The difference is that the bot is pretending to be a person. People are herd animals, they are easily manipulated to follow views that the herd sees as "correct". Having bots that are pretending to be people expressing their views is essentially an attempt at large-scale psychological manipulation. It is not simply about making people aware of a candidate or a certain point of view, it is about trying to make people believe many others believe that point of view to try and manipulate them into believing it as well.
Exactly this. A single person can put up 50 yard signs. Seeing 50 signs for a candidate just means there’s someone really enthusiastic about that candidate (or paid by them), it’s not automatically an indicator of wide support.
On the other hand, if every second house in a large area suddenly sprouted a sign for a candidate, you might rightly interpret that as strong support. Having 10,000 likes on a post is akin to this latter scenario - showing that there’s a whole lot of “actual people” who are on the bandwagon.
How are signs not also an example of people attempting "large-scale psychological manipulation"?
Signs don't just grow naturally out of the ground. Someone had to make them and put them there. And those signs aren't there to decarate yards. They're there to convince passerbys that a lot of people support a particular candidate.
The issue is not that people tend to follow the herd, nor that people try to influence each other’s opinions, those are just facts of life. The issue is when someone creates a fake herd that only they control.
If 100 different Twitter accounts all weigh in on a thread, arguing for one side, but they are all secretly controlled by one person, that creates a false picture of widespread support for that person’s stance.
It’s true that traditional advertising has always been used to create artificial buzz around candidates, and this is often a bit manipulative. But creating a crowd of fake supporters, with fake photos and bios, and deploying them in conversations with unsuspecting real humans, is a whole different level of manipulation.
There is absolutely no difference. Why is it ok for politicians to pay for signs to be posted in front yards, show to all of the neighborhood "network". Yet, the same action is somehow evil when the "neighborhood" is instead a social media platform?
It’s because this exists in meatspace where there is almost always a significant Proof of Work required. This helps limit/prevent the most egregious abuses.
>The difference is that the bot is pretending to be a person. People are herd animals, they are easily manipulated to follow views that the herd sees as "correct".
If this is true (and I'm not saying it isn't), the entire premise of Democracy is incompatible with modern technology. We could keep trying to bandage it with "fake news filters", but at some point we will need to admit defeat on that front and start fiddling with suffrage rather than fiddling with free speech.
> Having bots that are pretending to be people expressing their views is essentially an attempt at large-scale psychological manipulation.
Paid celebrity endorsements on TV like we see for products are the same. I don’t know if you can legally do that for campaigns, but you could definitely hire them to the staff as a surrogate (any rules against doing so at an inflated rate)?
Bots are not "pretending" to be anything. Humans have a false assumption that everything posted on social media was hand typed by another human, at the time it was posted. This is not, and almost never had been true, therein lies the problem. There have been "bots" posting online since day 1
When bots have human names and human profile pictures they are most certainly pretending to be human. But even if they do not have these, by not explicitly mentioning they are bots on social networking sites (including sites like reddit) they are effectively pretending to be humans as well, because like you mentioned people assume that other users on the site are human.
It's a false assumption. People shouldn't assume anything, there are plenty of places to do legitimate research, political or otherwise, social media isn't one of them
Technically, the humans running the accounts are pretending to be a lot of different people. But since the HN audience is aware nobody has achieved artificial consciousness, we casually attribute characteristics to the puppets, not the puppeteers.
