They might know about it in concept, heard about it before, even if most people here haven’t. But they probably couldn’t tell real people from fake bots so easily, so fast to know they’ve been swamped within 24 hours before deciding to pull out.
I don’t see any reason to think that. They’re not just like “hey twitter! Look at all these people, wtf?” It’s an integral part of modern marketing. People study this stuff, and they have experts in it working for them, because… if they understand it they can make money off it and they can make money for their clients. My supposition is that they understand it and would not likely be fooled by previously known forms of manipulation, for which I have not seen any evidence presented by the way.
[quote=“jotham, post:43, topic:159640, full:true”]
They might know about it in concept, heard about it before, even if most people here haven’t.[/quote]
You should offer to work for them. With your expertise, you’ll rise to the top in no time! 
It has been noted and reported that Twitter activity was what spearheaded the campaign, and it was speedy, and advertisers pulled ads within 24 hours. In that amount of time, they couldn’t have done tests to distinguish real and fake accounts, so obviously they didn’t try; they just assumed it was a spontaneous protest of huge numbers of people, shame on them, but doesn’t surprise me, people aren’t so smart as you suggest.
This would be a very dishonest way for a company to make money, by faking interest with fake accounts to mislead people to buy their products. It must surely be illegal, false advertising, or something. If it were known any company were engaging in this, it would be a huge put-off.
But just the fact that it all transpired within 24 hours lends credibility that cool heads were not prevailing and certainly accounts couldn’t have been tested in that amount of time. And again, large numbers of people aren’t gonna do this in 24 hours. Democrats are a minority; they aren’t so much a majority as you might like to think to overcome and outnumber the viewership of his popular show. Moreover, we all know the character of Democrats. There is no bottom Democrats would stoop to. This is easily done, and there are no Democrat ethics that would effectively bar or prevent its being done. Of course they did it.
MILES O’BRIEN:…Thanks to a candidate who prefers campaigning in 140-character spurts, the social networking platform has become an essential political forum. What could go wrong with that? Plenty. Tweeters, beware.
FILIPPO MENCZER, Indiana University: Because so much of the opinions that we form and the information that we digest comes from social networks and social media, it is possible to try and manipulate the network to control opinions.
MILES O’BRIEN: Filippo Menczer is director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems at Indiana University. He says the junction of the political and computer sciences is a dangerous place for democracy.
FILIPPO MENCZER: Just like people have tried to influence elections forever without social media, why wouldn’t they also try with social media? Just like any other tool and technology, it can be used for good things and it can also be manipulated or abused.
Clever bots, employed in a stealthy, strategic manner, can put a virtual finger on the scale of political discourse. Bots generated a huge volume of tweets pro and con during the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. They also promoted candidates in the 2014 India elections. ISIS uses bots to amplify propaganda by creating thousands of phony accounts.
FILIPPO MENCZER: It’s like very easy to create one or 10 or 100 or 1,000 accounts controlled by that campaign and make it look like these are just regular people who are expressing their freedom of speech.
PHIL HOWARD: The real problem here is that not all users can tell when the content that comes up in their social media feed is actually generated by these bots.
It’s very difficult to know what the overall impact is on public opinion, but we do know that most Americans can’t distinguish these bots from real users.
MILES O’BRIEN: It’s hard enough for computer scientists and, for that matter, Twitter itself. The company admits 8.5 percent of its accounts are updated with no discernible human action.
But that includes useful applications like TweetDeck, as well as harmful bots. Finding them is a challenge. Menczer and his team are working on this. They visualize Twitter traffic, helping them find accounts that look and act suspiciously nonhuman.
FILIPPO MENCZER: Very often, there are patterns that we can still discern. They’re not necessarily easy for the human eye, but, sometimes, the machine-learning algorithms, by looking at over 1,000 features, they can recognize some patterns that make one particular account similar to other bots.
But, tweeter, beware of the more nefarious bots that lurk out there in the Twitterverse. What may seem like a viral grassroots movement can be nothing more than an empty field covered with Astroturf. So, take a moment to check before you retweet.
What’s so hard to imagine fake bots, which are easily employed by professionals, being utilized in this situation? The only obstacle is ethics, and we’re talking about Democrats here. We already know Twitter and online activism is involved in this, and just add the magic ingredient, Democrats, and viola, you got dishonesty trying to overcome democracy at every turn. It would only be hard to imagine because you don’t want to.
The remaining advertisers are under pressure from online activists. Social media campaign Sleeping Giants got started rallying followers to get advertisers to leave right-wing site Breitbart and is now going after O’Reilly’s sponsors. Their Twitter feeds are filling up with tweets asking them to pull their commercials from the show.
This is beginning to sound like the kind of horror movie where first strangers turn out to be bots, then acquaintances, then friends, and finally you look in the mirror and realize you’re turning into a bot too! 
We must find the other nine botmasters, or all is lost…
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Maybe the three Bills should get their own cable show, The Threesome. They could focus on bots, bimbo eruptions and other issues facing billness in the feminist era.
When I was young, I too had a childlike faith in the rationality and realism of decision makers.
To learn the truth of how human beings actually work, google “bounded rationality.”
That’s interesting. I was never so delusional to think that people are actually motivated by blatantly imaginary crap somebody made up.
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it:
BTW, they’re coming after Hannity now.
A reminder: when only the left read Alinsky, they had a huge advantage. But the rest of the political spectrum has been wising up lately. The Donald used Alinskyite tactics and they worked for him. So that advantage is evaporating.
New determiner: control over the Internet. That battle is very much underway right now. Hence Twitter mobbing. Whatever the left stoops to, it will only work until the right wises up and stoops to it as well. It’s a race to the bottom, and one side has always got a head start.
Culture of civility my arse.
And wait until the left realizes Fox News is dispensable.
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Yes, that is absolutely right. The left began it, the right is wising up to it, and when that happens, they’re beat all over again. The left use tactics to cheat because democracy ain’t going their way. Then the right uses their cheating back at them to appropriate democracy and set it aright again.
That’s one of the best posts I’ve seen. I tried to convey that, but you did it much better.
I hope that’s sarcasm.
I left atheism long ago, but I can’t deny some valuable insights into human nature came from that phase of my life. People love to believe bullshit. Advertisers know this well. The only delusion here is when they think they’re the exception to the rule. (Likewise atheists.)
By the way, O’Reilly’s ratings were pretty solid the last few days. What is it advertisers are supposed to care about again?
Naw, it’s not about the advertisers. Like I said, that could easily be weathered as it isn’t based on reality. If people were willing to fight, this wouldn’t be the news.
This is more about internal politics. The New York Times says it was the son who pressed for O’Reilly’s release, as well as responsible for Ailes going out to boot.
It was James Murdoch — the one looking so unperturbed at the NatGeo presentation, posing for photos as waiters milled about in yellow suspenders and guests ate skirt steak and shrimp cocktail — who had most aggressively moved against Mr. O’Reilly. The same had happened in July, when Roger Ailes, who founded Fox News with Rupert Murdoch, was forced to resign amid his own sexual harassment scandal.
Megyn Kelly is responsible for stirring up much of the trouble as well (and I’m not just referring to her sexual allegations). I’ve always had uncomfortable feelings about her, more than anyone else there. I absolutely love Gretchen Susteren and Judge Pirrho, very smart, yet great humble attitude with it; I very much identify with those two. Megyn is smart, but I hated something about her attitude her comportment, the way she presented news just made me wanna turn it off; I felt like she wasn’t one of us even though she was saying the right things; I couldn’t put my finger on it. When Trump ripped into her, I was so glad. As for O’Reilly, I think he’s so-so, but never watched any show from front to back. But I firmly believe Megyn’s behind a lot of this as well (when she was still there).
Not sarcasm at all, why would it be?
My god, I guess if you have a completely one-sided perspective on issues things can go whooshing through the middle on you. People love to believe bullshit, very good, congratulations for figuring that out. The bullshit here however is this narrative of fake bots which have not been demonstrated to exist in this case, topped by the incredible supposition that people making their living from advertising wouldn’t understand that issue, if it even occurred in this case, which I won’t believe until I see some evidence of it.
Advertisers care about making money. Being an idiot tarnishes other people by association. Very bad for business.
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Advertisers aren’t gonna really care if it’s true of false. They’re not going to investigate it, analyze it, and all that – because they aren’t so invested in it. If there is the appearance of controversy, that’s enough to scare them. They can park their money in many places; conservative or liberal, what do they care? They don’t care so much about the truth of the matter. They don’t see themselves being deluded as such, as someone from a conservative point of view who’s looking at the field of politics. Advertisers aren’t political enough to care about political calculation, strategy, cheating, activism, etc, in the pursuit of “truth.” They just don’t wanna be caught in the middle. You’re trying to make them the gatekeepers, guarding against political intrigue – it’s nothing of the sort.
It is up to Fox to convince them what’s up and that their money is indeed well spent, and as I’m saying, they weren’t trying, for whatever reason O’Reilly went off to Italy. If he were in fighting posture, that wouldn’t be happening.
Sometimes skepticism is a defense mechanism. That’s why I resist when they try to force the burden of proof down upon my shoulders.
While others argue about what constitutes evidence or proof, the people who matter pursue proof by physical demonstration, making their appeal to the hindsight of the future. You do what works, and let others either accept it or try to explain it away.
Many times in my life, I’ve been in a position to say told-you-so. It gets old. But sometimes people wouldn’t admit I was right even after my predictions came to pass and they had come to ruin. I left them to their rationalizations and moved on. Can’t save people from themselves.
For example, Clinton is still looking for people other than herself to blame. Hindsight is not always 20/20.
Meanwhile, Trump never really won a formal debate with Clinton. And it didn’t matter, because the debates didn’t matter. Just like this one doesn’t matter.
The political landscape will continue to shift, with or without Bill O’Reilly, and with or without Fox News. Even The Donald is somewhat expendable. The smart people are few, but not that few.
I think it’s a matter of you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. I have provided the dots with articles and explanations of the phenomena, but you have to connect them, put on your thinking cap, think the matter through. Education is partly to blame for not teaching us to think, conclude, but to accept as “proof” when some “expert” can tell us what we should think.
What is the high standard of “proof”? Those advertising companies buying expensive testing methods and showing you the data? The bot managers themselves revealing their nefarious activity? You’re not gonna get that, you just have to be smart and figure it out.
I’ve been familiar with this concept a long time, so it’s a natural explanation, not a leap of faith at all, you just know what kind of situations these things are going to be fitted into. Half the Internet is bots.
Here are the dots, Twitter (BIG dot!), online activism, Democrats, 24 hours of wild internet activity that humans are incapable of, huge numbers. It’s almost crazy to not conclude it was bots/fake accounts.
But again, I think this is a red herring, because it’s just a mirage, and Fox just weren’t fighting this, they were letting it happen. Inside politics is the ultimate cause of this.
Here Rolling Stones practically telegraphs their intentions. Of course not mentioning the fake accounts part, whether they are conscious or not of the fact, that’s the blank you have to fill in.
The activists who organized the hugely successful Women’s March on Washington have been advocating a boycott online, encouraging their nearly 500,000 Twitter followers to share their stories of workplace harassment using #DropOReilly. (The hashtag had garnered some 39 million impressions in just two days, according to the analytics companyKeyhole.)
The group Sleeping Giants, leaders of a months-long campaign targeting companies whose advertisements appear on Breitbart.com, launched an O’Reilly boycott Tuesday after fielding a torrent of requests on Twitter.
“As of this morning, people were just outright demanding it of us,” a spokesman for the anonymous group of media professionals who manage the account tells Rolling Stone. They’re now in the process of of assembling a list of O’Reilly Factor advertisers and a series of O’Reilly fact graphics that their 80,000 followers can tweet at sponsors of the show.
“We think it falls in line with what we’ve been doing with Breitbart, which is informing advertisers,” he says. “Instead of just saying, ‘Get off Bill O’Reilly’s show,’ we’re trying to give them information … about Bill O’Reilly’s past.” They plan to tweet out a few of the graphics a day. That strategy has worked for Sleeping Giants in its campaign against Breitbart – more than 1,750 companies whose ads had previously appeared on the far-right news site have now blocked it from their ad buys.
Another interesting, pertinent dot
However, @ilduce2016 wasn’t just a robot. It was also an activist, one of a growing number fighting in the political battles that are increasingly waged online. Across social media, and especially enlightened platforms such as Twitter that recognise bots as legitimate members of the community, robots are being used not to manufacture cars, but to try to manufacture political consent. We are living through the rise of automated activism.
At their best, these digital placard-holders have a two-fold edge over their fleshy, human counterparts. First, their sheer volume. Bots can shout constantly, tirelessly and indefinitely; in other words, they can be inhumanly loud. In early June 2016, as the UK’s EU referendum campaign gathered pace, researchers Philip N Howard and Bence Kollanyi judged that a third of all Twitter traffic concerning Brexit was most likely caused by bots, because “it is difficult for human users to maintain this rapid pace of Twitter activity”.
…Scale can beget scale. Bots can be programmed to make other bots, which means that it is entirely possible to raise an army of them. There are around 26 million on Twitter alone, and these legions often join together into networks called botnets. This ease of production makes them cheap: you can buy tens of thousands on Twitter for a few pounds to faithfully retweet your messages. Tom Feltwell is a British researcher who studies activist bots and runs botmaking workshops. “Making a bot is really quite easy,” he says. “With a bit of entry-level tech knowledge you can do something quite powerful politically.”
I don’t think we are arguing about the feasibility of bots. But just the context you are trying to say bots were used.
I do too. I think they know bots can be used for this/are used for this. They just don’t think Democrats are that dishonest. That’s a different problem.
Exactly. Just because something exists doesn’t mean it has any application here. If matters are as Jotham described, with massive numbers of bots being applied, it should be easy to prove, right? I don’t think you have to be a mensa member to figure that out. Typical conspiracy theory type thinking being applied here. Something looks odd–I would like to think something occurred–I have no proof but I’ll say it anyway. The argument you make when you have no proof but would desperately like to think that something happened. Let me know when it can actually be demonstrated in some way.
Blanket assertions about “Democrats” as if they were some massive block of clones also demonstrate a lack of any form of reasoned analysis being applied to the situation.