Twitter Bots: Usefulness Questioned
July 27, 2018
Twitter Bots have become the junk mail of the digital era. We get harassed and prodded by these autonomous accounts. Whether you are a celebrity or an average joe, you have likely been confronted by artificially intelligent Tweets that are tough to determine validity. We learned about an interesting way to combat this phenomenon from a recent Zero Hedge story, “Researchers Unmask Anonymous Twitter Accounts with 97% Accuracy Using Machine Learning.”
According to the story:
“For users who occasionally engage in anonymous tweeting, this revelation shouldn’t go unacknowledged. In their study, the researchers discovered that their most basic algorithm could correctly identify an individual user in a group of 10,000 using just 14 pieces of metadata from their posts on twitter nearly 96.7% of the time. Furthermore, attempts to obscure the individuals’ identity by tampering with the data were remarkably ineffective.”
Finally, we are getting to a stage where human intelligence is outwitting the artificial brand. These researchers are not alone, as was made big news recently, Twitter purged millions of accounts linked to bots recently. This is good news for regular folks, but also for retailers who now can have a more legitimate pedestal to stand on. It might be optimistic, but life seems to be inching closer toward the old definition of “normal.”
Patrick Roland, July 27, 2018
Twitter: A Brief Guide
March 12, 2018
Twitter continues to be of interest to some of the professionals with whom the addled goose speaks. The ease with which social media can be manipulated is becoming better understood. (Note: Few ask why the algorithms used by some social media outfits are vulnerable, but that’s a question which will follow as understanding increases.)
Social media is constantly changing and just as soon as you are familiar with one search technique it is replaced with another. Twitter is not the most popular social media platform, but it continues to hold its own against Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
In some ways, Twitter is very much like other communication platforms. An “official handbook” has to be assembled by a persistent reader of blog posts, books on Amazon, and information presented in the comments to Hacker News or Reddit, however.
Now a content centric company like Espirian has drafted its own guides that share the in’s and out’s of social media, especially the best ways to search the social Web sites. Espirian wrote the, “Twitter Search: Advance Guide 2018” to help bloggers and other content curators become Twitter search experts.
Here is a short description of the guide:
“Whether you’re researching blog ideas, looking for work or just trying to find out what’s going on near you, the advanced features of Twitter search will help you find the content you need.
We noted that one useful way to to search Twitter is to access the Tweetdeck. The Tweetdeck, an app which allows its users to have a bird’s eye view of their Twitter accounts, their own tweets, others’ tweets, and their news feed. Another way to search Twitter is to access the advanced search option.
For some researchers the difficulty of performing advanced searches is frustrating. Twitter has resisted adding some metadata to its users’ accounts. Despite its quirks, Twitter can be useful for analysts, marketers, and some researchers.
Whitney Grace, March 12, 2018
Facebook and Twitter: Battle Platforms
February 16, 2018
Social media is, according to an analysis by Lt. Col Jarred Prier (USAF), is a component of information warfare. “Commanding the Trend: Social Media As Information Warfare” explains how various actions can function as a lever for action and ideas. Highly recommended. The analysis suggests that social media is more than a way to find a companion and keep up with the kids.
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2018
EU Considers Making Platforms Pay for News Content
February 13, 2018
European journalists are sick of giant internet companies profiting from their labor without recompense, we learn from Yahoo News’ article, “Net Giants ‘Must Pay for News’ From Which They Make Billions.” The declaration from nine press agencies comes in support of a proposed EU directive that would require companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to pay for the articles that bring so much ad revenue to their platforms. The write-up shares part of the agencies’ plea:
Facebook has become the biggest media in the world,” the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde. “Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom… They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe’s departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground. Access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth,” the agencies argued. “At the end of the chain, informing the public costs a lot of money.
News, the declaration added, is the second reason after catching up on family and friends for people to log onto Facebook, which tripled its profits to $10 billion (€8.5 billion) last year. Yet it is the giants of the net who are reaping vast profits “from other people’s work” by soaking up between 60 and 70 percent of advertising revenue, with Google’s jumping by a fifth in a year. Meanwhile, ad revenue for news media fell nine percent in France alone last year, “a disaster for the industry”.
Indeed it is. And, we are reminded, a robust press is crucial for democracy itself. Some attempts have been made in France, Germany, and Spain to obtain compensation from these companies, but the limited results were disappointing. The press agencies suggest granting journalists “related rights” copyrights and assure a concerned Parliament that citizens will still be able to access information for free online. The only difference, they insist, would be that an appropriate chunk of that ad revenue will go to the people who actually researched and created the content. That sounds reasonable to this writer.
Cynthia Murrell, February 13, 2018
Twitter Changes API Offerings and Invites Trouble
December 8, 2017
Twitter has beefed up its API offerings to users, but it comes with an increasing price tag. While that is not a huge issue for many people, it will invite some problem if not played properly. We discovered this interesting change in a recent Venture Beat piece, “Twitter’s New Premium APIs Give Developers Access to More Tweets, Higher Rate Limits.”
According to the story:
Twitter is offering a solution for developers who are angry about limitations imposed on their apps when they use the service’s free APIs. The company has now introduced premium APIs to bridge the gap between the free service and the enterprise-level tools it provides through Gnip.
Developers will likely welcome this solution, though many will also say it’s long overdue. After the company’s mea culpa at its Flight conference in 2015, Twitter has made efforts to understand developers’ needs and has reallocated resources, including selling its Fabric mobile developer platform to Google.
Time will tell if this uptick in API accessibility will help Twitter financially. The company has long been seeking a financial home run since going public. While there are several ways APIs can solve outside problems and bring stability to a company, this can also fall flat on its face. Especially if developers don’t want to pay the fees or if the APIs don’t live up to the hype. Fingers crossed.
Patrick Roland, December 8, 2017
Google Search and Hot News: Sensitivity and Relevance
November 10, 2017
I read “Google Is Surfacing Texas Shooter Misinformation in Search Results — Thanks Also to Twitter.” What struck me about the article was the headline; specifically, the implication for me was that Google was not responding to user queries. Google is actively “surfacing” or fetching and displaying information about the event. Twitter is also involved. I don’t think of Twitter as much more than a party line. One can look up keywords or see a stream of content containing a keyword or a, to use Twitter speak, “hash tags.”
The write up explains:
Users of Google’s search engine who conduct internet searches for queries such as “who is Devin Patrick Kelley?” — or just do a simple search for his name — can be exposed to tweets claiming the shooter was a Muslim convert; or a member of Antifa; or a Democrat supporter…
I think I understand. A user inputs a term and Google’s system matches the user’s query to the content in the Google index. Google maintains many indexes, despite its assertion that it is a “universal search engine.” One has to search across different Google services and their indexes to build up a mosaic of what Google has indexed about a topic; for example, blogs, news, the general index, maps, finance, etc.
Developing a composite view of what Google has indexed takes time and patience. The results may vary depending on whether the user is logged in, searching from a particular geographic location, or has enabled or disabled certain behind the scenes functions for the Google system.
The write up contains this statement:
Safe to say, the algorithmic architecture that underpins so much of the content internet users are exposed to via tech giants’ mega platforms continues to enable lies to run far faster than truth online by favoring flaming nonsense (and/or flagrant calumny) over more robustly sourced information.
From my point of view, the ability to figure out what influences Google’s search results requires significant effort, numerous test queries, and recognition that Google search now balances on two pogo sticks. Once “pogo stick” is blunt force keyword search. When content is indexed, terms are plucked from source documents. The system may or may not assign additional index terms to the document; for example, geographic or time stamps.
The other “pogo stick” is discovery and assignment of metadata. I have explained some of the optional tags which Google may or may not include when processing a content object; for example, see the work of Dr. Alon Halevy and Dr. Ramanathan Guha.
But Google, like other smart content processing today, has a certain sensitivity. This means that streams of content processed may contain certain keywords.
When “news” takes place, the flood of content allows smart indexing systems to identify a “hot topic.” The test queries we ran for my monographs “The Google Legacy” and “Google Version 2.0” suggest that Google is sensitive to certain “triggers” in content. Feedback can be useful; it can also cause smart software to wobble a bit.
T shirts are easy; search is hard.
I believe that the challenge Google faces is similar to the problem Bing and Yandex are exploring as well; that is, certain numerical recipes can over react to certain inputs. These over reactions may increase the difficulty of determining what content object is “correct,” “factual,” or “verifiable.”
Expecting a free search system, regardless of its owner, to know what’s true and what’s false is understandable. In my opinion, making this type of determination with today’s technology, system limitations, and content analysis methods is impossible.
In short, the burden of figuring out what’s right and what’s not correct falls on the user, not exclusively on the search engine. Users, on the other hand, may not want the “objective” reality. Search vendors want traffic and want to generate revenue. Algorithms want nothing.
Mix these three elements and one takes a step closer to understanding that search and retrieval is not the slam dunk some folks would have me believe. In fact, the sensitivity of content processing systems to comparatively small inputs requires more discussion. Perhaps that type of information will come out of discussions about how best to deal with fake news and related topics in the context of today’s information retrieval environment.
Free search? Think about that too.
Stephen E Arnold, November 10, 2017
Twitter Customer Support and Access Control
November 6, 2017
I noted that an alleged employee of Twitter allegedly terminated the Twitter account of the alleged real Donald J. Trump. I scanned a number of news stories about this incident. I representative example is “A Rogue Twitter Employee Shut Down Donald Trump’s Account.” Now that’s access control. But what I found intriguing was an article on a Web site charmingly named Weasel Zipper. That site’s story was “Twitter Employee Who Deactivated Trump’s Account Was Not A Full-Time Employee, Rather A Contractor.” Perhaps Weasel Zipper was influenced by the New York Times’ story from November 4, 2017, which offered the “contractor did it” information? Who knows? The interesting angle for me is that Twitter has controls which allow an employee in “customer service” to kill an account. From my point of view, that’s “real” customer service and exemplary access control. What else can Twitter customer support do with regard to users, access, content, and filtering? Probably nothing: Just a fluke in a well-managed company.
Stephen E Arnold, November 5, 2017
Social Media Should Be Social News
October 18, 2017
People are reading news more than ever due to easy information access on the Internet. While literacy rates soar, where people are reading news stories has changed from traditional news outlets to something comparatively newer and quite questionable. According to Pew Research, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017,” people are obtaining their news stories from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. The Pew Research survey discovered that 67% of Americans get some of their news from social media, which has grown from 62% in 2016. The growth comes from people who are older, nonwhite and are less educated. That is an interesting statistic about American social groups:
Furthermore, about three-quarters of nonwhites (74%) get news on social media sites, up from 64% in 2016. This growth means that nonwhites1 are now more likely than whites to get news while on social media. And social media news use also increased among those with less than a bachelor’s degree, up nine percentage points from 60% in 2016 to 69% in 2017. Alternatively, among those with at least a college degree, social media news use declined slightly.
The information is different from what Pew Research has recorded in the past and there are two ways to interpret the data: compare the share of each social media’s users that get news on that specific Web site and the total percentage of Americans that get news on social media sites. Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube she a significant growth in user shared news and these directly correspond to investments the companies made to in developing their usability. Facebook remains the number one social media Web site that distributes news, while YouTube is a close second. The data also shows that users visit multiple social media sites to read the news, but that they also rely on traditional news platforms as well.
Social media is a major component to how people communicate with the world around them. Perhaps traditional news outlets should look at ways to incorporate themselves more into social media. Will Facebook, YouTube, and/or Twitter hire journalists in the future?
Whitney Grace, October 18, 2017
European Tweets Analyzed for Brexit Sentiment
September 28, 2017
The folks at Expert System demonstrate their semantic intelligence chops with an analysis of sentiments regarding Brexit, as expressed through tweets. The company shares their results in their press release, “The European Union on Twitter, One Year After Brexit.” What are Europeans feeling about that major decision by the UK? The short answer—fear. The write-up tells us:
One year since the historical referendum vote that sanctioned Britain’s exit from the European Union (Brexit, June 23, 2016), Expert System has conducted an analysis to verify emotions and moods prevalent in thoughts expressed online by citizens. The analysis was conducted on Twitter using the cognitive Cogito technology to analyze a sample of approximately 160,000 tweets in English, Italian, French, German and Spanish related to Europe (more than 65,000 tweets for #EU, #Europe…) and Brexit (more than 95,000 tweets for #brexit…) posted between May 21 – June 21, 2017. Regarding the emotional sphere of the people, the prevailing sentiment was fear followed by desire as a mood for intensely seeking something, but without a definitive negative or positive connotation. The analysis revealed a need for more energy (action), and, in an atmosphere that seems to be dominated by a general sense of stress, the tweets also showed many contrasts: modernism and traditionalism, hope and remorse, hatred and love.
The piece goes on to parse responses by language, tying priorities to certain countries. For example, those tweeting in Italian often mentioned “citizenship”, while tweets in German focused largely on “dignity” and “solidarity.” The project also evaluates sentiment regarding several EU leaders. Expert System was founded back in 1989, and their Cogito office is located in London.
Cynthia Murrell, September 28, 2017
Let the Tweets Lead Your Marketing, Come What May
September 14, 2017
It seems that sales and marketing departments just can’t keep up with consumer patterns and behaviors. The latest example of this is explained in a DMA article outlining how to utilize social media to reach target leads. As people rely more on their own search and online acumen and less on professionals (IRL), marketing has to adjust.
Aseem Badshah, Founder, and CEO of Socedo, explain the problem and a possible solution:
Traditionally, B2B marketers created content based on the products they want to promote. Now that so much of the B2B decision making process occurs online, content has to be more customer-centric. The current set of website analytics tools provide some insights, but only on the audience who have already reached your website. Intent data from social media can help you make your content more relevant. By analyzing social media signals and looking at which signals are picking up in volume over time, you can gain new insights into your audience that helps you create more relevant content.
While everything Badshah says may be true, one has to ask themselves, is following the masses always a good thing? If a business wants to maintain their integrity to their field would it be in their best interest to follow the lead of their target demographic’s hashtags or work harder at marketing their product/service despite the apparent twitter-provided disinterest?
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 14, 2017
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