Bots

Some of us have been boning up on this topic for about 6 years already, while others are just tuning in now based on the horrors of recent events. It can be overwhelming to come in cold, so here — don’t go it alone! Take this:

Putin’s war against the west

President Biden “declassified” an intelligence analysis many of us had arrived at some time ago: Russian president Vladimir Putin is a cruel revanchist leader who will stop at nothing to claw out a larger legacy before he dies. His goal is nothing less than reconstituting the former Soviet Union and restoring the “glory” of the Russian empire of yesteryear. And for some reason he thinks the world community is going to let him get away with his delusional fever dreams of conquest — as if fever dreams of Mongol domination are still de rigueur.

The attacks on the 2016 election and on the American Capitol in 2021 are related — both are Russian hybrid warfare operations. Russia also is the cold beating heart of the right-wing authoritarianism movement around the world, via financial, political, psychological, economic, and other means of government and regulatory capture.

Putin has hated democracy for a long time — since before the Berlin Wall fell where he was stationed in East Berlin as a young KGB agent, taking the news hard. Now, he has many fifth column confederates aiding and abetting him from within the United States — a number of them brazenly, and openly. It is getting harder and harder for those treasonous types to “hide out” in the folds of disinformation, misinformation, and plausible deniability. The play is being called — and everyone will need to decide if they’re for democracy or authoritarianism.

Further reading:

Media Resources

Twitter Lists

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How to detect fake from real

It is going to become increasingly more difficult to discern from fact from fiction, here in this world that seemingly quickly flipped from a world of The Enlightenment to a world of dark disinformation. From artificial intelligence to vast propaganda machines, from deep fakes to fake lives — it’s going to require more from us to be able to detect what’s real.

Already we can’t rely on old cues, signposts, and tropes anymore. We’re less credulous about credentials, and trust isn’t automatic based on caste, title, or familiar status markers.

Go slow and look for mimics

Here’s one key to more accurate reality detection: take more time to spot the fake. Don’t judge too quickly, because it can take time to weed out the fakesters and the hucksters — some are decent mimics and can fool people who are in a hurry, not paying much attention, or attracted to some irrelevant other quality about the ersatz knockoff and thus forms an affinity with them based on something else entirely. Some drink the Kool-Aid for various reasons.

Clues of fraud

Those who cling absurdly to abstract symbols are often fakes. And in general, any folks who feel like they are just trying a little bit too hard might be fake. Then, of course, there are the full-on zealots and religious nutbags. These theocrats are definitely faux compassionate Jesus-lovers. What better cloak than the robes of a religious man (or, less frequently, woman)? It’s the perfect disguise.

No wonder so many child abusers hide out in churches of all kinds, from famously the Catholic to the more recently-outed (though not surprising) Evangelical Southern Baptist Church. No one will ever suspect them, or want to confront them if they do. Plus, they have Democrats to absurdly try and pin the blame on repeatedly, despite a lack of a shred of evidence.

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How to deal with bullies

Or, DADA vs. MAGA. Defense Against the Dark Arts was like the women’s self-defense class of Hogwarts — it taught you how to prepare yourself for the evil that was out there lurking and waiting for you out there. This course of DADA will follow suit, aiming to offer ways to detect, defend, and defeat the cultism rising in America and beyond.

It will be a work in progress over time, so please bear with me as I assemble learnings from a number of sources.

Red Flags: Traits to watch out for

  • evasiveness
    • vagueness
    • slipperiness
    • can’t be pinned down
    • won’t answer straightforward questions
  • denialism
  • cognitive dissonance
  • black and white thinking
    • “my way or the highway”
    • rigid and inflexible, even when obviously off the mark
    • all or nothing framing
    • narrow range of observations
    • tunnel vision
  • motivated reasoning
  • deceptiveness
  • easily angered
    • almost anything seems to trigger them

Attention: Take Back Control of Our Minds

The internet, social media, seemingly infinite channels of entertainment and franchises in gaming are but tips of the giant iceberg that now competes for our time and attention. The number of options to choose from has scaled exponentially over the past several decades — but our amount of time to spend has not increased whatsoever. If anything, it’s decreased

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The concept of the Goldilocks Zone reminds us that most typically, there is a range of possibilities above and below which would not be viable. This is in contrast to the idea of unbounded growth, in which one or more key performance indicators is expected to continue to grow forever, without bounds. Think: up and to the right.

Commonly used as a metaphor, the Goldilocks Zone has its origins in planetary science. It defines a planet that is within the habitable zone of its star system, meaning not too hot and not too cold — with the ability to sustain liquid water. Without it, life on the only living planet we know — ours — would cease to exist. Therefore, one good place to look for potential life on other planets is the Goldilocks Zone, which has also come to be used as a reference meaning “the perfect conditions” for some ideal state or goal.

“Going viral” isn’t always desirable

We crave it in our social media feeds, but avoid it like the plague when it is the plague — viral contagion can both giveth and taketh away. In America we’ve recently been having both as of this writing.

Whereas the Goldilocks Zone presupposes limits at both ends, unbounded growth expects no limits to ever be encountered from the start. In a finite world inside a finite universe, it is simply unlikely to be true with much regularity.

You could say that Goldilocks Zones know a lot about establishing boundaries, while the infinite growth areas tend to extremism. Beyond the pandemic, cancer is another infamous candidate for illustrating the dangers of growth without bounds. Arguably, hypercapitalism belongs.

The Goldilocks Zone is a moderate

Goldilocks Zones are akin to the center of the Bell curve; the boundaries of the margin of error; the middle path. James Madison would have been a fan of the Goldilocks Zone — it would have smelled to him like his own concept of the moderating force of many factions preventing too much extremism from taking root in governance, and reminded him of the insights of the Marquis de Condorcet.

“Moderation in all things” was made famous by first the Greeks and later the Romans. It is a kind of ancient wisdom that turns out to have very old roots indeed — back even to the early days of the universe.

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There are many things in life you don’t want to rush through; many experiences you wish to linger. The American cult of efficiency is a kind of over-optimization, and over-fitting of a line that delusionally demands up and to the right every single day, every single quarter, every single time.

The benefits of stopping to smell the flowers have been extolled by sages and philosophers throughout the ages. In all of recorded human history lies some form of the mantra, “haste unto death” — for it is true. We rush headlong off the cliff after all the lemmings ahead of us. We can’t help ourselves — eternal moths to eternal flames.

The slow life

From the cuisine to jurisprudence, from behavior economics to psychological well-being, moving more slowly has numerous well-established benefits. Efficiency should never be the only goal, in any domain or at all times. As James Madison strongly agreed with, “moderation in all things” is the mathematically optimal way to approach life, justice, and governing. Influenced by the Marquis du Condorcet, the invention of statistics, and a distaste for extremism in all forms, The Founders were prescient regarding the later theory of the wisdom of the crowds. They sought to temper the passions of the crowds via checks and balances in our system of governance.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said Martin Luther King, Jr. That the veracity of the quote remains unsettled is unsettling, like strange fruit swinging in the southern breeze. Yet the “quick justice” barbaric efficiency of slavery, the Confederacy, Jim Crow, superpredators, and mowing down unarmed Black men for traffic violations to name a few, are no examples of fairness. Faster isn’t always better, especially when it comes to justice. It takes time to gather facts, talk to witnesses, piece together the crimes and document them in an airtight way, brokering no doubt in the mind of a single jurist.

More efficiency topics

Areas I’ll be further exploring:

  • Slow thinking — Daniel Kahneman’s behavioral economics and cognition theory about slow and fast thinking systems in the brain, how they physiologically arose, and their implications for bias, decision making, geopolitics, and more.
  • Journey vs. Destination — It’s not just about getting to the same restaurant and eating the same thing. The end doesn’t always justify the means. Traveler vs. Tourist. Go with the flow. Roll with it, baby.
  • An ounce of caution — A stitch of time. He who makes haste makes waste. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Be careful!
  • Self-reflection — Thoughtfulness. Rumination. Mindfulness. Presence.
  • Being too busy speeds up time, not necessarily in a good way. Leads to the unexamined life, a Stoic no-no. Socrates would not approve, dude.
  • Enoughness — Sustainability. Patience. Non-violence. Whole-heartedness.
  • Hierarchy vs. Fairness — Consensus takes a lot longer. Dictators and monarchs are nothing if not efficient.
  • The appeal of fascism — History and ideology of the Nazis and their obsession with efficiency.
  • PR — soundbites. Simple narratives. Tropes, slogans, repetition.
  • Entertainment — intellectual empty calories. Neil Postman. McLuhan.
  • Automation — AI, bots, robotics, threats to labor
  • Walking vs. Transportation
  • The slow food movement
  • Speed reading
  • Speed runs — video games
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speak, sistah!

see also: Shoshanna Zuboff (who wrote the seminal work on surveillance capitalism), Don Norman, Dystopia vs. Utopia Book List: A Fight to the Finish, surveillance capitalism dictionary

Some takeaways:

  • surveillance won’t be obvious and overt like in Orwell’s classic totalitarian novel 1984 — it’ll be covert and subtle (“more like a spider’s web”)
  • social networks use persuasion architecture — the same cloying design aesthetic that puts gum at the eye level of children in the grocery aisle

Example:

AI modeling of potential Las Vegas ticket buyers

The machine learning algorithms can classify people into two buckets, “likely to buy tickets to Vegas” and “unlikely to” based on exposure to lots and lots of data patterns. Problem being, it’s a black box and no one — not even the computer scientists — know how it works or what it’s doing exactly.

So the AI may have discovered that bipolar individuals just about to go into mania are more susceptible to buying tickets to Vegas — and that is the segment of the population they are targeting: a vulnerable set of people prone to overspending and gambling addictions. The ethical implications of unleashing this on the world — and routinely using and optimizing it relentlessly — are staggering.

Profiting from extremism

“You’re never hardcore enough for YouTube” — YouTube gives you content recommendations that are increasingly polarized and polarizing, because it turns out that preying on your reptilian brain makes you keep clicking around in the YouTube hamster wheel.

The amorality of AI — “algorithms don’t care if they’re selling shoes, or politics.” Our social, political, and cultural flows are being organized by these persuasion architectures — organized for profit; not for the collective good, not for public interests, not subject to our political will anymore. These powerful surveillance capitalism tools are running mostly unchecked, with little oversight and with few people minding the ethics of the stores of essentially a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires.

Intent doesn’t matter — good intentions aren’t enough; it’s the structure and business models that matter. Facebook isn’t a half trillion dollar con: its value is in its highly effective persuasion power, which is highly troubling and concerning in a supposedly democratic society. Mark Zuckerberg may even ultimately mean well (…debatable), but it doesn’t excuse the railroading over numerous obviously negative externalities resulting from the unchecked power of Facebook in not only the U.S., but in countries around the world including highly volatile domains.

Extremism benefits demagogues — Oppressive regimes both come to power by and benefit from political extremism; from whipping up citizens into a frenzy, often against each other as much as against perceived external or internal enemies. Our data and attention are now for sale to the highest bidding authoritarians and demagogues around the world — enabling them to use AI against us in election after election and PR campaign after PR campaign. We gave foreign dictators even greater powers to influence and persuade us in ways that benefit them at the expense of our own self-interest.

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This list casts a wide net in enumerating the various principals of interest to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election… and beyond. The Russia scandal has continued to unspool throughout the Trump presidency, including the real estate magnate’s first impeachment over his extortion of Ukraine, and his second impeachment over the armed insurrection he incited following his failed re-election bid. It continues to this day.

Plus, don’t miss the RussiaGate Lexicon — and please note these are both works in progress and being updated as new details emerge about the Russia scandal, the Trump family criminal organization, and Putin’s revanchist influence in American politics.

Bestiary

NameNationalityTypeKnown for
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Did Russia hack the 2016 US election? Most certainly. The FBI, CIA, and entire intelligence community is in agreement on this point. Russian information warfare has been infamous the world over for decades — with a recent flare up starting with the Brexit vote as an obvious canary in a larger coalmine, and extending to the proliferation of right-wing movements around the world: particularly in Eastern Europe on Putin’s doorstep.

The following list is an attempt to demystify the language surrounding Russian interference in the election of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin’s efforts to undermine the Western order — in retaliation for the fall of the Soviet Union which happened under his watch as a young KGB agent stationed in Dresden, Germany.

See also: the RussiaGate Bestiary which lists the individuals involved in the Russian 2016 election interference investigation of Trump campaign conspiracy and fraud. Please note: both of these resources are works in progress and are being updated frequently.

TermDefinition
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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

Further Reading

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But we will grow from it, and they will not — over the long run, at least.

Things we need to improve upon and/or rebuild:

  • media literacy
  • civic literacy
  • financial literacy
  • data literacy
  • tech literacy — especially security and privacy
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Republicans do not like to elect women in Congress. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Stats of note:

  • GOP women make up only 4% of the current Congress.
  • 12% are female Congressional Democrats — for a total of 16.5% vs. 83.5% male legislators.
  • As a percentage of the historical collection of Congress members over all time, women have comprised only 1.7% of the total. 

Women need more representation across the board! Let’s do this, America.
P.S. If you have any need for a Slack bot that returns data on sitting Congresspeople, look no further! You can install this bot in Slack easily; you’ll just need to set up a Fieldbook account.

Women in the 114th Congress

(As of 1/6/2015) 

SeniorityMemberParty & StateStart of Service
 (in desc order)Marcy Kaptur (D), OH01-03-1983
 Louise Slaughter(D), NY01-03-1987
 Nancy Pelosi(D), CA06-02-1987
 Nita Lowey(D), NY01-03-1989
 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen(R), FL08-29-1989
 Rosa DeLauro(D), CT01-03-1991
 Eleanor Holmes-Norton (delegate)(D), DC01-03-1991
 Maxine Waters(D), CA01-03-1991
 Corrine Brown(D), FL01-03-1993
 Anna Eshoo(D), CA01-03-1993
 Eddie Bernice-Johnson(D), TX01-03-1993
 Carolyn Maloney(D), NY01-03-1993
 Lucille Roybal-Allard(D), CA01-03-1993
 Nydia Velazquez(D), NY01-03-1993
 Sheila Jackson Lee(D), TX01-03-1995
 Zoe Lofgren(D), CA01-03-1995
 Diana DeGette(D), CO01-03-1997
 Kay Granger(R), TX01-03-1997
 Loretta Sanchez(D), CA01-03-1997
 Lois Capps(D), CA03-10-1998
 Barbara Lee(D), CA04-07-1998
 Grace Napolitano(D), CA01-03-1999
 Jan Schakowsky(D), IL01-03-1999
 Susan Davis(D), CA01-03-2001
 Betty McCollum(D), MN01-03-2001
 Marsha Blackburn(R), TN01-03-2003
 Madeleine Bordallo (delegate)(D), GU01-03-2003
 Candice Miller(R), MI01-03-2003
 Linda Sanchez(D), CA01-03-2003
 Virginia Foxx(R), NC01-03-2005
 Cathy McMorris-Rodgers(R), WA01-03-2005
 Gwen Moore(D), WI01-03-2005
 Debbie Wasserman-Schultz(D), FL01-03-2005
 Doris Matsui(D), CA03-08-2005
 Kathy Castor(D), FL01-04-2007
 Yvette Clarke(D), NY01-04-2007
 Niki Tsongas(D), MA10-18-2007
 Jackie Speier(D), CA04-10-2008
 Donna Edwards(D), MD06-19-2008
 Marcia Fudge(D), OH11-19-2008
 Lynn Jenkins(R), KS01-06-2009
 Cynthia Lummis(R), WY01-06-2009
 Chellie Pingree(D), ME01-06-2009
 Judy Chu(D), CA07-16-2009
 Karen Bass(D), CA01-05-2011
 Diane Black(R), TN01-05-2011
 Renee Ellmers(R), NC01-05-2011
 Vicky Hartzler(R), MO01-05-2011
 Jaime Herrera-Beutler(R), WA01-05-2011
 Kristi Noem(R), SD01-05-2011
 Martha Roby(R), AL01-05-2011
 Terri Sewell(D), AL01-05-2011
 Frederica Wilson(D), FL01-05-2011
 Janice Hahn(D), CA07-19-2011
 Suzanne Bonamici(D), OR02-07-2012
 Suzan DelBene(D), WA11-13-2012
 Joyce Beatty(D), OH01-03-2013
 Susan Brooks(R), IN01-03-2013
 Julia Brownley(D), CA01-03-2013
 Cheri Bustos(D), IL01-03-2013
 Tammy Duckworth(D), IL01-03-2013
 Elizabeth Esty(D), CT01-03-2013
 Lois Frankel(D), FL01-03-2013
 Tulsi Gabbard(D), HI01-03-2013
 Michelle Lujan Grisham(D), NM01-03-2013
 Ann Kirkpatrick(D), AZ01-03-2013
 Ann McLane Kuster(D), NH01-03-2013
 Grace Meng(D), NY01-03-2013
 Kyrsten Sinema(D), AZ01-03-2013
 Dina Titus(D), NV01-03-2013
 Ann Wagner(R), MO01-03-2013
 Jackie Walorski(R), IN01-03-2013
 Robin Kelly(D), IL04-11-2013
 Katherine Clark(D), MA12-12-2013
 Alma Adams(D), NC11-12-2014
 Bonnie Watson Coleman(D), NJ01-06-2015
 Barbara Comstock(R), VA01-06-2015
 Debbie Dingell(D), MI01-06-2015
 Gwen Graham(D), FL01-06-2015
 Brenda Lawrence(D), MI01-06-2015
 Mia Love(R), UT01-06-2015
 Martha McSally(R), AZ01-06-2015
 Stacey Plaskett (delegate)(D), VI01-06-2015
 Aumua Amata Radewagen (delegate)(R), AS01-06-2015
 Kathleen Rice(D), NY01-06-2015
 Elise Stefanik(R), NY01-06-2015
 Norma Torres(D), CA01-06-2015
 Mimi Walters(R), CA01-06-2015
Total Women: 88 Democrats: 65
Republicans: 23

https://www.govtrack.us/data/congress-legislators/

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