I've investigated claims of Russian-controlled political bots on Twitter several times. The stories always collapse when inspected carefully. Indeed it's common sense it would be this way because most of these stories appear to blithely assume Russia has built bots that can pass the Turing test, which is implausible.
I don't believe there is any need to censor such "bots" because they don't exist. Instead they're the creation of:
• Bad, agenda driven journalism.
• Bad, agenda driven academics who are looking for topics to write papers about that might have social impact.
• A desire to de-humanise and silence people with conservative opinions.
Clear examples of these three are described in my essay here:
"Just go to a random [Trump] tweet, and just look at the followers. They'll all be like, guns, God, 'Merica, like, and with the American flags... like who says that? Who talks like that? It's for sure a bot."
Obviously this Twitter engineer knows full well they aren't bots. What he means is, we ban accounts we think are bots without worrying about it, so if I can create a confusion between "bots" and "conservative Trump supporters" then maybe they'll get kicked off Twitter more easily.
I don't believe there is any need to censor such "bots" because they don't exist. Instead they're the creation of:
• Bad, agenda driven journalism.
• Bad, agenda driven academics who are looking for topics to write papers about that might have social impact.
• A desire to de-humanise and silence people with conservative opinions.
Clear examples of these three are described in my essay here:
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
The third is also quite clearly seen in the recorded conversations with Twitter employees, one of whom said:
https://twitter.com/project_veritas/status/99675939690561945...
"Just go to a random [Trump] tweet, and just look at the followers. They'll all be like, guns, God, 'Merica, like, and with the American flags... like who says that? Who talks like that? It's for sure a bot."
Obviously this Twitter engineer knows full well they aren't bots. What he means is, we ban accounts we think are bots without worrying about it, so if I can create a confusion between "bots" and "conservative Trump supporters" then maybe they'll get kicked off Twitter more easily.