Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots | Hacker News Reader

Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots

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If you squint really hard, you'll find what appears to be COVID-related trollbot-type activity right here on HN.

This breaks the site guideline against insinuating astroturfing, etc., without evidence. Please read the rules and stick to them when posting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Edit: it looks like we've had to ask you about this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19473700).

There's good reason for that rule: the vast majority of such accusations are pure imagination (we can say this because we've looked at the data extensively for years), and meanwhile they poison the community. If you think you're seeing a case of actual abuse, you should be emailing hn@ycombinator.com instead of posting about it here. That's in the guidelines too.

Plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Apologies. I did not directly reference a comment or user; just suggested that I have seen activity that appears to be trollbot-like, so did not believe that kind of generalization to be a violation. Further, it was relevant to the thread discussing a high rate of COVID-related trollbot activity elsewhere. It's a little difficult to believe that HN is immune from this activity, but I certainly take you at your word that you don't believe it's an issue.

I tend towards engaging people with whom I disagree, as I don't find it very interesting to stand around nodding heads. That to say that I have had plenty of vigorous debates on HN, yet there have been less than a handful of times that I suspected trollbots or shillage. It's not something I just hurl at folks when I disagree.

The most recent case was a person who engaged me on a COVID thread. First, he hid his motives. Then, he proceeded to parrot lockstep talking points from a certain point of view. He generally represented an ethos that I hadn't encountered on HN (intimating violence, etc.) Overall, it was an odd experience, but there's no more evidence than those observations and the feeling of something amiss in a style I have seen elsewhere. Hence, I did not accuse or report him.

In any event, I appreciate the pointer to the astroturfing search results and am frankly blown away by your patience. Appreciate the job you do. Obviously, I don't always agree with your conclusions, but there's no denying your good faith and efforts to be fair in maintaining quality. Even as I disagree, I am aware that I am a beneficiary of those efforts.

EDITS: near-immediate and mainly for clarity.

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