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Tag Archive for twitter

On the internet, no one knows you’re a bot….

March 11, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on On the internet, no one knows you’re a bot….

 

This is what a graph of 8,000 fake Twitter accounts looks like

I will go so far as to say that this is a pervasive problem.  Not the idea of anonymity, but rather this type of abuse of anonymity.   Twitter is the most obvious place to find these kinds of networks of imaginary followers, but it’s far from the only place.  Automated systems can (and have) been built to boost ratings for You Tube videos, dog-pile comment sections, adjust app rankings, you name it, on the internet, there seems to be a bot for it.

The thing is, nobody *really* wants to look closely at those numbers.  Anyone with a million followers on Twitter is not going to be interested in figuring out what percent of those are real and what percent are bots.  The paycheck is in the aggregate, in being able to sell to advertisers or throw your weight around.  So it behooves those bots to follow your lead.  The people who run those networks of bots need them to be valuable enough to not be run off, so they re-tweet, they signal boost, the amplify the signal of whomever they follow.

They don’t think, they don’t have morals, they don’t care, they just copy.  In doing so, they can give a megaphone to a great cause or a sh*tty one.  They can run people entirely off the internet forever, or draw eyeballs to a situation that needs to be discovered.

But in order to determine just how much of that signal-bump is real, you have to dig into it.  Data-mining is the only way to try to figure out where the real influencers are versus the ones that are just digital myna-birds.

The Trolls are in the Uncanny Valley

September 16, 2013 People, Uncategorized Comments Off on The Trolls are in the Uncanny Valley

It’s popping up more and more in the common parlance, this idea of the “uncanny valley”.  Right now you think of it as a point where a person/living creature looks real, but something about it gives you the creeps, there is a bit missing that tells you that whatever it is isn’t alive.

I’ve started running across this more and more IRL, not so much in robot-analogues, but in RSS feeds and robo-calls.  You know when you get the recorded message from your credit card company and it *sounds* like a real person, but after a few responses you get shuttled to a real human and you can suddenly tell the difference?  You get it in online chat assistance as well, some of the companies seem to have a low-rent “Alice” style AI asking you questions so you can get directed to the proper individual/department.

And now, recently, I’ve started to run across this in blogs.  I have a couple that I follow on a semi-regular basis.  They deliver a copy of the new blogpost directly to my email whenever it goes up.  Which should be great right?  I never miss a post.

But having it come to your email causes a bit of a disconnect, especially if you are following someone fairly colloquial, who addresses their blogs directly to the members of the audience.  When it shows up in your email, it feels like she/he is speaking directly to YOU, rather than posting to the internet.  It feels…  It feels a bit creepy.  Especially when you pop over to the blog site itself and realize that, whatever response you might have posted, it’s going to be one in several hundred at best.  So that whatever response you might have had, you’re still just a fan with no actual connection to the poster.

I do wonder if this might be where some of the rabid fan hate comes from, this kind of text-based uncanny valley.  With increasingly rare exception, blogs are a monologue.  They are a writer speaking to the void.  Sure, you have some bloggers who make contact in the comments, but not terribly often.  So when you have a fan who feels they have made a one-on one connection, but when they attempt to interact through the comments system, or by tweeting, or FBing or instagramming, or whatever the point of contact is, they get lost in the noise.  They fall into that uncanny valley and so they LASH OUT.  What they felt, because of the medium and the delivery, was a dialog, has turned out to be just writing on a wall.