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0 pointsemodendroket8y ago0 comments

Certainly people on both sides were accused of that but the idea that Black Lives Matter was actually just a Russian plot is frankly pretty repellent, and that paper in the end just defers to Twitter's ideas of who's a Russian troll, and how did they decide? We've seen a lot of really shoddy work in this department.

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MBCook8y ago

No, I’m not saying it was a Russian plot at all. It’s a real thing.

I’m saying they seized on it as something they could use to push division between people.

mike_hearn8y ago

I find that incredibly unlikely. I used to work in bot fighting on Google. Claims of Russian bots on Twitter and especially claims by academics are invariably riddled with methodological errors that render the "research" useless. I wrote about this problem here:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

These studies are seeing patterns in noise. That's why the narrative changed over time - it used to be "Russian twitter bots got Trump elected!" and now it's "they're supporting both sides .... to sow division!".

The former claim was extremely implausible but at least it had some sort of inner logic to it, in that Trump was more friendly to Russia than Clinton. The new spin doesn't even make logical sense. However it makes perfect sense if you're just picking random Twitter users and trying to explain their behaviour through the prism of some convoluted conspiracy.

hackinthebochs8y ago

>the new spin doesn't even make logical sense.

Sure it does. The appearance of a wide division in our political landscape leads to a wide division in our political landscape. People tend to "pick sides" in political fights and when something gives the appearance of a serious political dispute, people are motivated to pick sides and entrench their opinions. This is in keeping with getting Trump elected, as a large part of his support was due to the fear created by the appearance of growing civil unrest. None of this is particularly hard to understand.

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emodendroketOP8y ago

The article linked is excellent. Thanks.

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