The use of such analytics is welcomed by surveillance disinformation and technology policy. “New online safety regulators and independent auditors should consider implementing technology like TrollMagnifier,” said Max Beverton-Palmer, director of internet policy at Tony. existing safety systems, thereby making social media more accountable for online harms. Blair Institute for Global Change. A Reddit spokesperson said it is their policy to prohibit manipulation of content, including coordinated disinformation campaigns, as well as any content presented to mislead or misrepresent a person. individual or organization. “We have dedicated teams to detect and prevent this behavior on our platform using both automated tools and human review,” the spokesperson said. “Thanks to the efforts of our teams, we remove 99% of content that violates our policies before users see them.”
But Higgins and another researcher, Yevgeniy Golovchenko of the University of Copenhagen, who study disinformation, are cautious about the replicability of academics’ method of troll-hunting. Some organic behavior can look like trolls, Higgins says, pointing to flaws in more basic academic research that previously failed to accurately distinguish between inauthentic and authentic behavior. “I wanted to drill down into the data generated from this to see what percentage of it was just communities interacting with each other compared to actual state-approved trolls,” he said. . Golovchenko is concerned about their own results. “It’s a very interesting topic and an ambitious paper, but I’m not entirely sure how to judge the accuracy of the tool the authors present,” he said. For one thing, the tool is trained on the accounts that have been discovered — so the worst-designed accounts, perhaps, represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential for disinformation caused by publishers. sponsoring country. “These accounts were created to go undetected,” Golovchenko said. “Studies like this will always give us the bare minimum – by design, because we are talking about public institutions that dedicate resources to hiding.”
Others welcomed the paper and its findings more. Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who oversees misinformation and online extremism. However, O’Connor points out that it’s difficult to do such tracking without an original list of known accounts to see echoes of — something that could happen on Reddit, the company opens up about. the release of data to help researchers. “Transparency from social media platforms is an ongoing challenge and we would also argue that more data is always the answer that helps us and then helps the platforms to help themselves, understand and address emerging tactics, tools, and narratives favored by bad guys on social media,” he said.
That transparency has helped researchers spot troll-like behavior — and a boon when researchers hope they can give it back to Reddit. “I think this kind of technique will definitely help social media companies,” says Stringhini. He points out that while they have more metrics to consider that can provide hints about a troll user’s true background, such as the IP address and browser fingerprint, the type checking Posting content can help to more accurately identify many non-authentic users.
However, finding those unauthenticated users can still prove difficult, given Reddit’s procedures. Bootinbull went silent on the platform on December 3, 2015, 50 days after it was first posted, its mission to stir hearts and minds appears to have failed — or ended. Their farewell? This: Responding to a setup for a lengthy joke in r/jokes that begin with a woman asking a man “Do you drink beer?” Bootinbull was confused as he replied, “Just beer :)”.
Stories with WIRED are better
