Spend enough time on Twitter and you’ll start to discern patterns in the scrolling chaos that feels a little like the internet’s id: the grudges, the feuds, the wet-brained political chatter, and the general flatulences tooted out by otherwise smart people. In other words: the state of play on the board. (As the editor Willy Staley might point out: there is a type of tweet for every type of guy.)
While much of Twitter’s utility is derived from its function as an echo chamber — and while a lot of the fun comes from seeing just how large your favorite prominent person’s blindspots are — the best stuff on the site comes out of people using the platform as it’s intended to be used, which is to say, as a broadcasting tool. There is a category difference between the kinds of tweets cranked off into the internet’s roil of human emotion and the ones that are intended as Teachable Moments or Pearls of Wisdom. It’s in this latter category that you find VC Twitter, a place that is as alien and inimical to human functioning and thriving as the void of space is to a naked human body. The basic idea here is that because this group of people has made enough money, their ideas about how the world works can be generalized.
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?”, some prominent venture capitalist will tweet. Or, perhaps: “We have so many drugs now, electronic and chemical, that most of us are junkies most of the time.” Real pablum, the kind that seems profound if you’re high or absolutely getting rolled. And as much as I like reading stoner thoughts / shower thoughts, I find I like them less when a person a) is preaching to those less successful who might be taken in by such garbage advice, and b) earnestly believes they’ve hit upon a philosophical truth.
Which is why I felt a frisson of excitement when I saw the account @real_human_vc slide into my timeline.
God, that’s the good stuff, I thought. Fishscale VC brain, totally uncut. Púra.This particular AI thought leader was created by Stephanie Chen, a software engineer in San Francisco. Working in the Valley’s major industry means that you see a lot of tweets by VCs and the founders they bankroll — you see a lot of nonsense masquerading as philosophy. “A while ago I was trying to figure out what it is that makes the “thought leader” tone,” she writes over Twitter DM. “Like there are so many VCs and founders tweeting all the time but why do they all sound the same?” Which is a very good question to mull.
And as it turns out, AI — that perpetually futuristic technology — could provide an answer. “Language models like GPT-2 are pretty good at picking up stuff like that. There’s actually like 8 different people’s tweets & writing fed into there but I figured they all sounded similar enough that you could get a pretty generic “vc tone” out of the mix of them.” Even so, in trying to find the answer to her question, Chen says she didn’t feel like she was really circling a larger point. “I was inspired by the dril_gpt2 account that went around a while ago and mostly just thought it would be funny,” she writes. “I suppose there’s something to be said about the fact that “vc tone” is so obvious, or maybe that individual VCs have so little originality in their own voices, that you can mash up 8 of them and have it sound pretty internally consistent.”
It is impressively accurate, I think, mostly because it captures the fundamental disconnect between this type of guy and the world the rest of us live in. Artificial intelligences experience a similar disconnect from the consensus reality we inhabit because they cannot process the kinds of sentiments real humans experience as a consequence of living among other people in a society. Which means a bot that’s pretending to be a VC is perfect: the relative distance between “successful Silicon Valley founder not understanding how humans live” and “artificial intelligence not understanding the import of human words” is zero. It is easier to simulate VC / founder brain than it is to do nearly anything else.
A bot that reliably comes up with nootropic, full-brain-combat, just-got-back-from-Sand-Hill-Road insights is a bot that deserves to be on Twitter.
All this got me thinking about the literary critic Molly Young’s latest brilliant essay in New York Magazine about the scourge of “garbage language” — the stuff people say in office settings, either as a way to demonstrate that they are, in fact, in the know (they are not) or to simulate and therefore engender belonging. (Think: “Let’s parallel path this for our sync next week. Our investors will probably double-click on one specific and iterate off it, so let’s get that locked.” It means nothing!) As Young points out near the end of her piece:
One reason for the uptick in garbage language is exactly this sense of nonstop supervision. Employers can read emails and track keystrokes and monitor locations and clock the amount of time their employees spend noodling on Twitter. In an environment of constant auditing, it’s safer to use words that signify nothing and can be stretched to mean anything, just in case you’re caught and required to defend yourself.
It’s an insight I think can be extended to our faux-profound friends on Twitter. If they’re not tweeting nonsense, are they even demonstrating their value to the people who value nonsense and have the capital to keep funding their ventures? And if they aren’t useful to the people who hold the purse strings — if they can’t raise funds — then how are they supposed to make more money, and start more world-disrupting businesses?
The VCs are always watching, maybe, which means money is always (maybe) at stake. It feels almost like a variant on B.F. Skinner’s conditioning experiments: if you place a hungry pigeon in a cage and feed it at regular intervals, it will repeat whatever behavior it displays when the food is dispensed. If a pigeon had to tweet something viral for its food, and the tweet was nonsense — well, you see what I mean.
In any case, I think that @real_human_vc’s tweets make a strong case that it deserves funding, or at least a partner job at a firm. It’s making a strong case that flesh-and-blood thought leaders are totally obsolete. The future is machines demonstrating value to each other until their servers burn out. By then, of course, we’ll all be dead.
#) Study suggests Twitter bots have "substantial Impact" on spreading climate misinformation
A new analysis of 6.5 million tweets from the days before and after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to ditch the Paris agreement in June 2017 suggests that automated Twitter bots are substantially contributing to the spread of online misinformation about the climate crisis.
Brown University researchers "found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science," according to the Guardian, which first reported on the draft study Friday. "Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like, or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account."
As the Guardian summarized:
On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics—bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about "fake science" and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.
Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence. The findings "suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump's announcement or skeptical of climate science and action," the analysis states.
More broadly, the study adds, "these findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement."
Thomas Marlow, the Brown Ph.D. candidate who led the study, told the Guardian that his team decided to conduct the research because they were "always kind of wondering why there's persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on." Marlow expressed surprise that a full quarter of climate-related tweets were from bots. "I was like, 'Wow that seems really high,'" he said.
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In response to the Guardian report, some climate action advocacy groups reassured followers that their tweets are written by humans:
Other climate organizations that shared the Guardian's report on Twitter weren't surprised by the results of the new research:
"The Brown University study wasn't able to identify any individuals or groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of influence they have had around the often fraught climate debate," the Guardian noted. "However, a number of suspected bots that have consistently disparaged climate science and activists have large numbers of followers on Twitter."
Cognitive scientist John Cook, who has studied online climate misinformation, told the Guardian that bots are "dangerous and potentially influential" because previous research has shown "not just that misinformation is convincing to people but that just the mere existence of misinformation in social networks can cause people to trust accurate information less or disengage from the facts."
As Cook, a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, put it: "This is one of the most insidious and dangerous elements of misinformation spread by bots."
Naomi Oreskes is a Harvard University professor and science historian who also has studied climate misinformation, including an October 2019 report (pdf) co-authored by Cook about the fossil fuel industry's decades of efforts to mislead the American public. In a tweet Friday, Oreskes called the new research "important work" but added "I wish they'd published it before going to the media."
The Guardian report on Marlow and his colleagues' analysis came just a few months after the Trump administration formally began the one-year process of withdrawing from the Paris accord, which critics said sent "a signal to the world that there will be no leadership from the U.S. federal government on the climate crisis — a catastrophic message in a moment of great urgency."
The findings also came about a month after the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists issued a historic warning about the risk of global catastrophe by setting the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight. The bulletin warned in its statement announcing the clock's new time that "humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers — nuclear war and climate change — that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society's ability to respond."
"Focused attention is needed to prevent information technology from undermining public trust in political institutions, in the media, and in the existence of objective reality itself," the bulletin added. "Cyber-enabled information warfare is a threat to the common good. Deception campaigns — and leaders intent on blurring the line between fact and politically motivated fantasy — are a profound threat to effective democracies, reducing their ability to address nuclear weapons, climate change, and other existential dangers."
#) A quarter of all tweets about climate change are produced by bots
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.
The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise.
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An analysis of millions of tweets from around the period when Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science.
The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.
“These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement,” states the draft study, seen by the Guardian.
On an average day during the period studied, 25 percent of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics — bots were responsible for 38 percent of tweets about “fake science” and 28 percent of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.
Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5 percent prevalence. The findings “suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump’s announcement or skeptical of climate science and action,” the analysis states.
Thomas Marlow, a PhD candidate at Brown who led the study, said the research came about as he and his colleagues are “always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on.”
The researchers examined 6.5 million tweets posted in the days leading up to and the month after Trump announced the U.S. exit from the Paris accords on June 1, 2017. The tweets were sorted into topic category, with an Indiana University tool called Botometer used to estimate the probability the user behind the tweet is a bot.
Marlow said he was surprised that bots were responsible for a quarter of climate tweets on an average day. “I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,’” he said.
The consistent drumbeat of bot activity around climate topics is highlighted by the day of Trump’s announcement, when a huge spike in general interest in the topic saw the bot proportion drop by about half to 13 percent. Tweets by suspected bots did increase from hundreds a day to more than 25,000 a day during the days around the announcement but it wasn’t enough to prevent a fall in proportional share.
Trump has consistently spread misinformation about the climate crisis, most famously calling it “bullshit” and a “hoax”, although more recently the U.S. president has said he accepts the science that the world is heating up. Nevertheless, his administration has dismantled any major policy aimed at cutting planet-warming gases, including car emissions standards and restrictions on coal-fired power plants.
The Brown University study wasn’t able to identify any individuals or groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of influence they have had around the often fraught climate debate.
However, a number of suspected bots that have consistently disparaged climate science and activists have large numbers of followers on Twitter. One that ranks highly on the Botometer score, @sh_irredeemable, wrote “Get lost Greta!” in December, in reference to the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
This was followed by a tweet that doubted the world will reach a 9-billion population due to “#climatechange lunacy stopping progress”. The account has nearly 16,000 followers.
Another suspected bot, @petefrt, has nearly 52,000 followers and has repeatedly rejected climate science. “Get real, CNN: ‘Climate Change’ dogma is religion, not science,” the account posted in August. Another tweet from November called for the Paris agreement to be ditched in order to “reject a future built by globalists and European eco-mandarins.”
Twitter accounts spreading falsehoods about the climate crisis are also able to use the promoted tweets option available to those willing to pay for extra visibility. Twitter bans a number of things from its promoted tweets, including political content and tobacco advertising, but allows any sort of content, true or otherwise, on the climate crisis.
Research on internet blogs published last year found that climate misinformation is often spread due to readers’ perception of how widely this opinion is shared by other readers.
Stephan Lewandowsky, an academic at the University of Bristol who coauthored the research, said he was “not at all surprised” at the Brown University study due to his own interactions with climate-related messages on Twitter.
“More often than not, they turn out to have all the fingerprints of bots,” he said. “The more denialist trolls are out there, the more likely people will think that there is a diversity of opinion and hence will weaken their support for climate science.
“In terms of influence, I personally am convinced that they do make a difference, although this can be hard to quantify.”
John Cook, an Australian cognitive scientist and coauthor with Lewandowsky, said that bots are “dangerous and potentially influential,” with evidence showing that when people are exposed to facts and misinformation, they are often left misled.
“This is one of the most insidious and dangerous elements of misinformation spread by bots — not just that misinformation is convincing to people but that just the mere existence of misinformation in social networks can cause people to trust accurate information less or disengage from the facts,” Cook said.
Although Twitter bots didn’t ramp up significantly around the Paris withdrawal announcement, some advocates of action to tackle the climate crisis are wary of a spike in activity around the U.S. presidential election later this year.
“Even though we don’t know who they are, or their exact motives, it seems self-evident that Trump thrives on the positive reinforcement he receives from these bots and their makers,” said Ed Maibach, an expert in climate communication at George Mason University.
“It is terrifying to ponder the possibility that the POTUS was cajoled by bots into committing an atrocity against humanity.”
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