Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I can tell you Twitter took the not question seriously. I have only used twitter once when my company had a notice board you needed to tweet to, over 7 years ago.

After musk started talking about bots, I started getting a ungodly amount of twitter emails asking me to sign in and see watt my friends are doing ect. Over 10 a day for the last month or so.

My email is literally filled with twitter emails trying to activate my inactive account to temporary inflate their numbers.

Musk didn't have buyers remorse, we entered a huge market crash in the middle of the deal, so twitter was not worth nearly as much. Likely worth around $15 USD per share.

Everyone knows twitter is majority bots, gpt influence accounts. Musk was using that angle because they would never admit to it publicly as it would likely have stock or legal issues.

He likely still wants to but twitter at the current market value, not yesterdays current value.



>My email is literally filled with twitter emails trying to activate my inactive account to temporary inflate their numbers.

Big if true


I just went and double checked, 4 emails a day for the last month ( not 10). All the same email suggesting I login.

I have not logged into twitter since 2016, no friends and no followers. Just set up for my company noticeboard.


> Everyone knows twitter is majority bots, gpt influence accounts

You are writing fan-fiction, not making an argument.


Most of social media is PR companies running bot farms, this has been the case for many years. Especially around African elections (well studied) or large social issues ( Johnny deep court case )

My country is notability bad they close the comment section so real accounts can't out comment the bot accounts, our government has social media influence programmers running this, people I know. ( small country )

They use gpt 2 to generate around 100 curated comments for each news article, You can typically tell by going into their account and seeing when they joined and friend count ect. However recently they started hiring normal people to comment.

This has been the PR industry for at least 4 years.


You have provided no evidence.


https://www.skynettoday.com/overviews/misinfo

"There has been a 150% increase in countries using organised social media manipulation campaigns over the last two years." [University of Oxford]

https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/entertainment/amber-heard-...

"A new survey has proved a large number of Amber Heard's Twitter support is coming from "fake" accounts."

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/large-p...

"Nearly 11 per cent of all Twitter accounts participating in discourse surrounding Johnny Depp's defamation trial"

https://democracyinafrica.org/cambridge-analytica-africa-kno...

https://m.dw.com/en/dictators-in-africa-using-social-media-t...


Their was a guy on here a few weeks ago that made 10% of all comments on 4chan using three bot accounts over the span of a month, running gpt-j fine tuned.

You need so remarkably few people/PR agencies to outnumber active humans.

Its such a problem creating a social media account is actually quite hard, often you need a phone number and a separate IP address.


You have provided no evidence.


https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/researchers-fin...

Honestly this is such a common thing in PR it's silly posting more examples, for social issues and elections most content is bots.

The only thing new is gpt which allows huge scale.

Where groups like this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

No longer have to hire people to make comments they can just shotgun influence with GPT type language models.

This video is has pretty good sources

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl0TrA8oXXo

It only talks about politics, but the same campaigns exist for other topics like reputation management and social issues.


> https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/researchers-fin...

This doesn't say anything about the concentration or percentage of bots on Twitter.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

Neither does this.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Xl0TrA8oXXo

Nor this. Nobody said bots aren't on twitter. What's under discussion is whether or not the bots make up a large percentage of users on twitter.

> Honestly this is such a common thing in PR it's silly posting more examples That's kind of hand-wavey. I'd appreciate more examples.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: