The Public Square Has Been Squashed

fake traffic buries the genuine people

I hope you find that this is an interesting subject. I will try to keep it brief, and hopefully that helps to keep you reading the post till the end! Maybe a sprinkling of memes will help.

Sometimes, when I think on the subject of censorship on social media, this quote comes up for me: “If a Tree Falls in the Forest, and There’s No One Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?”

Recently Twitter has decided to make likes private. At first, I hoped that this might be for the benefit of real life users, but in retrospect it may be directly in response to this video I will be writing about in the post today. The video released by PANDA in May, is titled The Role of Fake Bot Traffic on Twitter/X | Alex Kriel.¹

I found this video on Twitter, however I noticed a familiar feature with the tweet that linked to the video. It was almost invisible².

Here are some of the highlights of what he explained in this 40 minute presentation on the topic of bots on Twitter:

1. On Twitter, and very likely every other social media platform, including Substack, we all get censored in a relative sense when our traffic is not amplified and therefore we get buried under the fake traffic, so it serves a dual purpose of promoting certain messages and at the same time burying genuine messages and genuine people.

2. One of the ways we can identify bot activity is by looking at traffic. The profiles that are getting a lot of traffic are likely amplified by bot traffic. By measuring how many likes per tweet it can be determined which accounts are amplified versus the accounts that are buried. In the linked (see footnotes) presentation he shows a graph where he compared the accounts of certain people like Professor Fenton, Allison Pearson, Toby Young, and James Delingpole to others like James Melville and Matt Gubba. The accounts of the first group have been active on social media, and have been helpful in countering the COVID authoritarianism, so it is natural that they would have a following. The second group, with James and Matt is suspected of getting fake likes or followers. The chart shows that engagement appears overly inflated for the accounts that are suspect.

Wrapping this up before I lose you. I know this is not super interesting, but it is incredibly important information!

A giveaway that an account is amplified is that even super mediocre boring tweets/posts get a lot of engagement.

Finally as I had mentioned earlier Twitter has made what you like private and this affects our ability to identify bots.

As Alex explains in the video, there are two different bots that he often sees on Twitter. There are bots which like posts and bots that retweet. If you are looking at one of the retweeting bots you can see that they retweet all the same accounts. When you find a liking bot, you would be able to see how many times the bot account had liked a post. But now that likes are private, the liking bots will be harder to spot.

Since this is such an important topic I wanted to keep the post short as longer posts are a turn off for many people.

I expect I will write about this more, because I would not be surprised if even mentioning this becomes the reason why I might be buried here on Substack. This is why I always ask for you to like and repost my work.

I do not own any bots, you are my bots, HELP!!!

I don’t know if it would be helpful even to start sending letters to our elected representatives, to point out what is going on here, because they are very likely either completely oblivious to this or 100% using it to support their careers and their cronies.

1. The Role of Fake Bot Traffic on Twitter/X | Alex Kriel

2. I don’t know how they do it, but if you are on Twitter you may have noticed that sometimes when you try to re share a tweet there will be a small message at the bottom of the screen that says “this post has been deleted” but the post has not been deleted. This happens a lot to my tweets as well.

There is a way around it, which is that instead of re posting the tweet you put a comment on it — it is called a quote tweet — and then it will post. From that post you can now retweet. They sure do make it difficult. I am sure that if you were saying nice things, and not “awful” things about the lizards you would not need to go through all of this.