Twitter Bots and Pushing Agendas

Maxton Brunke

maxbrunke77@gmail.com

 

Ever since Twitter was created in 2006, the world population utilized the social media to connect with others across the globe, share jokes, or receiving news in a timely fashion. In case you may be unaware, when someone posts a tweet, that tweet is released to the entire world in under a second. For this reason, Twitter became a popular spot for many people, especially the younger generation, to receive news. As time has passed and Twitter has grown older and more popular, its become apparent that verifying information (fact-checking) is near impossible when there is so much freedom on this social media.

Before we get serious, it is worth mentioning that some users spread false information accidentally. Whether they were making a joke and it fell on deaf ears, or someone's source was inaccurate, it is still considered fake news from the eyes of a journalist. A recent example would be when semi-famous TikTok influencer began providing updates on the Big Ten football season via Twitter. While following his tweets, he constantly mentions a source but never provides any evidence who it is and how they are reliable, which leads me to believe he's either doing it for impressions, or he is trying to make a joke. 

In this tweet, he is providing hope to football fans by saying that there is a plan to come back in October. Since he has published a tweet similar to this wording a couple of days in a row, and in hindsight can see that there has been nothing announced yet, it leads me to believe that this is unreliable. However, there were still a lot of people in the replies who immediately believed him. Being a journalism student, I know how to fact-check my news, but the general population may not. Twitter has become controversial in this sense, with many believing that Twitter should be validating and fact-checking the information that is tweeted out themselves to prevent the spread of fake news. 

The political side of Twitter has become the most corrupt, especially over the last few years with President Trump in office. Twitter gives off the vibe that it has a mostly Democratic demographic, and my evidence to back that claim would be the ratios from replies to retweets/likes (impressions) on Republican based tweets. The reason the replies to impressions ratio is important is because most people on Twitter feel the need to reply to those they disagree with and tell them why they're wrong, and obviously those who like or retweet a tweet tend to agree with it. 

Feeling the need to outnumber their opponents, there has been an uprising of burner twitter accounts (using a second Twitter account to make it seem like a different person), and bots (Twitter accounts of fake people that were programmed to push an agenda). The reason we know burner Twitter accounts exist is because of some people with burner accounts slipping up and giving themselves away, most of the time when they try to defend themselves in a Twitter thread and accidentally Tweet from the same account. Bots are a different story, because most of the time they are called out for bad grammar or having little to no followers (a sign of a new account or an account that is used for nothing but replying and pushing an agenda) but can't be concretely proven that it's a programmed bot. 

Photo description: This is an example of someone getting ratio'ed, with 15 times more replies than likes. Photo credit: Twitter

Both sides of the political spectrum call out bots when they fit the criteria as well, it is not just a right or left thing. If you wish to find a potential bot, the easiest place to go is in the replies of President Trump or presidential candidate Joe Biden's tweets. I found this tweet in the replies of President Trump's tweet from earlier today, so let's analyze this account and determine its reliability. First, the account itself has over 800 followers, which would be a lot for a bot. However, the account is also following nearly 3,000 people, and usually people following three times their followers are just looking for people to follow them back and boost their social media status. For that reason, I remain skeptical but am still not sure that this account was created to spread propaganda specifically. 

Next, I'll look through this account's tweets to see if there is other content besides political agenda. The reason I'll do this is because a regular Twitter users account would have more than political content, such as a retweet of a cute baby, or commenting on their favorite sports teams. Obviously there are some real people who use Twitter restrictively to talk about politics, but from my experience, that number of people is low enough to consider it an outlier. Of the last 30 tweets from this account, including retweets and replies, 28 of them were about politics. The other two were a comment about a cute baby, and an odd reply to Alan Dershowitz. While I think that there is a clear lop-side for political tweets on the account in question, based on the wording of tweets I don't think this is a bot account. 

Finally, to determine if it could be a burner account, I look to see if this account has engaged in any "Twitter fights" (threads of back-and-forth arguing) with a common person for a sign that they are defending themselves. I didn't find anything of that nature with this account, but in my gut I feel that I have seen enough evidence from this account that it could be someone's political burner who doesn't want to tweet it out on their main account (usually out of fear of offending friends/relatives), which is something that people I personally know have done. Although those people didn't change their identity on their burner account, there is a chance Kris (the account we have been questioning) isn't a real person and is using this to spread his agenda. However, I believe that Kris is real and that this is most likely a political burner account. 

The question then becomes, is that wrong? Personally, no. As long as your goal of creating a burner isn't to fake an identity to make it look like more people agree with something than there really is, then your reasoning is probably justified. If I cared about spreading my political agenda, that would honestly be the quickest and most efficient way to do so. Regardless, these type of people have thrown a wrench in the gears of social media.

You may hear a lot of people these days calling social media all types of negatives adjectives because of fake news. Despite making my journalism career through sports journalism via Twitter, I put my bias aside and argue against that narrative. Social media, like Twitter and Facebook, is the greatest concept of our modern world. The ability to connect with people all over the world within seconds, meeting new people, and establishing connections and friendships is a massive technological jump in our timeline, I would say the biggest since the creation of the internet. I understand the frustration of constantly not being able to trust the information that we read, but this is exactly the reason I believe every citizen should have minimal fact-checking skills to determine real and fake news. But even if that was the case, confirmation bias is a whole other animal. I didn't mention it in this post because confirmation bias isn't always fake news, but almost every political argument I've seen on Twitter contains some amount of confirmation bias to make their side look better, while not telling the full truth. 

This, paired with over-generalization of a criticized group, is our biggest threat to reliable news. If it continues, it will officially turn media into a political affiliation based and threaten the reliability of the media. The scariest part of all this is even after extensive research and discussion, I don't see a solution to this. Twitter offers so much freedom of expression that even if they wanted to fact-check every tweet thats sent, there would be extreme push back from all types of people, let alone the logistical problem of Twitter actually fact-checking every single Tweet that gets sent. All we can hope is for someday, hopefully soon, America finds a political common ground that helps phase out fake news and confirmation bias.