I just ran my own Twitter account through the so called 'Botometer' used to form the conclusion of the article. Apparently I'm 4.7/5 bot.

Needless to say I didn't finish reading the article.

I've long suspected there are vast bot networks like this all over social media.

YouTube comment sections on videos related to covid are an absolute cess pit of covid deniers, misinformation spreading and conspiracy theory peddling.

I would like to think these are bots and not a very vocal but significant section of society but given recent world events I am not sure at all.

If these findings are true, this should be no surprise. If I had to guess, it's big oil that is backing the bot propaganda efforts.

I assume if there is large amounts of money or power to be made, then there are most likely some type of digital propaganda efforts ongoing. This includes oil, big tech, and political parties just to name a few.

If a semi competent programmer can make a simple twitter bot in 4 hours, imagine what a well funded organization like a multi-billion dollar company can accomplish.

People are very easy to manipulate with propaganda, especially when most of the public are not aware that their social news feeds are likely filled with disingenuous information likely from, or influenced by, carefully crafted digital propaganda campaigns

Why do we trust twitter etc? We seem to have forgot how newsgroups died. The problem is not solved yet, probably never will be solved with machine learning. ML just moves the goalposts for trusting the algorithm to trusting the employees of each company.

With articles like these, I wish they would provide examples of what they they are talking about. As in, examples of likely bots, and examples of the problematic tweets. It's not too hard to provide the evidence to really make their case.

Not to be snarky - but remove the words Bot and Climate from the title - it's cleaner.

Twitter as a platform promotes toxic social interaction, tribalism, hot takes, low effort & low impact feel good activism and rage driven mobs.

It is literally a hack on human neurochemistry that hurts individuals and society as a whole. People should be connecting with others in a rich, high context, cooperative and supportive environment - like we often have in our physical communities. That is by definition healthy and productive. I wish social platforms were the virtual version of what we have in the real world - not this twisted and broken imitation. Twitter is the worst but that doesn't mean any of the other forums are much better. HN is often ok - but has its flaws too.

Tldr everyone thinks everyone is a bot AND there actually are bots too. That's because twitter is virtual heroin and it is hurting us by design. :(

I choose 4 of my followers that I did not agree ideological and surely their Botometer score was higher than 4.0

Maybe people I disagree they have same arguments and are considered bots?

Or they just parrot same things?

And Scientific American is a major source of politicized science.

How could someone possibly label posts correctly if they don't actually know what accounts are bots.

Seems like the training data was selected to aid the answer they were looking for.

You have to remember people that believe their point if view is correct tend to share more and comment more so other people know they are misinformed.

The Botometer is a non-explainable ML model, not a scale or a photodetector, so I'm not convinced it's actually valid to use it for this kind of study. Did the researchers verify that "spreads climate disinformation" is not itself a factor in the Botometer classification?

“Bot” is the new “square” — just a generic insult for people you don’t like. I, a meatspace human, have been called a “Russian bot” when I disagreed with liberals and “Leftist bot” or similar when I disagreed with Trumpists.

Honestly a lot of what I use Twitter for is stock alerts and giveaways. It’s a crap platform for anything else

The problem of addressing global warming is very much one about persuasion. That means getting beyond people's tribal defences, which are a big part of climate change denial. Disinformation campaigns play a significant role, but the reason the disinformation is so effective is it plays into people's confirmation bias which is driven by perceived threats to their status in society. They see this liberalism as threatening, of which anthropogenic global warming is a part, and reject it outright, willing to accept any information that confirms their prior emotional decision.

I believe that we need a Greta Thunberg-like figure who is conservative-leaning on literally every major topic of political contention, except believes that anthropogenic climate change is real and we should take significant action to mitigate it, and then we need the media and entertainment industries to prop them up as virtuous. People's instinctive defences will be lowered and we will be surprised at how easily people's minds can be changed.

youtube is infested with bots

For the millionth time: the number of bots tweeting about something doesn't imply a lot of people are actually seeing the tweets.

Also, afaik all the botometers are crap, so studies based on them are also crap.

Or the current cohort of climate-change policies are deeply unpopular, including among the educated and well-informed.

There are climate-change policies that are not deeply unpopular but it seems the powers that be are not interested in them.

Anyone remember the late 90s when Scientific American didn't publish clickbait?

Oh no better make the SPLC in charge of banning people for wrongthink now.

Just uninstall Twitter. Easy.

I tried to read the paper but I need to pay €45 for it. Thanks but no thanks.

Once you call climate change an 'existential crisis', you've pretty much lost your sane audience.

Yes, people labeling real people as bots so that they can disregard their viewpoints. Mostly it's democrats / liberals who do this. Oh, you support republican policies? You must be a Russian bot! Oh, you are skeptical of climate change? You're a bot!