Language

Surveillance Capitalism Dictionary

They were inspired by hippies, but Orwell would fear them. The giants of Silicon Valley started out trying to outsmart The Man, and in the process became him. And so, surveillance capitalism got born. Such is the story of corruption since time immemorial.

This surveillance capitalism dictionary of surveillance is a work in progress! Check back for further updates!

TermDefinition
algorithmA set of instructions that programmers give to computers to run software and make decisions.
artificial intelligence (AI)
Bayes' Theorem
bioinformaticsA technical and computational subfield of genetics, concerned with the information and data encoded by our genes and genetic codes.
child machineAlan Turing's concept for developing an "adult brain" by creating a child brain and giving it an education
CHINOOKcheckers program that becomes the first time an AI wins an official world championship in a game of skill, in 1994
click-wrap
collateral behavioral data
common carrierA sort of hybrid public interest served by corporate promise of meeting a high bar of neutrality -- a historical precedent setby the early Bell system monopoly, and an issue of public-private strife today with the advent of the internet.
contracts of adhesion
cookiesSmall packets of data deposited by the vast majority of websites you visit, that store information in the browser as a way to extract intelligence about their users and visitors.
corpusIn Natural Language Processing, a compendium of words used to "train" the AI to understand patterns in new texts.
decision trees
Deep BlueChess program that beats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997
deep learning
evolutionary algorithms
Facebook
facial recognition
Flash Crash of 2010sudden drop of over $1 trillion in the E-Mini S&P 500 futures contract market via runaway feedback loop within a set of algorithmic traders
FLOPSfloating-point operations per second
Free BasicsFacebook's plan, via Internet.org, to provide limited free internet services in rural India (and elsewhere in the developing world).Controversy centers on the “limited” nature of the offering, which gives Facebook the power to select or reject individual websites and resources for inclusion.
genetic algorithms
GOFAI"Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence"
HLMIhuman-level machine intelligence: defined as being able to carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human
interoperability
Kolmogorov complexity
language translation
linear regression
machine learning
Markov chains
monopoly
NAFTA
natural language processing (NLP)A technology for processing and analyzing words
neofeudalism
net neutralityLegal and regulatory concept maintaining that Internet Service Providers must act as common carriers, allowing businesses and citizens to interoperate with the physical infrastructure of the communications network equally, without being subject to biased or exclusionary activities on the part of the network.
neural networks
netizens
"Online Eraser" law (CA)
patrimonial capitalism
Pegasus
phonemes
predatory lending
predictive analytics
privacy
private eminent domain
probability
prosody
qualia
r > gPiketty's insight
randomness
random walk
recommender systems
recursion
recursive learning
right to be forgottenWhen it became EU law in 2014, this groundbreaking legislation gave citizens the power to demand search engines remove pointers to content about them. It was the growing of a data rights movement in Europe that led later to GDPR.
SciKit
simulation
smart speakers
speech recognition
spyware
statistical modeling
strong vs. weak AI"weak AI" refers to algorithms designed to master a specific narrow domain of knowledge or problem-solving, vs. achieving a more general intelligence (strong AI)
supermajority
supervised learning
surplus data
TensorFlow
Tianhe-2The world's fastest supercomputer, developed in China, until it was surpassed in June 2016 by the also Chinese Sunway TaihuLight
Terms of Service
Twitter
unsupervised learning
WatsonIBM AI that defeats the two all-time greatest human Jeopardy! champions in 2010
WhatsApp
WTO
Zuccotti Park
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It feels odd to have to make these arguments for diversity, again, some centuries after the Enlightenment. And decades after Darwin, in whose name many fallacious opposite “interpretations” are levied.

Nevertheless, the evidence is there for us as it has always been. Diversity isn’t a bad thing — it’s a good thing. For populations, for economies, for problem solving, for all of us. The more options there are, the higher probability that one of them might be the right match, or the thing that solves the problem, or the best selection for the job at hand.

So there’s a strict mathematical component to the arguments for diversity, but beyond that many fields have weighed in on the utility and pragmatic value of diversity. This assortment is a work in progress I’ll continue to add to over time:

  • In biology, more diverse populations are more resilient to a wider variety of changes. This resilience is one of the best arguments for diversity of all.
  • The best investment portfolio, generally speaking, is the one that is most diversified.
  • In business, a diversity of new ideas leads to better decision-making and increased innovation; studies show a diverse workforce, as well as a diverse board, nets better results and outperforms their more conformist cousins.
  • Cross-pollination is generative
  • Range adds resilience
  • Condorcet jury theorem: the more people there are making a decision, the more right it will be. Plurality makes better decisions. See also: wisdom of crowds
  • Law of large numbers: the more data points you have, the more accurate your distribution will be.
  • A large number of independent transactions helps economies function properly and grow. We speak of the economy “moving” and finding many touchpoints to do business on.

Diversity unhinges us because it unmasks our hidden assumption that if we all look the same, we will think the same and thereby avoid conflict.
Deep down, we still secretly hope that we can avoid having to deal with our differences by magically generating conformity.

Our unspoken wish is that, by being identical, we achieve the harmony and collective togetherness we so deeply crave — the collective harmony we mistake for God.

Diversity outcompetes monoculture

The opposite of diversity is monoculture… and inbreeding. Monoculture represents sameness, stasis, and stagnation — the system or culture feels fairly dull and stale.

Most people like a certain level of variety in their lives. Some though, have great aversion to difference, change, or both. Authoritarian personalities tend to dislike difference, while individuals with conservative ideology tend to dislike change.

One of the more relatable arguments for diversity stems from the fact that a majority of people enjoy and benefit from diverse points of view, experiences, community members, and beyond.

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GOP angry elephants

Only 7 out of 50 among them are patriots — the rest, cowards and knaves who continue to seek destruction of this republic out of self-interest and an authoritarian’s need to dominate others. Today’s impeachment vote of acquittal for Trump‘s role in the January 6 insurrection was brutal but of course, not surprising. It highlighted once again something that’s been hiding in plain sight for some time — that the Republican Party is a criminal organization that thinks of itself and its members as being above the law.

“Law and Order” is just another Big Lie

It’s used to cover up quite the opposite — criminality, entitlement, sadism, and a zeal for the domination of others. Including both the violent insurrectionist kind and the pasty jowly turtly slow walking kind on the right wing. The GOP is an insult to the rule of law.

https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1360092604919128064?s=20

There is no best time to impeach a president

Unfortunately the spineless toothless Republican Senators defanged the Constitution today, by casting into doubt its power to achieve healthy checks and balances between the branches of government. They gleefully gave up the role of Congress in moderating the chief executive — to the probable detriment of us all.

As usual, they performed a series of timeline hacks, rhetorical games, and parliamentary tricks that resulting in the “logical” impossibility of ever successfully impeaching a US president. They are masters at avoiding responsibility for their actions, and fiercely protect their own, even despite heinous crimes.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his merry band of “institutionalists” and “originalists” have managed to do more damage to our institutions than any other Republican administration, and that’s truly saying something.

In addition to sowing doubt about our elections, throwing SCOTUS and the courts under the bus despite having packed them with conservative judges and loyalists for years, damaging our sovereignty and our national security, and impugning our reputation with nations around the world, they’ve managed to turn the United States into a kleptocracy. It’s official: the Republican Party is a criminal organization.

Let the DOJ do its work

Even Trump’s own lawyer advocated for it, along with McConnell. Though he can’t be trusted and will surely have tricks up his sleeve, it would be cathartic to see Attorney General Merrick Garland and the much-maligned Department of Justice bring down the largest RICO case in the history of history. I hope that karma brings justice to all of them, regardless of the actual outcome here and now.

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January 6: A Day that will live in ignominy. The day Capitol riots broke out when an angry mob, following instructions from Donald Trump, stormed the halls of Congress and came within minutes of a potential hostage situation or worse: a massacre.

I’m still processing the events of Wednesday, as are many. Even though I fully anticipated something horrifying given the utter obviousness of the confrontation brewing, I did not have a particular picture in mind of what that thing was going to be.

Despite having steeled myself for the past 4+ years, I wept many times at some of the imagery and video footage. The defilement of the people’s halls by a violent armed mob who took selfies with Capitol Police was just not something I could have conceived of.

There must be accountability

This was one of the darkest days of our nation. Even during the Civil War the Confederates never stormed the US Capitol, so to see the Confederate flag waving in Congress was a desecration. It twisted me up to have such a raw display of America’s deepest gash of white supremacist history taken symbolically and literally to the nation’s capital.

This event was broadcast around the world, to our allies and to our enemies. We received rebukes from Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. We — the supposed bastion of democracy. The country that lectures other nations around the world on how to do democracy better. We have been humiliated for the entire planet to see.

We need answers about what happened here. The people deserve to know who planned this, who helped this along, who looked the other away, and perhaps most importantly: who still agrees with it (Hawley and Cruz, for one — they must go).

We must stop fascism in America

The rot of fascism has been allowed to spread to the point where a violent mob of white supremacists, QAnon conspiracy nuts, MAGA faithful and a demon’s host of all stripes came within minutes of taking hostages inside the chambers of Congress. Five people lost their lives and already are being made into martyrs.

This did not begin with Trump, but he certainly amplified the signal at a much more psychotic rate than under previous administrations, certainly of my lifetime. We are now at a dangerous precipice: in a time of staggering wealth inequality, a once in a century health crisis largely being ignored by the right wing, deeply bitter partisanship played out over decades, the creep of authoritarianism around the world — and now at home.

Wednesday’s Capitol Riots did essentially mark the “crossing of the Rubicon” that the Trump cult begged him to do — it was a coming-out day for fascism. It was the President of the United States instructing an armed mob to walk up to the Capitol where lawmakers were certifying the election for the guy who won it, and telling them to “take our country back” and give it to him — by force if necessary. Which, of course, was necessary.

That is the Rubicon — the Rubicon is the willingness to use political violence when you have exhausted all other legal, shady, illegal, and hideously criminal means. That is the fascist twist. If we do not react now; if we do not censure, remove, and allow justice to hold these individuals accountable — both inside and outside of the government — they will take it as permission to try again and again until we deal with this.

We must hold the insurrectionists accountable — if we are to keep this republic.

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I try to be choosy about my news as well as reading widely. I make it a habit to routinely consult sources outside the US, know the ethics of the outlets I most rely on, and try to mix up the types of media ownership and format (newspaper, TV, podcast, website, radio, etc.) to avoid a monolithic class or other point of view on any particular subject or issue. Some of the media sources I trust for valuable perspectives are in the table below.

Other habits: trying to corroborate stories amongst multiple publications; evaluate the credibility of authors and references; read source material; do my own calculations; consult public data when available; go back further into history to understand the trajectory of preceding events; keep listening for new information on the subject. Adjust my views based on new incoming information, if warranted. Keep an eye out for disinformation or other skewed presentations of fact.

Good journalism matters

Having worked in media for most of my career, I have a lot of practice evaluating the quality and veracity of reporting. Cross-referencing comes second nature. I’ve studied the media industry as a professional imperative and understand a bit about its ownership structures and its history, both technical and economic. As a political philosophy buff, I’m aware of the great importance of a free press to our democratic republic.

I appreciate a tight headline, a profound topic, and bold investigation as well as imaginative prose and pithy information. We need the intrepid courage of the press, particularly in these times of demagoguery, kleptocracy, hucksterism, and Zucksterism. The fourth estate has helped us find our better angels in the past, and there’s no reason to think it can’t assist us once again to get better transparency into the bigger picture and big histories behind today’s otherwise chaotic and overwhelming political landscape.

NameCountryFundingYear foundedAgeLink
The GuardianUKPrivate1821203https://www.theguardian.com/
The EconomistUKPrivate1843181https://www.economist.com/
Scientific AmericanUSPrivate1845179https://www.nature.com/
Associated PressUSNonprofit1846178https://apnews.com/
The New York TimesUSPrivate1851173https://www.nytimes.com/
ReutersUSPrivate1851173https://www.reuters.com/
The Daily TelegraphUKPrivate1855169https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
The AtlanticUSPrivate1857167https://www.theatlantic.com/
NatureUSPrivate1869155https://www.nature.com/
The Washington PostUSPrivate1877147https://www.washingtonpost.com/
LA TimesUSPrivate1881143https://www.latimes.com/
Financial TimesUKPrivate1888136https://www.ft.com/
The New RepublicUSPrivate1914110https://newrepublic.com/
BBCUKPublic1922102https://www.bbc.com/news
TimeUSPrivate1923101https://time.com/
The New YorkerUSPrivate192599https://www.newyorker.com/
CBCCanadaPublic193688https://www.cbc.ca/news/world
SpiegelEUPrivate194777https://www.spiegel.de/international/
Radio Free EuropeEUPublic194975https://www.rferl.org/
New ScientistUKPrivate195668https://www.newscientist.com/
Rolling StoneUSPrivate196757https://www.rollingstone.com/
PBSUSPublic196955https://www.pbs.org/
Foreign PolicyUSPrivate197054https://www.euronews.com/
NPRUSPublic197054https://www.npr.org/
Greg PalastUSIndependent197648https://www.gregpalast.com/
C-SPANUSPublic197945https://www.c-span.org/
CNNUSPrivate198044https://www.cnn.com/
The IndependentUKPrivate198638https://www.independent.co.uk/us
Sky NewsUKPrivate198638https://news.sky.com/
EuronewsEUPrivate199331https://www.euronews.com/
MSNBCUSPrivate199628https://www.msnbc.com/
International Consortium of Investigative JournalistsUSNonprofit199727https://icij.org
VoxUSPrivate200519https://www.vox.com/
PoliticoUSPrivate200717https://www.politico.com/
BellingcatEUIndependent201410https://www.bellingcat.com/
Gaslit NationUSCrowdfunding20159https://www.patreon.com/m/1844970/posts
AxiosUSPrivate20177https://www.axios.com/
Just SecurityUSAcademic20177https://www.justsecurity.org/
The ConversationalistUSNonprofit20195https://conversationalist.org/
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Boiling frog syndrome is a metaphor that refers to the creep of some insidious process that sinks in slowly and only becomes apparent over time. In it, a frog in increasingly hot water will not attempt escape as long as the temperature is increased gradually. It happens a little bit at a time, until the poor frog meets its end, in the end.

Scientifically, the fable is on poor footing — most frogs would actually leap to escape at some point along the way. But metaphorically, the analogy is a useful descriptor for some processes which tend empirically to have this quality of imperceptible changes over time resulting in seismic shifts when taken as a whole.

This syndrome is frequently invoked in discussions about social, political, or environmental issues. For example, in the context of climate change, it suggests that incremental increases in temperature and gradual environmental degradation might not be met with immediate action, leading to a lack of urgency in addressing the problem. The metaphor is a cautionary tale, urging people to be aware of and responsive to gradual changes that might have serious consequences if left unchecked. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and acting upon subtle shifts in our environment, whether they are literal or figurative, to prevent detrimental outcomes.

Related to boiling frog syndrome:

  • slippery slope
  • gradualism
  • marginal changes
  • evolution
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The right wing is full of contradictions — a defining trait, almost. Chief among them is this bit of cognitive dissonance:

  • hatred of liberals
  • love of “freedom”

You can’t have this both ways, philosophically speaking. The entire concept of individual liberty (hint: it’s right there in the name!) is a core insight of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment Inspired the United States

This 18th century philosophical movement grew large in Europe, predating the French Revolution of 1789 and influencing heavily the American Revolution. Resting on the then recent revolutions in science, math, and philosophy including the works of Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz, The Enlightenment has its roots in 1680s England with the political philosophy of John Locke.

Locke argued that human beings are capable of self-improvement via rational thought and accumulated experience. His philosophy was a break with traditional assumptions that knowledge came only from authorities, and that truth was opaque and unknowable. Working in the same era as Isaac Newton, Locke’s ideas about human nature were highly informed by the Scientific Revolution well underway by this time. The two strains of philosophy have a common commitment to reason and empiricism at their core.

Political ideas of The Enlightenment

You can appreciate why any number of authorities would find the radical ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers potentially threatening — their age-old power structures were in jeopardy. It represented the democratization of knowledge, removing a dependency of the less powerful upon the powerful as a singular source of truth. The church, monarchy, and aristocracy were all on the chopping block — sometimes literally — during this age of philosophical and political revolutions.

The following philosophical and political ideals emerged from The Enlightenment:

  • Reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy. Phenomena can be examined in the real world to understand more about how things work and what is true. Everything should be subject to critical examination, versus simply being taken on faith.
  • People have natural rights, and prime among them is liberty — or freedom to pursue the kind of life they so choose, without infringing upon the natural rights of others.
  • Equality is the concept that all members of a nation or society are equal members and have equal standing in terms of their political influence and power. These are expressed in the American concept of equality before the law (14th Amendment), free speech, and one person/one vote.
  • Progress as the collective project and meaningful unifying force for a nation or group. The goal is to create better societies and better people by discarding outmoded traditions and embracing rationalism.
  • Religious tolerance as a rational way to prevent civil unrest. Appears in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
  • Consent of the governed is one of several foundations of liberal thought from philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who stated that to be legitimate, political power must be representative and agreed to by the people bound by it.
  • The social contract is a foundational concept from both John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, extending the consent of the governed and placing it as the true basis for governmental authority.
  • Constitutional government has its underpinnings in a 1748 work by French judge and political philosopher Montesquieu, titled The Spirit of the Laws. This tome is the principle source for the concept of separation of powers in government as a system of healthy checks and balances to protect political liberty.
  • Fraternity in a philosophical sense is concerned with an ethical relationship between people, based on love and solidarity as the foundation for how individuals in society should treat each other.
  • Separation of church and state is a logical outgrowth of freedom of religion. The idea is older, but its introduction to the United Sates is attributed to Thomas Jefferson who declared the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause to be about building a “wall of separation between church and state.”
  • Property rights as a natural outgrowth of natural rights and labor (Locke).

Freedom is self-determination, but is not unlimited

The history of political philosophy reveals the evolution of Enlightenment thinking over the course of centuries, and how the ideas underpinning our government have deep roots. Freedom isn’t a new idea, and it does come with some caveats.

The first caveat is that freedom cannot be unlimited if we are to have a civil society. As Hobbes put it, if men are left to their natural state our lives will be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Also, we cannot preserve equal rights for all citizens if some members of society are allowed to trample on the rights of others.

That’s why the concept of liberty is so important. It’s important to our democracy, and it’s important to our day to day lives and how we treat each other. Freedom and liberty are similar and we often use these words interchangeably, but there is a very important distinction between them.

Liberty flows from equal rights

Liberty means that I have freedom, but only insofar as I don’t intrude upon your freedom. I must respect your rights and not invade your sovereign boundaries of life and property. For all persons are created equal, and the rights of one another shall not be infringed.

Political liberty has its foundations in Greek philosophy and was closely linked with the concept of democracy. Aristotle and Plato among others planted the seeds that would later be picked up by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and John Stuart Mill — giving us our modern concept of liberty today.

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Doxxing is intentionally researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual with the intent and purpose of having law enforcement called on them for spurious reasons.

The doxxing term is derived from “dropping dox” or “documents,” and it refers to the malicious practice of researching, collecting, and publicly disclosing someone’s personal and private information without their consent. This information can include home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, or any other data that can compromise an individual’s privacy.

The intent behind doxxing is often to intimidate, harass, shame, or exact revenge on the target by exposing them to potential threats, unwanted contact, or public scrutiny.

The act of doxxing can have serious repercussions, not just infringing on an individual’s privacy but also potentially leading to real-world consequences such as stalking, identity theft, and physical harm. In the digital age, where vast amounts of personal data can be found online, doxxing has become a significant concern.

The ease with which personal information can be gathered and disseminated across various platforms—social media, forums, and websites—amplifies the risks associated with this invasive act, making digital literacy and privacy protection more crucial than ever.

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Cruelty is a line for me. It’s a one-strike-you’re out policy. We will not be friends.

Cruelty is a moral stain. Something we need to outgrow from childhood to become a member of society. As a form of sadism, it does basic disrespect to the natural rights of persons and flouts the core ideals of democracy. Cruelty is antisocial behavior, and will not be tolerated.

I will speak up for those being crueled. And speak out against those crueling.

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We have so many mental frames related to numbers, that have been handed down culturally for, in some cases, hundreds and even thousands of years. These numerical superstitions come from myths, some from science, some cultural and historic — and many are universal. They remind us that despite our differences across nations and across time, we human beings still have a lot more in common with one another than we have differences.

  • 1 is the loneliest number… but can also be unity, and the origin of all things
  • 2 is duality ☯️
  • 3’s a crowd
  • 4 is a square; representative of justice | Buddhist Four Noble Truths ⬛
  • 5 is alive
  • 6 is the first perfect number
  • 7 notes in the musical scale 🎼
  • 8 is paradise; lucky in Buddhism 🍀
  • 9 lives 😺
  • 10 is the most perfect number 🔟
  • 11 players in soccer & football ⚽
  • 12 is cosmological: zodiac symbols, stations of the Moon, stations of the Sun | 12 inches in a foot 📏
  • 13 lunar months in the year 🌙
  • 20 bucks 💵
  • 30 pieces of silver 💰
  • 40 days and 40 nights 🚣‍♂️
  • 50 ways to leave your lover | 50 shades of grey
  • 100 year centennial 💯
  • 1000 — millenarianism

I’ll keep adding to the list of numerical superstitions over time…!

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The Artist vs. the Fundamentalist is an ancient tale, told throughout history. Whereas the artist is creative, often whimsical, and stimulated by diversity, the fundamentalist is unimaginative, strict, and preferential to monoculture.

Many other dichotomies mirror this pair, from fluid to rigid, from passionate to wooden, from fun to drab and a multitude of others.

The former seeks self-expression and collaboration; the latter, conformity and hierarchy. Artists go in search of harmony; fundamentalists crave conflict.

Loner vs. the Tribe

A dichotomy along similar lines is between the artistic loner, and the fundamentalist thinking and conformity of the tribe. This narrative also evokes themes of belonging versus rejection, creativity vs. conformity, strange vs. familiar, insanity vs. sanity, and many others.

Freedom vs. Control

These concepts are two very different conceptions of the Good Life, and I know that for me — I’m solidly in the artist camp. I’m all about generativity, about synthesis, and about making something new.

But is everyone? Not so much. Especially now or, perhaps — as with the coronavirus outbreak — having been here long before and in larger numbers than we knew at the time.

see also:

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metaphormeaningnotes
pick your brainI need to gather information that you have
mental spacea way to describe how much of your thoughts are occupied by a specific topic, event, person, etc.
in the back of my mindstored for usage later
out of my mindtemporarily unable to think clearly; often, drunk, stoned, high, etc.🤪
lose my mindgo crazy; generally in a more permanent sense than “out of my mind”
mind meldto be completely in sync with someone else on an idea, plan, concept, etc. without having to communicate very extensively or at all
brainlessof low intelligence; stupid; without thought
on my mindI’m thinking about you
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While multiple formal investigations against the Trump family and administration continue to unfold, and Drumpf supporters weirdly deny the probable cause for concern, Putin’s troll army continues to operate out in the open on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and other social media networks. The sheer scale of this operation started to become clear to me in the months leading up to Election 2016, having both spent a lot of time on social media both professionally and personally for over a decade as well as a hefty amount of time on political investigation during this presidential cycle: bots on Twitter had taken over.

Whatever your thoughts on the #RussiaGate corruption scandal may be, it should concern any citizen that an enormous group of bad actors is working together to infiltrate American social media, with a specific intent to sway politics. Media literacy is one part of the answer, but we’re going to need new tools to help us identify accounts that are only present in bad faith to political discourse: they are not who they claim to be, and their real goals are kept carefully opaque.

Cold War 2.0

We should consider our nation embroiled in a large international game of psychological warfare, or PsyOps as it is referred to in intelligence circles. The goal is to sow disinformation as widely as possible, such that it becomes very difficult to discern what separates truth from propaganda. A secondary goal is to sow dissent among the citizenry, particularly to rile up the extremist factions within America’s two dominant political parties in an attempt to pull the political sphere apart from the center. 

We didn’t really need much help in that department as it is, with deep partisan fault lines having been open as gaping wounds on the American political landscape for some decades now — so the dramatically escalated troll army operation has acted as an intense catalyst for further igniting the power kegs being stored up between conservatives and progressives in this country.

Luckily there are some ways to help defray the opposition’s ability to distract and spread disinfo by identifying the signatures given off by suspicious accounts. I’ve developed a few ways to evaluate whether a given account may be a participant in paid propaganda, or at least is likely to be misrepresenting who they say they are, and what their agenda is. 

Sometimes it’s fun to get embroiled in a heated “tweetoff,” but I’ve noticed how easy it is to feel “triggered” by something someone says online and how the opposition is effectively “hacking” that tendency to drag well-meaning people into pointless back-and-forths designed not to defend a point of view, but simply to waste an activist’s time, demoralize them, and occupy the focus — a focus that could be better spent elsewhere on Real Politics with real citizens who in some way care about their country and their lives.

Bots on Twitter have “Tells”

1) Hyper-patriotism

– Conspicuously hyper-patriotic bio (and often, name)  – Posts predominantly anti-Democrat, anti-liberal/libtard, anti-Clinton, anti-Sanders, anti-antifa etc. memes:

2) Hyper-Christianity

– Conspicuously hyper-Christian in bio and/or name of bots on Twitter: 

3) Abnormally high tweet volume

Seems to tweet &/or RT constantly without breaks — supporting evidence of use of a scheduler tool at minimum, and displaying obviously automated responses from some accounts. The above account, for example, started less than 2 years ago, has tweeted 15,000 more times than I have in over 10 years of frequent use (28K). Most normal people don’t schedule their tweets — but marketers and PR people do.

4) Posts only about politics and one other thing (usually a sport)

– Posts exclusively about politics and potentially one other primary “normie” topic, which is often a sport – May proclaim to be staunchly not “politically correct”:

5) Hates Twitter Lists

– Bots on Twitter have a strange aversion to being added to Lists, or making Lists of their own:

6) Overuse of hashtags 

– Uses hashtags more than normal, non-marketing people usually do:

7) Pushes a one-dimensional message

– Seems ultimately too one-dimensional and predictable to reflect a real personality, and/or too vaguely similar to the formula:

8) Redundant tweets

– Most obviously of all, it retweets the same thing over and over again:

9) Rehashes a familiar set of memes

– Tweets predominantly about a predictable set of memes:

Mismatched location and time zone is another “tell” — and although you can’t get the second piece of data from the public profile, it is available from the Twitter API. If you know Python and/or feel adventurous, I’m sharing an earlier version of the above tool on Github (and need to get around to pushing the latest version…) — and if you know of any other “tells” please share by commenting or tweeting at me. Next bits I want to work on include:

  • Examining follower & followed networks against a matchlist of usual suspect accounts
  • Looking at percentage of Cyrillic characters in use
  • Graphing tweet volume over time to identify “bot” and “cyborg” periods
  • Looking at “burst velocity” of opposition tweets as bot networks are engaged to boost messages
  • Digging deeper into the overlap between the far-right and far-left as similar memes are implanted and travel through both “sides” of the networks
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