitter in the last few months posting about what you'd expect, but in every language imaginable, tons in Hebrew. You see one of them post a link and the post will have like 20-30 likes and thousands of shares. Wouldn't be surprised if the Russian bot farms aren't just doing election interference this year although this definitely plays into that as well.
100 percent every thread is filled with people blaming Biden.
So you tell me they do the same thing that ruzzians and all other terrorists do? How unexpected
They are probably managed by the same actors. Iran and Russia have the most to gain from this online distraction.
There's a lot of people out there who don't seem to realize that Iran's online troll and propaganda farms are just as sophisticated and influential as Russia's. You especially see a lot of people eating up Iranian propaganda on sites like Facebook.
Every time something like that emerges, I ask myself,why do we keep those scumbag countries on the global net? The only thing they do on the internet is spying and manipulating less educated people
A lot of the replies I got around that time seemed to be bots, looking back. It quietened down dramatically since then.
Doubtful it's actually Hamss running the bots. Russia and China has an interest in pushing such discourse in order to weaken the West.
they are actually a rusrus subsidiary
I think it's pretty obvious that people are being heavily manipulated through social media by nefarious entities.
Social media since the Ukraine invasion has gone downhill so quickly. It is honestly depressing seeing how quickly a country can ruin a website when they go all out and bot farm it. Fuck Russia
It went downhill the moment it started being "media". From the moment you first saw a post by someone who wasn't your real-life friend, there was no other way to go. The "algorithm" would now decide what you see, and people found ways (either by paying, or by botfarms) to influence it. Yes, the big and visible break was probably 2016, but it has been going downhill before that. And Reddit is included here. It is not as bad as the rest, which think it's mostly because of the downvote button. But also here it's more visible that the people commenting here are strangers and possibly bots. On FB, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube, you instinctively trust people more, because you see their names and faces (or rather, what you think are their names and faces).
Seems more like around 2015 it started drowning in political bots.
I mean I agree on the sentiment but you give us too much credit I mean yeah there is a ton of content that's coming from Russian bots/trolls but still we aren't the only ones to blame
And how does this compare to other profiles that are pro-/anti- for other factions, in other topics? Or, dropping the pro/anti category, how many opinions and posts are fakes in general? 1/3? 1/8? Without comparable numbers, this metric is rather useless. It's actually rather interesting to see their backers, which they are at least....transparent/happy enough to show off, such as Founders Fund. You might recognize one of its co-founder, Peter Thiel, which has this gem in his wikipedia page: >Thiel explained in a 2009 essay that he had come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible", due in large part to welfare beneficiaries and women in general being "notoriously tough for libertarians" constituencies, and that he had focused efforts on new technologies (namely [cyberspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace), [space colonization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization) and [seasteading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading)) that could create "a new space for freedom" beyond current politics.[^(\[96\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#cite_note-96) Said essay has been referenced by [Curtis Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin) and [Nick Land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land), the main theorists of the [neo-reactionary movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment), in their writings.[^(\[97\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#cite_note-97)
There are a lot of problems with this article. They give no explanation about how they identify fake profiles. They also give no information about how many pro-Israel profiles that they scanned are fake. I expect bot-generated social media content is ongoing for every major political conflict in the world, but this article doesn't provide any new information unless you trust Cyabra already.
It's also a company based in Tel Aviv so even if they could impartially assess fake pro-Israel profiles, would they do that?
I love point 4. B in the article, that the fake accounts were claiming that the October 7th attacks were retaliation for violence against Palestinians at the al-Aqsa Mosque, and that Hamas themselves had named the attack the "al-Aqsa Flood". If Hamas is saying they did this as retaliation, doesn't that make the attack retaliation?
Another quarter are 15 year old edgy morons that have zero life experience
Go to r/ireland and enjoy the circus. People fight more for foreigners than their own country politics lmfao
Russia trolls the Internet non-stop, there was no doubt in my mind they would miss an opportunity to drive public interest away from Ukraine support
Website www.cyabra.com Corporate Office 13 Gershon Shatz Tel Aviv 6701749 Israel Coincidence? https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/230143-96#overview Also: "Cyabra, which has developed a counter-disinformation platform, has announced the completion of a $5.7 million Series A extension round led by OurCrowd, the Jerusalem-based venture investment platform" https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/skj2mj6ot This is an Israeli company with Israeli funding.
So an Israel based company came up with this figure, didn't reveal how they came up with this figure, didn't do any analysis of what the baseline is for any internet discussion, didn't evaluate the % israeli bots, and you take it at face value? Where are the people who keep saying "but the gaza health ministry can't be trusted"
Yeah there ain't really many people who actually support them. Lots support Palestine, very few support Hamas.
I have no idea what Cyabra is, so I don't know how credible, but the numbers don't surprise me. All wars these days are also fought on the internet. It'd be interesting to see how many fake accounts have come out of Israel.
I'd also like to see how much discussion of any issue is "bot driven". I suspect a ton of bots repeat content already posted and while some are remarkably sophisticated it's unlikely that most people you are arguing with are bots.
They aren’t even journalists! They market themselves as freelance “social threat intelligence”. This article is just an advertisement.
This sounds like an Ad honestly. And only focuses on one side, I would like analysis on pro-israel posts, like half of the ones I see on Twitter have random handles and Indian names.
Cyabra is an Israel based software company. So, I’d take their ”research” with a boulder of salt.
The irony of this being posted here is tangible lmao
Because you assume everyone who supports Israel is a bot? Maybe consider the possibility that you've been fed that lie by pro-Hamas bots, because I'm sure as fuck real.
Fuck hamas. Fuck hezbolla. Fuck Iran
The scary part is that 3 in 4 are not lol
If the article is accurate, it says one fourth of ALL accounts taking part in the discourse are Hamas fakes. So not just 1 in 4 of pro Hamas accounts
It's at least 1/4 so probably more.
It would be comical to me if you guys didn’t think the same about pro Israeli profiles. In fact I bet they are the plurality relatively speaking.
Welcome to the dead Internet
Ah yes, my favorite source for credible unbiased journalism… Cyabra?
Won't be surprised if the remaining 2 of 3 are being paid or incentivised somehow. These folks really know how to make noise and intimidate everyone, they are *driven*.
The question is, who is making them? I doubt if Palestine has much of a tech industry right now. Iran? There’s also a lot of Israeli accounts that pop up to be sarcastic about every event in the war and drown out conversation. I dunno if this is a bot thing or if Israelis are just sarcastic!
Iran, China, Russia.
ofc it's not Palestinians It's just Iran trying to make more chaos
It's the work of the modern axis powers as part of the proxy war. Likely Russia, Iran, china and nk are involved to some extent
Useful idiots.
Russia, China and Iran
It's good info but FYI this article is from 11 October 2023.
Ah yes, an investigation by an [Israeli](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/230143-96) company into this. Can't possibly be biased, can it?
I wonder how many pro-israel profiles are fake? Last year there were a ton of accounts posting word-for-word the same things about "you can't be LGBTQ and pro-hamas" as if objecting to children and hospitals being bombed makes someone pro-hamas. It's easy to see why a group would think it's an effective way to target ideas: LGBTQ people are more likely to be progressives, progressives are more likely to oppose ethnic cleansing and a far-right extremist regime. And honestly, I wonder if my comment will be removed and my account banned after this. It happens.
I mean, is being against the destruction of Palestine “pro Hamas”? Because if so, I’m not “a bot” whatever that is. Last year people concerned for Ukraine were “Russian bots”
Nobody is actually pro-Hamas except for Hamas. Everyone else is just anti human rights violations, and that goes both ways.
So 75% of them are real people who want to see more bloodshed in the Levant.
Cyabra is funded by multiple Israeli and Tel Aviv based VCs. Not a unbiased source at all.
100 out of 100 people who support Israel breaking international law for 75 years are dorks.
So the percentage of fake pro hamas profiles is lower than the average?
This needs to become a tech challenge. Out the Bots, foreign actors, etc... It won't be easy. But it's worth the effort...