I remember a few weeks ago when the deal was first announced. A bunch of folks reported that conservative accounts were gaining followers while liberal accounts were loosing followers. The analysis back then is this could not have simply been organic because of when the followers picked up and dropped off, basically looked like a script doing the work.
This led to the theory that Twitter might have way more fake accounts then it's leading us on to believe. There was some speculation that the "Less than 5% figure" would come to bite them in due diligence so they were panicking and dumping bot accounts. Now this...
I'm not saying these two events are related, but there does seem to be something fishy going on. My gut says it will come out in the next few days that Twitter has something like %10-15 of their accounts being bots rather than the initial "Less than 5%" figure.
Imagine if the old law of 1% applied here. That is on the internet, 99% of all content is generated by 1% of the users.
Now if we include "users" as "content" (bots, ai, scripts), we have a very brooding fringe theory similar to "dead internet theory."
In my experience... it's pretty obvious and prolific how much automation is in Twitter. It's basically a public cyber-war; you have state actors and non state-actors using military grade propaganda tools for 'reality framing' between military interests, government interests, and corporate interests.
Interestingly after just digging into this a bit more it seems that when considering this principle in multiple studies measured since the 2000s, the most successful predictor for this power law is if the internet property is a form of community. Specifically in those cases there was a strong 1-9-90% rule in effect.
1% of the users were responsible for all generated content in terms of creation.
9% were responsible for editing if they had the privilege to edit. Perhaps “replying” would fit in this segment.
90% lurkers.
This is a stronger version of the Pareto principle. It’s interesting metaphysically and perhaps physically when considering musical theory, intervals, and how boundary conditions seem to work pretty consistently despite seemingly unrelated things.
I digress though, back to my earlier point. It seems if these laws hold up then there is a strong potential that much of the users who are active are in fact “avatars of creation.”
It’s certainly been mentioned that the internet has felt like this over the recent years by more fringe echo chambers. However given the backdrop of progress, it certainly gives more credit to the idea of a more nuanced form of the dead internet theory reminiscent of “society of the spectacle.” What is the said progress I allude to? Well, “NLP” of course. The most amount of progress in machine learning and AI is specifically within language models. Given that the availability of building such automation tools to conduct memetic warfare doesn’t even require sophisticated language models, (manpower, shills, some creative spam) one may have to wonder for how long oneself may have been talking to themselves on the internet? In a way it forms an “imaginary great firewall” for every user. Interacting with avatars built on your predictors, with seemingly no truth vector for the utility function and it’s behavior modification goal (alignment functions). Weird. I think we are past the smoke alarm stage. The evidence of ability and active training is self-evident since 2016 on 4chan and elsewhere.
>The analysis back then is this could not have simply been organic because of when the followers picked up and dropped off, basically looked like a script doing the work.
This led to the theory that Twitter might have way more fake accounts then it's leading us on to believe. There was some speculation that the "Less than 5% figure" would come to bite them in due diligence so they were panicking and dumping bot accounts. Now this...
I'm not saying these two events are related, but there does seem to be something fishy going on. My gut says it will come out in the next few days that Twitter has something like %10-15 of their accounts being bots rather than the initial "Less than 5%" figure.