The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. She makes that inference very quickly, and from then on, they are just referred to as "bots". I am 100% sure there are bots, but I am highly skeptical that Yang Gang is the worst offender here or stands out in any way compared to other campaigns. In fact a quick check on twitteraudit.com tells that he might be better than others, although I don't know how good their fake follower detection works.
I have been following this campaign since a few months, and I can attest that it has pulled in a large number of voters who were not politically inclined, the members are very passionate, and also that Yang Gang is quite cliquey and live in an echo chamber. Given those facts, I won't be surprised if those accounts were mostly real people.
> The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey.
The sad truth is that the vast majority of bots are extremely unsophisticated, they don't even try to hide their IP address through a proxy server, and basic tools like Google Analytics can identify this. In Google Analytics, just find the "Network" section, and see how much of your traffic is from "amazon web services", and just block all of it.
It may not block sophisticated scrapers, and it could potentially harm legitimate users (e.g., amazon based VPN services), but it's amazing how much "bot" traffic is identifiable.
The only real bot traffic that's hard to identify are actual people with machines that have been compromised.
The whole time I was reading this I was thinking that she almost certainly has my account flagged as a bot. I only use Twitter for infosec and politics and lately about all I do is RT Yang (and Zach) tweets.
> “ For example, my bot tracker focuses on bots that post on average 70 times a day or more. While a human being can certainly post to Twitter a hundred times in a day, it’s unlikely that a real human being would post a hundred times a day every day without some kind of automation helping out.”
If that sentence is correct, you’re unlikely going to get flagged by the bot.
> The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey.
Multiple accounts with the same name, image, and profile, coupled with radical changes in the types of content posted, and also with superhuman (clearly automated) posting rates? What more evidence do you need?
I didn't say there weren't any bots. But the article portrays Yang's followers as somehow being more full of bots than others. There is no evidence for that.
HN tends to be a more technical place. So when we have two competing narratives and analyses people become suspicious (high number or retweets, high number of likes). When one analysis basically characterizes bots similarly to how the president tweets, people get suspicious. When one analysis characterizes bots as having expected behavior of users (Yangers having connections to MAGA, which was a MAJOR part of her analysis), people become suspicious. When the author says that they only identified 3 bots from Trump's twitter account, one becomes suspicious. When you link to Mother Jones as your coup de ta and the article doesn't characterize your link's words, people become suspicious.
> The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey.
I had the same reaction. I follow all of the candidates on twitter. Most of the campaigns are periodic quite frankly boring posts by the candidates. Yang lets his gang do most of the tweeting and he retweets their posts. In person he does the same thing. There is a lot of audience participation during his speeches. This makes his campaign more lively.
The reason why I doubt they are bots is that the tweets are intelligent. About a week ago I tweeted something about Yang that was factually incorrect. Someone tweeted back within minutes and very politely corrected what I said. We had a few tweet exchanges then someone else jumped in and said that my confusion was something that they would take back to the campaign. A few days later Yang mentioned my confusion in one of his interviews. I am not exactly sure if this was a coincidence...
Bernie and warren have multiple official accounts. At least two I know of for each.
@berniesanders: 69% | 7,052,953 Real | 3,124,469 Fake
@sensanders: 74% | 6,480,666 Real | 2,171,758 Fake
@senwarren: 68% | 3,668,103 Real | 1,694,620 Fake
@ewarren: 84% | 2,966,118 Real | 560,776 Fake
So cumulatively the scores are more like:
Bernie: 71% Total non-fake followers: 8,237,392
Warren: 79% Total non-fake followers: 4,939,601
At the end of the day the percentage/ratio of real to fake doesn't matter. What matters is the REAL people following a candidate, Besides trump, Bernie beats all others.
Disclaimer: My account looks like a Bernie Bot, but my followers real % is 85 which actually surprised me lol. I'd support Yang or Tulsi. Probably not anybody else running. I'm an independent, and align more with leftist/socialist libertarianism (not the GOP think-tank ran version of American libertarianism). I don't just vote for any 'blue' because they're blue. I don't do party politics.
I do find it odd, though, that this piece calls out the person with the lowest bot count. Why target a specific person if your concern is bots? Why target the person with the least amount of bots? It makes the post feel disingenuous.
If we trust twitter audit over her (which tbf I don't see any good reason to trust one over another) then her piece seems at best naive and at worse a hit piece.
Knowing Yang Gang, and knowing that there's a lot of people turning from Trump (they literally pride themselves on it [0,1,2,3,4], I can go on pretty easily with a lot like [2]), it makes me inclined to believe that the analysis is naive (I'm hesitant to call this a hit piece) because she mentioned the suspicion of MAGA and YG. MAGA and YG connections makes a lot of sense if you just checked out the subreddit for ten minutes.
The "everyone is a bot" thing is insanely stupid. It's not just happening with Yang, it happens with Trump, Bernie, and Tulsi (generally the others don't get accused.) Some people just can't imagine a world where so many people disagree with them that they make up reasons why it's happening. Yes bots exist, but one of the greatest tricks Russia has pulled is making people believe they are bigger and more powerful than they are.
This is an interesting post if you also follow the subreddit for Yang[0].
There are a lot of people there that created Twitter accounts just to follow Yang and participate in those polls about who is more popular. So when the author mentions the creation of new accounts when Yang started, it actually doesn't surprise me. The campaign is very technocentric after all. Also, these people (a lot of them "true believers" types) do post A LOT on Twitter and get involved in any mention of Yang (go check any YouTube video about Yang). You have to "yang" everyone that you can. It is a really weird community to be honest. But one where they are actively telling one another to create social media accounts to promote Yang. What this post really tells me is that it is hard to distinguish real people from bots. Here's a post even about YouTube comments[1].
Seems (to me) to be similar to the Ron Paul bots (fanatics, I should say, because they certainly weren't mechanical war-bots; They seemed like what the right calls NPCs these days, but they were just so ... into it! 24/7! It's actually kind of nice to see groups of new/young people get excited about politics - I think they might learn a lot through the process (maybe)) all over Reddit in 2008 (not just /r/politics, but they were everywhere), esp. since that also included all of the influx of rapidly migrating Diggers.
Maybe it's not the same, but those folks were all in on the Paul Train (or whatever they called it). They were eggcited!
That's unfortunate. Yang himself isn't very dogmatic / ideological. But his supporters are very passionate about his candidacy. So i can see your bad experiences happening. I support Yang; not sure if i would call myself Yang Gang...
For me personally, Yang is the first political candidate who sees and reasons about the world in a similar way to myself. He's a systems thinker. Everything in society is connected and to correctly address issues you have to understand how one component will influence another. That is very exciting for me!
He has a lot of policies, i don't agree with all of them but i'm a lot more aligned with him than any other candidate. Left or right.
I've seen so many ...."Bernie's people are horrible" posts on the Yang subreddit which has turned me off the yang gang. Yang is still my 2nd though, because unlike Yang Gang folks, I don't base my support on the followers of a candidate cause that's just lunacy. I've chimed in on a few to set the record
A. we're not all that bad.
B. You can't blame us for what gets banned by mods of a reddit when they use bots to do so.
C. Many of us would support Yang if he were on top or higher than Bernie in polls. But we want a chance at winning, and Bernie has a strong grassroots.
D. Whether the online real/fake people on reddit/twitter are 'toxic' in your opinion doesn't even matter isn't relative because THEY aren't Bernie. They could even be bots or trolls. Listen to the candidate and make your decision from that, whether they're a good or bad person.
> I've seen so many ...."Bernie's people are horrible" posts on the Yang subreddit which has turned me off the yang gang.
Do please remember that the subreddit is not a full expression of Yang's support, as in it is biased towards people who are active on Reddit. The number of anti-bernie posts on there are indeed very annoying, and the quality has indeed gone downhill as the number of subscribers has increased (which is a very common, often repeated pattern, e.g. eternal september)
> C. Many of us would support Yang if he were on top or higher than Bernie in polls. But we want a chance at winning, and Bernie has a strong grassroots.
This is exactly why we need Ranked Choice Voting (or another similar non-FPTP system like Approval Voting), so you can actually vote your true preference. An alternative voting system is a concept that I've personally supported for many years and is one of Andrew Yang's policies: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/rankedchoice/ which is one of the reason's that I support him.
>I've seen so many ...."Bernie's people are horrible" posts on the Yang subreddit which has turned me off the yang gang
Well, Bernie's subreddit literally bans every single person who makes a post containing the word "Yang". They even remove him from the poll results. Certainly doesn't give any socialist dictatorship vibes (that, and his support of Venezuela).
Come on. People will get upset at you for speaking like this on the Yang subreddit, expect the same here. It doesn't matter if another group is more toxic or not. It isn't a competition about who can be more toxic. We say "Humanity First". If you really do support Yang, stand by that. You're talking to another human and you're also representing Yang. Be kind. We're running a campaign about unification, so expect to be called out if you're causing division.
I'm not American so I don't really support any candidate. I have my own preferences, and neither is Yang my preferred candidate, nor is Bernie my most disliked candidate.
And I had the same experience with Hillary, yet I still voted for her (not as enthusiastically as I'd have liked) because I don't want to let a bunch of jerks make my mind up for me.
If nobody existed but a Yang Gang member and Bernie - could they really admit he wasn't authentic and wanted to make the world better?
Is he corrupt?
Is he in this for himself?
To enrich his businesses per se?
Sell more books?
Has he changed his message to win? Or is he consistent?
I mean look at the candidate. Sure the community can get toxic like a rivalry highscool football game with pranks and shit, but in the end. Are the players really evil, or do their fans just go way out of proportions and get way too overly excited and/or angry when things don't go their way?
> Has he changed his message to win? Or is he consistent?
Serious question, why is this a metric?
Changing your mind should be a good thing. I find this odd coming from a tech and more science oriented website. I'm not saying that we should just encourage people to change on a whim but changing positions because 1) you're presented with new evidence and/or 2) the people you are representing have changed positions, this should be respected. There's a difference between changing positions and feigning belief. It is especially bad if you feign a position and work against that position (I can respect you if you even if disagree with a position but work for it because your constituents hold said belief). #1 is obvious why it is good (because we're human and fuck up). #2 is good because you're adapting to what those that you represent believe.
I for one DO NOT want a president that is going to double down on bad beliefs and not change beliefs as either culture changes (e.g. Obama changed positions with gay marriage as the US culture changed) or because they are presented with new evidence. These things should be regarded as a good trait.
tldr: why is consistency such a highly regarded metric?
> Serious question, why is this a metric? Changing your mind should be a good thing. ... why is consistency such a highly regarded metric?
It's not about consistency, it's about being right consistently. Unfortunately, most decisions whether made by an individual, CEO, or politician have to be made with imperfect information. The data just isn't there to do a full analysis. In data's absence, when you need to make a decision, you rely on instinct and foundational principles.
Of course, when the data becomes available you can adjust, as anyone should. But when you have good enough instincts or principles, you can operate effectively without good data, and that makes for a good leader.
Does that even exist? We're not talking about something that can be scientifically modeled here. There's always going to be a "better" answer post hoc. Like you're suggesting. So it seems like a weird metric still. I think you're agreeing too. But it takes more critical thinking to judge someone on the decisions they made given the data available to them vs judging them based on decisions made from a post hoc analysis. The latter is always easier, you have (at least partially) the answer in front of you.
I think it’s a balancing act of adjusting your position based on new information without straying from your core principles. This is most definitely an art more than a science and requires extremely effective communication to explain why you’re making a better decision vs. flip flopping or poll chasing.
I like Yang, but I've never been one that idolizes another person. I would 100% vote for Yang above another candidate (I'm actually even surprised HN, which is pretty pro UBI, isn't Yang Gang), but I've never been passionate about another person. I don't understand people that will move to another state to campaign for a candidate. I've never been part of that kind of movement before, and in it I don't understand it. So it is weird to me. I will describe people in Bernie's camp, Trump's, and others the same way. Fanatics confuse me in the same way. I do also have a religious past and it reminds me of the fanaticism of that as well. But we're all humans and see through different lenses. It just is a lens that is odd to me.
I understand that perspective, but I hope you can see that unlike a religion, politics, especially in USA is through people. People need to push a specific candidate because they represent a vision for yourself and the people you love.
One key thought experiment I like to do is to project out a behavior pattern for all people and then asking whether that would be a positive or negative for yourself and society. If everyone were to campaign and push for the ideas they care about, I do believe that would result in a more informed and better society. Through the marketplace of ideas, we can fight through the differences and hopefully create better policy and have better leaders execute on our future.
I think for a lot of people, taking action to affect change for the community/society you live in is very natural. On a small scale that can be something like running for class president or joining your HOA. At a larger scale, politics is where change happens.
If you believe in a set of principles, it is sometimes worth your personal time, effort, and money to affect change. Hopefully you can see that from their perspective they are about their own future and this is the most effective way to impact that prospective future.
I see that perspective and appreciate the comment. To be more clear, the weird thing to me is the __degree__ of fanaticism. I understand being passionate, there are many things I'm passionate about. But there are very few things where I would drop everything and campaign for someone. This REALLY reminds me of religion (I left a religion that sends people to go knock on peoples' doors for 2 years of their lives).
I also think politics (I'm not sure if it has always been that way, but I don't remember it like this when I was younger) has a lot of parallels to religion and that similarity is growing. I do actually believe this is rooted in the growing partisanship. That political answers are not "best solution vs a different solution" but "good vs evil". Partisanism relies on good vs evil. There's a John Cleese skit about extremism that always makes me laugh[0].
To take the religion + politics thing further, consider that the president is hailed as being sent by God, and is surrounded by Christian Dominionists that are actively trying to apply make the U.S. a theocracy.
That's bound to stir up some passion on both sides, being that the stakes are rather high.
I have always found this type of behavior perplexing as well. I had a Kickstarter campaign a few years ago and one of my backers latched onto me like glue, he was repping and praising my product like it was god's gift to man, incessantly for weeks on end. It was flattering but also a bit confusing. I scrolled through his FB wall the other day and see that over the years he's done this pretty much over everything that's gained some traction in the media.
He became a "bitcoin zealot" when that was popular, he became a AI fearmongerer, now he's a Trumpian provocateur. There is no cohesion between any of these identities other than the fact that they are reflections of what's popular at any one point. To me it's facade he's constantly draping over himself but to him that is identity.
I think humans are evolutionarily tribal and naturally some members are going to be more dogmatic than others. Myself not exhibiting that behavior, it's somewhat odd to observe from the outside.
That's a lot of narrative overlaid on the data. The author even says this about Democratic politician accounts:
> All of them had bot activity of some kind. Given enough time to collect the data, bot networks would eventually appear for all of them.
I think the analysis could be very interesting but they're injecting too much personal spin on the motivations of everyone involved. Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too?
I think it would be interesting to study bots and how they intersect with media and politics in a less biased manner.
I found it was a good intro to the world of Twitter bots. I don’t use Twitter but like to read about its influence and how others are using it.
But yeah I did get the same tinge of condescension about the “sad” and “lonely” teenager Mike because he works at Taco Bell, doesn’t want to go into $100k worth of debt going to college and is following bots from campaigns she doesn’t agree with.
> He seemed lonely. Eager to please. His last video blog he announced he wasn’t going to college after all…
Like you said, what if he followed Bloomberg bots, would he be described as “sad” too.
However at the same I would have to concede that writing an unbiased article about political bots in this day and age is probably not gonna happen, either.
> Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too?
Which party do you think Yang is running for?
Anyway, the article was clearly describing as "sad" that the teenager is trying to build an online following but his "following" is just bots using him to look less like bots.
One of Yang's pitches is that he is pulling from the MAGA group. Just scroll down the subreddit [0] and you'll see tons of posts about MAGA/Republicans switching sides for Yang. If anything I'd __expect__ a real person to be more likely to be connected to both MAGA and Yang (compared to the average democratic voter). But that also makes it difficult to tell real people from bots, which is what this story is really about.
Sure but in this case it’s his adherents who are claiming to be right leaning and former MAGA supporters.
It doesn’t look good to Democrats to see memes for Yang or back to Trump so I cannot be cynical here.
edit: Because it's a bad look with Democrats to have a lot of right leaning support I take the MAGA supporters at their word. Particularly because I'm a Yang supporter and became politically disengaged after supporting Bush in my first election cycle.
Just an FYI, a lot of people that voted Trump in 2016 were big Bernie supporters. I personally know quite a few people that made this switch. Is it a surprise that the same thing is happening again?
A lot of people who voted for Trump are Bernie supporters now. It isn't surprising that people who are anti-establishment would be for Bernie. I am objecting to the casual dismissal by loneappde. It is meaningful that a large part of the population, left and right leaning, is so anti-establishment and flippant dismissal will become dangerous in another cycle or two.
Unfortunately I think I'm being mis-read and unfortunately I am blind to why. ...it happens
The teenager following the bots isn't sad because he intersects with MAGA, he's said because he's a kid working at Taco Bell who hopes to build up an online fanbase, and unbeknownst to him, all his interactions and affirmations appear to come from bot accounts.
Regardless of why the author thinks they're sad, it's a mistake to project the mental and emotional state of someone based on some facets gleaned from checking out their social media profiles. It's actually kind of creepy to focus on this individual especially since they're a teenager and aren't given a chance to rebut.
I don't see much psychoanalysis involved. I see a description of someone with dubious goals who is getting played by bots into believing they're making progress.
I wonder how many people are more of the author's mistaken bots, like Mike mentioned in the article?
If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior. Activities the author describes as bot-like to me seem like activities a noob on twitter would engage in.
Twitter itself does a lot to self-create these node clusters, with a circle jerk of recommended followers based on your activity. If you have a bunch of twitter noobs, all liking and retweeting Yang and his surrogates, they will inevitably get clustered together via twitter's own algorithms.
I think it's a mistake to assume that politically disengaged folks who would like to stay anonymous online, and are only joining a social media platform to promote their candidate or two, would behave like "real" users.
I say this as someone who converted an old twitter account from 2011 I used when I was a teenager for spam purposes, to become a Yang account. I'm sure I'm considered a bot by the author's software.
> If you were to join twitter for the purpose of campaigning, I imagine you'd have a lot of bot like behavior.
To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate. It is definitely an agenda that is pushed. Lots of new Twitter accounts that are pro Yang is not surprising if you visit the subreddit. It also shouldn't be surprising that these accounts would be associated with MAGA bots and supporters. After all, Andrew is targeting the same demographic as Trump. There's several posts a day on the yang subreddit about ex-Trump supporters turning.
All of this makes me think that it is very hard to distinguish bots from real people who are excited by the campaign.
So I fully agree with this
> I think it's a mistake to assume that politically disengaged folks who would like to stay anonymous online, and are only joining a social media platform to promote their candidate or two, would behave like "real" users.
> To add to this, that yang subreddit actively encourages people to create Twitter accounts (if you don't already have one) to participate.
Not only that, Yang ran a couple of UBI-themed contests offering a chance to win money for following and retweeting him. What better use is there for acquiring an army of fake accounts?
It’s terrifying how cheap and easy it is to masquerade as hundreds of thousands to millions of people on social media using automation, and how little social media companies are doing to stop it.
Regardless of the numbers, the stress it’s placing on discourse is devastating, and there seem to be few serious, market-driven solutions to this problem.
The growth-at-all-costs mentality has put companies like Twitter in a position where they must choose between profits and responsible community development and moderation. It’s clear which path they’ve chosen.
It's also terrifying that headlines and articles can be taken as valid. Smear articles and misleading information are troubling as well in the upcoming years.
An anonymous account is not the same thing as a bot. As acrimonious as the current state of politics is, I wouldn't blame anyone for using a pseudonym online to voice their opinion.
Touche. But you'll have to pardon me for being distrustful of anyone that walks in just to defend a politician of any kind (without hard proof, anyway).
This is understandable, but nonetheless HN guidelines ask that you suspend that distrust. Every legit account starts with a first comment, and it's natural that a person's first comment would be on a topic they feel strongly about.
You can check my comment history to verify my identity if you want someone that is defending Yang. I'm actually being vocal in this thread about Yang Gangers specifically making accounts to participate in conversations about him.
is it? don’t all twitter accounts require phone number validation? can’t twitter set a limit to 5-10 accounts per phone number? isn’t there all kind of rate limiting + captchas to creating/liking tweets?
Twitter in 2020 seems to be a seething mass of agenda driven automation. I am a Tulsi Gabbard for president supporter and am aware that 'like' counts on pro Gabbard posts appear to be regularly culled, presumably by Twitter themselves. Gabbard's team have complained loudly about this on Twitter (@CullenYossarian for example, Gabbard's press assistant).
I recently started reusing Twitter, partially to explore this election cycle and am struck by the number of dissenting tweets appended to pro Gabbard posts (Russian asset etc etc) from obviously recently created accounts with very low 'followers'. (These posters almost never create an original post but retweet other posts 'as themselves' on their main account).
If you challenge a comment, asking for proof that Gabbard is a Russian asset for example, the effect is similar to responding to a robocall, with the account suddenly being manned by a human for a few hours. There is typically a hail of abuse and denegration of the candidate, then the poster falls silent again, presumably going off duty.
Regardless of who you are rooting for in the election I find this alarming. It is very difficult to know how to go about investigating these networks and who the actors are.
The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process.
It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate. In the absence of evidence, the claim should be rejected and we should look for simpler explanations for political ills.
The more likely explanation, and the one loathed by those who still can't accept that the US elected the current president, is that things like Twitter bots and fake Facebook ads are just sideshows.
It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to. The fact that using Twitter bots hasn't caused one candidate to become the most popular doesn't seem like sufficient evidence. Perhaps he would be even less popular without the Twitter bots. And perhaps many of the other candidates are doing the same thing, but better or at a larger scale.
It's also possible (and plausible to me) that negative messages tend to be more effective than positive ones, and that sowing doubt is easier than positively convincing people. In which case it would be very hard to elevate a random candidate into a winning position, but significantly easier to harm the reputation of a rival, or to muddy the waters on issues unfavourable to your candidate.
> It seems like a pretty strange null hypothesis that people are entirely unaffected by the social media they are exposed to.
Why? When people measure how ads perform, the null hypothesis is that the ad has no effect on the behavior of the viewer. Bots are sort of like ads that look like native content.
That being said, I don't think a single data point (Yang) is enough to be conclusive, but it does change my beliefs a little bit on the effectiveness of bots.
Also, the null hypothesis is just a starting point from which you gather and analyse the data that may disprove it. There's no reason that 'X has no effect on Y' should have a privileged position in messy real-world epistemology; we don't assume that nothing causes anything in the absence of conclusive proof, we keep an open mind and make our best guess based on whatever information we have.
I don't think we should be looking for a candidate who wins on the strength of Twitter bots, that's pretty much impossible (and that's a good thing.)
Instead, we should consider the fact that all these bots make a lot of information noise and that's a problem to how we view candidates. With enough bots spamming fake articles or posting links that favor the candidate/smear his opponents, they muddy the waters and make it harder to find real information. This alone won't win anybody elections but it brings prominence to smaller candidates, makes it harder to find legitimate dirt on others (bring certain links as evidence and people dismiss them, saying 'Oh, those are part of the bot campaign'), and makes any political discussion on Twitter a horrible idea. (Whether or not I think Twitter is already a horrible place for political discussion is another matter entirely.)
I would not say Yang's campaign is struggling. He literally was an unknown guy right before this election cycle, who made a low millions from selling a test prep company and then ran a non-profit for 7 years. Never even ran for a political office before this. And he's outlasted many senators/governors.
About twitter and Yang, I created a twitter account just to follow him. Did not create any bot. And I also donated to his campaign multiple times. And I'm over 40 yrs old.
> The fact that Yang's campaign is struggling should throw cold water on the notion that this kind of thing poisons the political process.
This is not logical. "This kind of thing poisons the political process" does not come close to implying 'any candidate who engages in this kind of thing is likely to become wildly popular'. That would be an obviously crazy position, and refuting it is only useful as a way to avoid engaging with non-strawmanned concerns about social media manipulation.
even assuming that's true and all other things being equal, people passing bots off as natural users rather than clearly marking that they're bots is simply lying and detrimental to discourse if for the sole reason that these bots are being mistaken for authentic users.
Given the crude tactics outlined in this article, with accounts making 400 tweets per day in regular intervals, duplicate accounts of the same alleged person and so on I think it's pretty bad that platforms like Twitter do not pursue the issue much more agressively.
I agree and bots should be banned... Now that we're passed the perfect being the enemy of the good, I'm also quite concerned about, instead of bots, just paying some people to have your opinion - that's also a problem we're definitely going to need to address since if you subsidize the cost of living of someone who agrees with you then you can basically turn them into a 24/7 advocate for your point of view. If that person happens to live in a remote part of the third world then the actual out of pocket cost to subsidize them could be a negligible portion of your earnings.
$16.5 million raised last quarter and steadily rising polls. Dave Chappelle is doing a fundraising show at/near Iowa State in a few days. Oprah's "spiritual advisor" is helping Yang campaign.
Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit.
> $16.5 million raised last quarter and steadily rising polls.
He's been bouncing around between 2-5% in the polls since October; he's not steadily rising, he's stuck in one place.
> Still going strong after numerous candidates including senators have had to quit.
A number of the candidates that have dropped out have been consistently polling above Yang. They haven't dropped out sooner because they were doing worse, they've dropped out sooner because they have a different calculus about the value of staying in the race.
Yang isn't still going strong, he's still stuck in neutral.
Polls have outdated models that don’t accurately reflect the age of social media. Prior polling models don’t work with the changing environment. For example most the people they poll are in landlines and 65+ yrs old.
Let's not forget the media gives him dramatically less coverage, he receives less than proportional speaking time at debates, and it seems the amount of times the mess up facts about him is too high to be accidental, not to mention not even getting his picture correct and instead showing an image of some other asian.
I'm convinced that the outdated nature of polling entirely explains Biden's numbers. He appeals to clueless old people, and polling as practiced today over-samples that demographic.
I think there's a little bit of dismissal on both sides here, because people want very clear narratives about what happened. Some people feel good saying, "Trump won because people wanted him." Some people feel good saying, "Trump won because the system was hacked."
Both of those claims are simple. Either the election was a farce, or nothing is wrong and all the criticism is fearmongering. That kind of simplicity feels good.
It doesn't feel as good to say, "Trump won in part because the system was hacked, but if a bunch of people hadn't also genuinely wanted him, hacking the system would not have been enough to make him win."
People are hardwired to look for clear, easy-to-reason-about patterns or rules that they can just universally apply to every situation. Real patterns like that are rare, usually uncommon events have multiple causes. Usually reality is more complicated than we expect.
I don't think that bots/plants are as big of an issue as people say. I certainly don't think they're an existential threat to democracy. I also don't think we should ignore them, I do think they have an impact. They're one element of many that can influence an election.
I'm half convinced that the thing that broke everyone's brains is Trump handily winning the electoral college but also clearly losing the popular vote.
A lot of people still don't understand that a lot of pro Bernie people ended up voting for Trump. After the DNC stuff people went even harder for Trump. People also don't get that Trump supporters are jumping ship to support Bernie and Yang in this election (e.g. this article suggesting connection to MAGA bots is evidence that Yang Gangers are bots).
>It remains to be proven whether an armada of Twitter bots can change anyone's mind about a candidate.
If an army of Twitter bots could change voter's minds, why is it suddenly an illegitimate tactic? How is it different than any other form of political speech? Are politicians and political campaigns only dishonest when presented through new mediums?
Is this a problem with Twitter, free speech or just a timeless flaw within democracy which has been known since antiquity?
I would suggest that it is the latter. Misunderstanding the underlying principles results in the alarmist blaming of social media. This is nothing new, aside from a new opportunity to opine for regulation.
Yes, there's now been published a single poll which has him outside the MoE of zero. (Not outside the MoE of his polling average for any month since October, though, and statistically you'd expect with the number of polls at least one with him at 8% if he was just hovering at 3.5% for this long.)
While that's a landmark, I guess, it's a thin reed to ground a conclusion of any, much less rapid or exponential, progress.
6 months ago the majority of the US didn't know about Yang (or much more importantly, basic income.). If 8% of voters now know about him and this issue it's a huge win.
Fundraising numbers. Others dropping out would count as progress too I guess. Although polling is still in single digit but 5-6% is certainly progress from 2-3%.
Fundraising is just a means to get money to spend (often, ineffectively) building/maintaining support. If you are raising and spending more money and not moving the needle in the polls, that's not progress.
> Others dropping out would count as progress too I guess.
No, if the field is narrowing and you aren't getting any of the support (and your remaining competitors are) that's also the opposite of progress.
> Although polling is still in single digit but 5-6% is certainly progress from 2-3%.
It would be, if he was consistently polling at the former and previously polling at the latter. But that's not what's happened to Yang. His national polling in January has ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in December ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in November ranged from 2-5%. His national polling in October ranged from 2-5%. And the margin of error on most of the polls is in the neighborhood of ±5%.
Yang's campaign has been consistently growing and growing as other campaigns have dropped out. He raised $16.5M last quarter. Polls show him at 5%+ with an up arrow attached to it. And that's not counting that polls don't capture his base (first-time voters, independents, disaffected conservatives).
As for the article, I'll address it in another comment.
> Yang's campaign has been consistently growing and growing as other campaigns have dropped out.
His support is consistently enough nonzero across multiple polls that you can say he has some support, but it's often within the margin of error of zero on individual polls. He's not gaining enough to have a welk's chance in a supernova of winning.
On the other hand, he generally leads NY Times-endorsed Klobuchar (and yet, pollsters are less likely to include him in their polls), so there's that.
Most recent poll has Yang at 8% nationally, beating Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. And Yang has been left of several polling questions entirely (whereas Klobuchar and Buttgieg always included) and left out of several graphics on TV.
Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively.
> Most recent poll has Yang at 8% nationally, beating Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar.
Paying attention to individual polls produces more noise than useful information; you get more value (though less cherry-picking opportunities) from a poll aggregator like 538s.
But if you want to play that game, the most recent national primary poll I can find that includes Yang has him at 3%, the best recent polling was at 5% in a couple of polls about two weeks ago. [0] The only 8% for him I can find is a poll of voters under 30. [1]
> Which is to say, he has been written off prematurely and in fact is gaining massively.
No, Bloomberg—who started much later and actually is polling in the neighborhood of 8% now—is gaining massively. Yang's been bouncing around between 2-5% with no real trend since October; he's not gaining or losing anything that isn't small enough to be obscured by noise.
> Bloomberg has spent $250 million and is still trailing Yang in the latest Emerson Poll.
Bloomberg is also at over 3x Yang's support in the Ipsos poll that covers the same time as that Emerson poll, and ahead of Yang by a similar amount in most othere recent polls that are within a couple days of that Emerson poll.
Now, it could be that the Emerson poll is showing a real phenomenon that appeared suddenly and that Ipsos missed, but its vastly more likely that its just a statistical outlier blip.
Yang is often referred to as a “tech entrepreneur” but it’s practically a smear to insinuate he’s some billionaire (a common assumption). It’s more accurate to say he’s a nonprofit entrepreneur given his dot-com was a charity organizing company and his nonprofit works with startups in underserved markets.
Slightly related - Twitter still hasn't done anything about those bot accounts with fake crypto scams. Elon Musks tweets for example always have these fake crypto scam tweets at the very top often using account names of popular people. I think it's been going on for almost 2 years now if I remember right. This should be such a simply thing to take care of but for some reason, Twitter hasn't bothered.
I would love to know how many people actually fell for that. People who own bitcoin isn't your normal crowd but recent surges in the scams and hype, may have created a lot of people who are oblivious as to what bitcoin technically is but talk and broadcast it everywhere along with having invested a lot.
How many startup people have actually read “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel?
Yang has gone from 0 to 1 and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. All these articles are people who have a distorted views of reality and chalk up his support as bots in order to fit their world view. The most likely reason from my observation is bias against Asian American men in leadership positions.
Yang hasn't gone anywhere, he's been bouncing around in the same range for months with no systematic progress.
> and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer.
If he did something radical like doubling his support in Iowa in the, what, 10 days remaining, and the sources of support he gained were optimally distributed for him to move up positions, that would still only get him to fifth from his current sixth in Iowa, and he'd only be a little over half the support of #4.
I am opposed to Yang and his agenda, but I am sympathetic to his (and Yang Gangs) mistreatment.
I agree that Yang's passionate supporters grew quickly, and part of this 'bots' narrative is due to cognitive dissonance. But the 'bot' narrative is also a tactic to discredit Yang and his supporters.
Bias against Asian men may play a role, but there is much more going on here. The leadership of the DNC do not like to see people like Yang gain too much momentum.
When the president is using Twitter as his primary means of communicating with the public, it becomes a 1st Amendment right. Granted, this may be more an issue of the president using a private system to communicate with the public.
Some Senator who's name I can't recall was arguing otherwise. He said something to the affect of, if social media companies, or websites in general want protection under the law from content generated by their users, then they should not be able to dictate what their users can and cannot post barring illegal content.
It's an interesting argument regardless of what you believe, but certainly your first amendment rights don't currently extend to Twitter.
He wasn't arguing the current interpretation of the law as much as proposing an amendment.
I don't think that HN, nor the community at large does as much as say twitter or reddit to stifle opposing points of view. Relegating extremist to their own echo-chambers is a good way of proliferating their beliefs. Were their ideas exposed to the world where they would have to defend them, they may be dissuaded from holding such extreme beliefs, or a passerby may see the flaws in their argument.
> He wasn't arguing the current interpretation of the law as much as proposing an amendment
I wanted to point out it would require radical changes to our current laws and maybe the Constitution. I wasn't sure if he was aware of that. (Stronger versions of this argument, including ones deployed by members of Congress, have said it described current law)
> Were their ideas exposed to the world where they would have to defend them, they may be dissuaded from holding such extreme beliefs, or a passerby may see the flaws in their argument.
One interesting study mentioned in that summation found that temporary internet outages in Germany reduced hate crimes against refugees.
> This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in major Facebook and internet outages, which fully undo the correlation between social media and hate crime. We further find that the effect decreases with distracting news events; increases with user network interactions; and does not hold for posts unrelated to refugees. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online messages and violent crime.
With regards to the paper you posted, I don't think it does enough to escape the fallacy of correlation/causation. It stands to reason that a news event implicating refugees for a crime will attract anti-refugee sentiment, likewise why would such sentiment spread to unrelated news posts? Facebook has already been caught prioritizing controversial content in user news feeds to increase interaction. Facebook will quickly learn a user that displays such views interacts more with said content, and display more.
What really pisses me off about bot accounts isn't the fake info simply because I analyze things based off my own opinions and research, although I understand how this is an issue for the general majority. My issue is that if I happen to retweet somebody opposite of that running a bot farm, then the bots are trigger to all report me and then I need to verify my account again the next time I'm on. And the sad thing is that it works, because I'll stop retweeting that person's tweets just to avoid that verification process since it happens consistently.
Whether there's other criteria that qualifies me for attack, such as the retweeting in combination with following that person, I'm not sure as I haven't tested that.
That is unfortunate. Sadly, it also happens without bots. Some communities self righteously abuse Twitter's reporting system just to silence or censor views they disagree with.
I wish the local elementary school would do something about the yang gangers who draw lengthy screeds in shoepolish on the side of their van and park it in front of the doors every day. There's a rule against political ads on the property, but apparently not against cars parking there.
I like a lot of Yang's proposals. I just wish the enthusiasm of his supporters could be a little more... judiciously focused?
They're loving it though. Bots push something to trending, real people end up talking and sharing like crazy. Their KPIs since this last election must be insane.
I'm a 42 year old Yang supporter. I never voted before and only used Twitter for a week or so many years ago. A few Yang posts are the only things I have ever retweeted. In particular when he was excluded from the debates I was retweeting everything with #AmericaNeedsYang or whatever. I am not a bot. But my activity then might have seemed bot-like.
Anyway if anyone hasn't 100% made up their mind on Yang maybe watch a few YouTube videos of him.
This is an interesting comment from multiple directions. 1) because I could see someone calling __this__ comment a bot comment, but you're much more active here and so it seems like you aren't. 2) Because if you are real, it really shows the idea (I suggested this in another comment too) that Yang Gangers come off as bots. (I also found the statement about Yang accounts being linked to MAGA accounts as evidence as funny).
I like Yang and it is kind of insulting to be dismissed as a bot for posting a comment supporting him. It feels dismissive and similar I would imagine to being a Bernie supporter and being called a "bernie bros". I know lots of Bernie supporters who are not dumb college males and lots of Yang supports who are not automated scripts (aka bots).
There's nothing bot like about this person's post. It's actually kind of a nice tale of civic re-engagement. It does make me more interested in hearing what Yang has to say because it seems honest and like a statement from someone who hasn't been doing political activism for years.
It was a poor joke making a critique of the Medium post.
> It does make me more interested in hearing what Yang has to say because it seems honest and like a statement from someone who hasn't been doing political activism for years.
Lots of people suggest the Joe Rogan podcast [0], but that is old, things have changed in his campaign, and it is long. I rather like the Now This interview [1] (30 mins). Others like the Iowa Town Hall[2] (hour).
The reasons I personally like Yang are #1, climate (I'm a scientist myself and work in labs with many climate scientists. I don't think his plan is going to solve everything, but I like it more than the other candidates. It is clear to me he has talked to experts), #2 I think he's trying to answer an important question that I've been curious about for a long time "How do we transition into a post scarcity society". Or specifically "how do you transition into an economy where you do not need a large number of workers. What do you do if 10% of your population is unemployable, not because of lack of skills, but because lack of demand?" It is the reason I am interested in UBI in the first place (where I've read a lot about here on HN). So I rather like his talk about changing the rules of the economy and making them human-centric. I do personally see a drastically changing economy and society, and I think he is asking the right questions about it. I have also seen him change positions after talking to experts, which I think is an essential quality in a president (though I know changing positions on a topic is often seen as negative in a political climate).
If you do want to learn more about him I highly suggest posting in the subreddit [3]. It is __extremely__ active and people really do want to answer every question you might have. It is a welcoming community and I do think feels different from other political subreddits.
This looks like a green handle bot supporting another bot. You may find my statement pretty silly today but in about 5 years we will be in the uncanny valley.
WTF makes you think I'm a bot? Because I took the time to write a full paragraph and tried to promote the presidential campaign I have invested my time and money into?
I don't think you are. The comment doesn't come across to me as one. But using the same analysis that the author of this post did, I think they'd characterize you as one. It was more a critique on the post. I think the author has never visited the subreddit.
What if, like the Kobayashi Maru, the bots eventually pass the Turing Test by simply dumbing down human discourse? It seems that on Twitter that is already taking place.
Tangential thought: There is an biting element of dehumanization when you call someone a “bot” (who is actually a real person). I see this term thrown around a lot in political threads when the account in question is quite obviously human.
In short, It’s become a term du jour for compromising and silencing those with whom you disagree.
Yes, this is a good and important point. There are many people who declare NPC a vile, dehumanizing term...who hypocritically call everyone who disagrees with them a bot.
People exhibit such bot-like behavior in certain circumstances that the burden of proof for calling something a bot is extremely high. If you saw sports fans in a stadium you’d think they were bots authored by the team’s robotics division — the same behaviors manifest in online discussions of politics. It's like how CAPTCHAs today are virtually unsolvable for humans -- we meatbags are more bot than the bots.
I encountered this myself after responding to someone's comment about the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept, and got spammed with negative replies. I figured it was just ardent supporters, bots make sense though given the speed of the responses. Sadly, I think this may be the new normal of politics in the 2020s.
> after responding to someone's comment about the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept, and got spammed with negative replies. I figured it was just ardent supporters, bots make sense though given the speed of the responses.
Ardent non-supporter of UBI here! Not a bot!!
The nefarious issue with UBI is that it threatens our existing social safety nets. The social goal is not to give everyone a single basic income, it's to give everyone a single basic standard of living.
It's far more fair and moral to give folks access to basic standards of human decency (e.g., healthcare, education, housing, food, air), than writing them a check and letting them fend on their own. The moral underpinning of social safety nets is not to increase the total or average, but to increase the lowest.
Bernie supporter here AND UBI supporter, (not Yang's version per se though). I support a bigger more expansive UBI that would basically cover all food, housing, and major monthly expenses. We still need education/healthcare though as Bernie suggests. Which is why I support him.
I like the idea of ending the current welfare system because it makes the recipient feel 'less' because they're on 'state assistance' vs everyone gets 3k/month + 500 per dependent per month.
We'd need a different tax system though, and need maybe VAT to offset it a little. It would move everyone above poverty though so pretty much everyone could afford at least some level of taxes. It would also give job mobility and more ability to negotiate wages. Some would choose to stay home and join esports leagues, or start an arts career or go back to school, or start a business. Meaning less people would be required by labor, meaning supply/demand would be in worker's favor -- which would drive up wages.
I think there's definitely a place for UBI on the table, AS LONG as single-payer and free college ALSO exist - -and college debt forgiveness.
> Bernie supporter here AND UBI supporter, (not Yang's version per se though). I support a bigger more expansive UBI that would basically cover all food, housing, and major monthly expenses.
I agree that those basics that make up common humanity should be covered. But I differ on how to get there. UBI means writing a check to someone, and letting them spend it how they wish. They can spend it on food and healthcare, their startup, or alcohol and gambling.
But if the purpose is to set a minimum level human decency (food, housing, healthcare), then we should provide that level of decency, rather than writing a check and hoping people will use it wisely. If an entrepreneur takes their UBI check and rather than buying healthcare, puts it into a startup that eventually becomes big, that may be a better result for the overall economy, but we've still failed that person in providing a minimum level of humanity.
The moral purpose behind UBI is not to just write checks, it's to allow humans to retain their humanity. Providing solid public schools, healthcare, and basic housing better provide that minimum level of dignity than sending a person a check.
I also come at it from a technical standpoint. It's easier/cheaper to shut down all welfare buildings and government programs and just cut a check. That ends a lot of wasteful spending to pay for the thing. Also housing/food differs dramatically across the country. How do you manage that? Mailing multiple checks? Multiple EBT like cards? I mean it's really difficult to think of a method other than just writing a check that's big enough to cover most..
Who in America would not be better off with a guaranteed $36000/year income? If they have a spouse and two kids they'd make around $50k...and that's BEFORE they take up a full or part-time job.
I support UBI and social welfare program reform, but the two are separate things. The programs are there for when people need help. The UBI is there to minimize the number of people who need help.
All the solutions I see for UBI are short term. What I posted on Twitter was the idea of addressing it in the long term:
For each of the 3919528 babies born in the USA in 2019 ((11.979 babies born per 1000 people, in 2019; 327.2 million population), deposit $100k in a lower risk growth mutual fund. , at a cost of $391 billion. Do this for 50 years. When the first cohort of babies turns 50 they should have around $1m available for retirement. So will each year's cohort after them for the next 50 years. Much of that money will be passed on to a new generation, or go back to the government if they die without issue (and that money goes into a mutual fund whose interest goes to help pay for subsequent cohorts).
Yes, it won't touch the problem for 50 years (hence the need for social program reform now too), and it requires both political parties to agree to not dismantle it (like Soc Security was tampered with). But if so, the problem is solved after 50 years, for at least 50 years and hopefully longer.
From what I have seen of Yang Gangers, that could very well have been the result of real people. A high proportion of them are always online, highly vigilant, eager to participate in online activism.
It deems accounts as bots if they post and retweet a lot and are newly created? Being familiar with the Yang Gang, people are extremely passionate almost to an addiction of supporting Yang. They follow his every move, his surrogates words, and engage with any tiny bit of content they can. Many are new accounts because few have ever followed politics and want to keep separate from their main accounts.
While there may be a few bad actors, it is definitely not representative of those that engage with Yang and his campaign. It shows up on the ground as well where Yang's following shows up in biggest numbers.
At least in Iowa, there were hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that flew in to canvass in the snow, outnumbering most campaign ground forces. In San Francisco, weekly hangouts have been growing to 30 people, and volunteer events turn out 15+ people regularly. I believe this is nationwide as well, there aren't many campaigns that have been matching the grassroots volunteer forces.
The twitteraudit service says they determine if an account is fake or real as:
“Each audit takes a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”
It seems that the service would determine a lot of plain lurker accounts as fake. (And I’m a lurker on Twitter who almost never tweets and has a really low followed/follower ratio, so I would probably get flagged as a bot. Actually I think Twitter flagged me as one before, because my account got suspended once even when I didn’t really post anything at all, and I heard someone being unable to see one of my comments) Most bots have probably evolved a lot from simply lurking and following, so I don’t think the service provides an accurate picture of bots on Twitter.
how do you know the passionate to the point of addiction Yang supporters are real?
I think its likely that many are, but that there are also many passionate supporters of the other candidates who just lurk on Twitter without posting due to social norms about how often you should chime in and how forcefully. The social norms around Yang supporters on twitter have changed by bots posting often and loudly, breaking the bubble and giving permission to people to do it too. If you then turn the bots off, the YangGang effect would last. (I'm sure this applies to not just Yang...)
I've seen proof of concepts that could be strung together to do that, using a combination of Generative Adversarial Networks, style transfer, and rule-based semantic reasoner.
The question is are these bad actors acting in support of Yang or to undermine Yang? If you were against Yang, imagine how easy it would be to set up bots to "support Yang" and then have fellow operatives/journalists who are against Yang write about Yang "bots". It's just as easy for Yang's detractors to set up bots as it is for his supporters.
There seems to be a concerted effort by certain operatives/journalists/etc to undermine certain political candidates by tainting them with "russian asset" or "bot" labels.
Without a doubt, there have been bot activity starting with obama/ron paul/etc in 2008 and everyone since in political life. If the author ( who also submitted her own article here ) wanted to find bots, there are far better candidates to focus on. Why the focus on Yang?
As with bots, journalists, media and everything, we have to understand the context and agenda.
Since the author also has an account here, I would love to know what her political leanings are and who she is supporting. Has she work for any political candidate before?
Someone should make a Twitter-like that verifies posters at various levels based on humanness/geographic locale and other characteristics.
Then posters could limit conversations to those with >90% human score (with score going up when twitter has more certainty that you are a human) located in the US (for US political conversations), etc.
I'd certainly pay a few bucks to be verified and contribute much more often to conversations than I do now, as now it just seems like screaming into the bot void.
What I don’t understand about Yang and his UBI push, is that he doesn’t mention anything about the housing crisis.
It’s not really the people that have homes that are at risk. It’s the people who are renters, and are under the whims of landlords raising the rents to match expensive mortgages.
There’s no mention from him, about socializing the cost of housing. This is the primary source of inequality.
I am not a fan of socializing anything, but it’s clear to see, that rampant capitalism has run amok, and distorted the housing cost for everyone.
Is his he expecting that people will take the $12,000/year UBI, and move out to podunk Iowa somewhere, and buy a small plot of land, and farm the earth and raise chickens to be self subsistent?
Like, what happens after you receive this monthly UBI check?
Clearly, this isn’t enough to pay the rent. Will these people work part time driving for Uber, or delivering for DoorDash?
> There’s no mention from him, about socializing the cost of housing. This is the primary source of inequality.
It isn't well mentioned on his website[0], but he has talked about it in more details before (sorry, I forgot which videos he specifically addresses this in. There are a lot and they are long). But the tldr is he wants to do better zoning, encourage high rise apartments, and throw in government incentives for affordable housing. If you post this question in the subreddit I know it'll get answered quickly, with many links, and will likely be updated on the website (that's the usual pattern).
> Is his he expecting that people will take the $12,000/year UBI, and move out to podunk Iowa somewhere, and buy a small plot of land, and farm the earth and raise chickens to be self subsistent?
In part UBI, but in part he wants the IRS to refund some moving costs[1]
> that rampant capitalism has run amok,
This is actually at the forefront of his campaign: "Human Centered Capitalism"[2] That the rules need to be rewritten and we need to make the economy human centric, not money first.
> Clearly, [UBI] isn’t enough to pay the rent. Will these people work part time driving for Uber, or delivering for DoorDash?
There's no way you can pass a living wage UBI in this political climate. But $1k/mo does more than $15/hr (presuming hours are stagnant and you can get full time work. Most states already pay above federal minimum) and it is something that Republicans are on board with (because it simplifies welfare and enables more choice). I know it isn't a complete win, but it is an obtainable win. People are already asking how you pay for UBI, now imagine if he doubled the amount. Let's not let perfection get in the way of good. Think of it as a step in the right direction, not a full solution.
Yang supporters believe expats should also get the freedom dividend. It would be funny if yang just declares a United States of earth and distributes the freedom dividend to every human on the entire planet...
If American expats pay US income tax, why shouldn’t they qualify? Maybe the US should stop taxing people that don’t even live in America like every other civilized country.
Not really. Yang is unequivocal that expats should not receive the dividend while they are abroad. And they deserve their part given we tax them as if they were present.
> Yang is unequivocal that expats should not receive the dividend while they are abroad.
What is the moral basis for this? Pretty much every other U.S. right and rule is grounded on U.S. citizenship, not where you're currently residing. Basing rights on where you live (rather than citizenship) also leads to some weird results. If you deny expats some right because they don't live in the country, then shouldn't you grant non-citizens who are indeed living in the country those same rights? After all, the standard is where you live rather than citizenship.
> Yang supporters believe expats should also get the freedom dividend.
Well, this is what Trump believes. A solid 30% of the U.S. stock market is owned by foreigners, and so when U.S. corporations used their Trump tax break to increase their market value, 30% of that effectively gave foreigners a bump.
His tax plan effectively increased taxes in expensive "blue" states and gave that money to foreign investors.
I think that one article doesn't prove that Yang's campaign is driven by bots.
I'm a 42 year old programmer who has never voted before. I am voting for Yang because his policies are superior and the other candidates have outdated policies or worldviews.
I have contributed around $400 or $500 and if there is something we are "trying to trend" I will retweet it (even though I never really used Twitter before now).
By the way, Yang has received endorsements from people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dave Chappelle, Donald Glover, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, James Gunn.
Saying the campaign is driven by bots is an unsubstantiated smear.
I am most definitely not a Yang support, I am critic, and yet I strongly agree with your last sentence. Saying the campaign is driven by bots, based on the 'evidence' presented so far, is an unsubstantiated smear.
Theorem: 100% of these articles talking about "bots" on twitter are bullshit. None have any evidence, yet we're supposed to be impressed because ... muh plots. Nobody has any idea how many "bots" are following Trump or Yang or anybody else.
I have been following this campaign since a few months, and I can attest that it has pulled in a large number of voters who were not politically inclined, the members are very passionate, and also that Yang Gang is quite cliquey and live in an echo chamber. Given those facts, I won't be surprised if those accounts were mostly real people.
Full disclosure: I like Yang.