> 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.
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?