On Twitter, a Battle Among Political Bots

This portends some very incredible things for the future of social media and politics.

Astroturfing of various forms is in its infancy as a technology. Yet, it's so successful even in its crude form that every successful advertiser, media company and political party participates in it. Given that paid protestors, astroturfed comments, and brigading are seen as dubious tactics each of these parties uses their brigading, astroturfing and bots to accuse their opponents and competition of using brigading, astroturfing and bots.

Therein, the situation is a manifestation of what economists call a "tragedy of the commons" where each actors' best response to collective negative behavior on account of their opponent is to participate in it better themselves.

There are few ways out of a "tragedy of the commons" situation, with regulation itself having a quite spotty record. The best way out of the situation is for the incentive structures and technologies that encourage the behavior to move toward a more healthy 'market' structure that raise the costs of the behavior and lower the effectiveness.

Any attempt to 'solve' automatically and provide the user with access to what they 'really need to know' is an escalation of this trend, and will be gamified, copied and duplicated in an automatic fashion, making the situation worse - not better.

The only solution is a critically thinking public with the tools themselves to determine what is fake and what is real.

Platforms promising to introduce fake information and advertisements as a critical and crucial feature of their network are not able to achieve both a skeptical, critically thinking user base at the same time that it encourages gullible social participation.