{"id":6868,"date":"2018-02-12T21:32:31","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T01:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/?p=6868"},"modified":"2018-07-21T21:33:50","modified_gmt":"2018-07-22T01:33:50","slug":"the-reality-of-twitter-puffery-or-why-does-everyone-now-hate-bots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2018\/02\/12\/the-reality-of-twitter-puffery-or-why-does-everyone-now-hate-bots.html","title":{"rendered":"The Reality of Twitter Puffery. Or Why Does Everyone Now Hate Bots?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This was originally posted on NewCo Shift<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

A friend of mine\u00a0worked<\/span>\u00a0for an online dating company whose audience was predominantly hetero 30-somethings.\u00a0At some point,\u00a0<\/span>they realized tha<\/span>t a large number of the \u201cfemale\u201d accounts were actually bait for porn sites and 1\u2013<\/span>900<\/span>\u00a0numbers.<\/span>\u00a0I don\u2019t remember if users complained or if they found it themselves, but they concluded that they needed to get rid of these fake profiles.<\/span>\u00a0So they did.<\/p>\n

And then their numbers started dropping. And dropping. And dropping.<\/p>\n

Trying to understand why, researchers were sent in. What they learned was that hot men were attracted to the site because there were women that they felt were out of their league. Most of these hot men didn\u2019t really aim for these ultra-hot women, because they felt like they would be inaccessible, but they were happy to talk with women who they saw as being one rung down (as in actual hot women). These hot women, meanwhile, were excited to have these hot men (who they saw as equals) on the site. These also felt that, since there were women hotter than them, that this was a site for them. When they removed the fakes, the hot men felt the site was no longer for them. They disappeared. And then so did the hot women. Etc.\u00a0The weirdest part?\u00a0<\/span>They reintroduced decoy profiles (not as redirects to porn but as fake women who just didn\u2019t respond) and slowly folks came back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why am I telling you this story? Fake accounts and bots on social media are not new. Yet, in the last couple of weeks, there\u2019s been newfound hysteria around Twitter bots and fake accounts.\u00a0I find it\u00a0<\/span>deeply problematic<\/span>\u00a0that folks are saying that having fake followers is inauthentic.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>This is like saying that makeup is inauthentic.<\/span>\u00a0What is really going on here?<\/p>\n

From Fakesters to Influencers<\/h4>\n

From the earliest days of Friendster and MySpace, people liked to show how cool they were by how many friends they had. As\u00a0Alice Marwick eloquently<\/a>documented<\/a><\/span>,\u00a0self-branding and performing status were the name of the game<\/span>for many in the early days of social media. This hasn\u2019t changed<\/span>.\u00a0People made entire careers out of appearing to be influential, not just actually being influential.<\/span>\u00a0Of course a market emerged around this so that people could buy and sell followers, friends, likes, comments, etc.\u00a0Indeed, standard practice, especially in the wink-nudge world of Instagram, where monetized content is the game and so-called organic \u201cmacroinfluencers\u201d can easily double their follower size through bots are more than happily followed by bots, paid or not.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Some sites have tried to get rid of fake accounts. Indeed, Friendster played whack-a-mole with them, killing off\u00a0\u201cFakesters\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and any account that didn\u2019t follow their strict requirements; this prompted a mass exodus.\u00a0Facebook\u2019s real-name policy also signaled that such shenanigans would not be allowed on their site, although shhh\u2026. lots of folks figured out how to have multiple accounts and otherwise circumvent the policy.<\/span><\/p>\n

And let\u2019s be honest\u200a\u2014\u200afake accounts are all over most online dating profiles.\u00a0Ashley Madison<\/a>, anyone?<\/p>\n

Bots, Bots,\u00a0Bots<\/h4>\n

Bots have been an intrinsic part of Twitter since the early days.\u00a0Following the Pope\u2019s daily text messaging services, the Vatican set up numerous bots offering Catholics regular reflections.<\/span>\u00a0Most major news organizations have bots so that you can keep up with the headlines of their publications. Twitter\u2019s almost-anything-goes policy meant that people have built bots for all sorts of purposes.\u00a0<\/span>There are bots that do poetry, ones that argue with anti-vaxxers about their beliefs, and ones that call out sexist comments\u00a0<\/span>people post.<\/span>\u00a0I\u2019m a big fan of the\u00a0@censusAmericans<\/a>\u00a0bot created by FiveThirtyEight to regularly send out data from the Census about Americans.<\/p>\n

Over the last year, sentiment towards Twitter\u2019s bots has become decidedly negative. Perhaps most people didn\u2019t even realize that there were bots on the site. They probably don\u2019t think of\u00a0@NYTimes<\/a>\u00a0as a bot. When news coverage obsesses over bots, they primarily associate the phenomenon with nefarious activities meant to seed discord, create chaos, and do harm. It can all be boiled down to: Russian bots. As a result, Congress saw bots as inherently bad and journalists keep accusing Twitter of having a \u201cbot problem\u201d without accounting for how their stories appear on Twitter through bots.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although we often hear about the millions and millions of bots on Twitter as though they\u2019re all manipulative, the stark reality is that bots can be quite fun.<\/span>\u00a0I had my students build Twitter bots to teach them how these things worked<\/span>\u200a\u2014\u200athey had a field day, even if they didn\u2019t get many followers.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are definitely bots that you can buy to puff up your status.\u00a0Some of them might even be Russian built.<\/span>\u00a0And here\u2019s where we get to the crux of the current conversation.<\/p>\n

Buying Status<\/h4>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>
Typical before\/after image on Instagram.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

People buy bots to increase their number of followers, retweets, and likes in order to appear cooler than they are.\u00a0<\/span>Think of this as mascara for your digital presence.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>While plenty of users are happy chatting away with their friends without their makeup on, there\u2019s an entire class of professionals who feel the need to be dolled up and giving the best impression possible.<\/span>\u00a0It\u2019s a competition for popularity and status, marked by numbers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Number games are not new, especially not in the world of media. Take a well-established firm like Nielsen.\u00a0<\/span>Although journalists often uncritically quote Nielsen numbers as though they are \u201cfact,\u201d most people in the ad and media business know that they\u2019re crap.<\/span>\u00a0But they\u2019ve long been the best crap out there. And, more importantly, they\u2019re uniform crap so businesses can make predictable decisions off of these numbers, fully aware that they might not be that accurate.\u00a0<\/span>The same has long been true of page views and clicks<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span>No major news organization should take their page views literally. And yet, lots of news agencies rank their reporters based on this data.<\/span><\/p>\n

What makes the purchasing of Twitter bots and status so nefarious? The\u00a0NYTimes story<\/a>\u00a0suggests that doing so is especially deceptive. Their coverage shamed Twitter into deleting a bunch of Twitter accounts, outing all of the public figures who had bought bots. It almost felt like a discussion of who had gotten Botox.<\/p>\n

Much of this recent flurry of coverage suggests that the so-called bot problem is a new thing that is \u201cfinally\u201d known.\u00a0It boggles my mind to think that any regular Twitter user hadn\u2019t seen automated accounts in the past.<\/span>\u00a0And heck, there have been services like\u00a0Twitter Audit<\/a>\u00a0to see how many fake followers you have since at least 2012.\u00a0Gilad Lotan even detailed the ecosystem of buying fake followers in 2014<\/a>.\u00a0I think that what\u2019s new is that the term \u201cbot\u201d is suddenly toxic. And it gives us an opportunity to engage in another round of social shaming targeted at insecure people\u2019s vanity all under the false pretense of being about bad foreign actors.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been one to feel the need to put on a lot of makeup in order to leave the house and I haven\u2019t been someone who felt the need to buy bots to appear cool online.<\/span>\u00a0But\u00a0<\/span>I find it deeply hypocritical to listen to journalists and politicians wring their hands about fake followers and bots given that they\u2019ve been playing at that game for a long time<\/span>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Who among them is really innocent of trying to garner attention through any means possible?<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, I don\u2019t really blame Twitter for giving these deeply engaged users what they want and turning a blind eye towards their efforts to puff up their status online. After all, the cosmetic industry is $55 billion. Then again, even cosmetic companies sometimes\u00a0change their formulas<\/a>\u00a0when their products receive bad press.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note: I\u2019m fully aware of hypotheses that bots have destroyed American democracy.<\/em><\/span>\u00a0That\u2019s a different essay. But\u00a0<\/em>I think that\u00a0<\/em><\/span>the main impact that they have had, like spam, is to destabilize people\u2019s trust in the media ecosystem<\/em><\/span>.<\/em><\/span>\u00a0Still, we need to contend with the stark reality that they do serve a purpose and some people do want them.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This was originally posted on NewCo Shift.) A friend of mine\u00a0worked\u00a0for an online dating company whose audience was predominantly hetero 30-somethings.\u00a0At some point,\u00a0they realized that a large number of the \u201cfemale\u201d accounts were actually bait for porn sites and 1\u2013900\u00a0numbers.\u00a0I don\u2019t remember if users complained or if they found it themselves, but they concluded that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6869,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6868\/revisions\/6869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}