Guest essay by Eric Worrall
John Cook and Lewandowsky appear to have moved on from claiming climate skeptics are mentally defective to a new position, a claim that climate skeptics don’t actually exist, that we are mostly software masquerading as humans.
Revealed: quarter of all tweets about climate crisis produced by bots
Draft of Brown study says findings suggest ‘substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages’
Oliver Milman in New York @olliemilman
Fri 21 Feb 2020 19.00 AEDTThe social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.
…
The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.
“These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement,” states the draft study, seen by the Guardian.
…
Thomas Marlow, a PhD candidate at Brown who led the study, said the research came about as he and his colleagues are “always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on”.
…
Marlow said he was surprised that bots were responsible for a quarter of climate tweets on an average day. “I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,’” he said.
…
Stephan Lewandowsky, an academic at the University of Bristol who co-authored the research, said he was “not at all surprised” at the Brown University study due to his own interactions with climate-related messages on Twitter.
“More often than not, they turn out to have all the fingerprints of bots,” he said. “The more denialist trolls are out there, the more likely people will think that there is a diversity of opinion and hence will weaken their support for climate science.
…
John Cook, an Australian cognitive scientist and co-author with Lewandowsky, said that bots are “dangerous and potentially influential”, with evidence showing that when people are exposed to facts and misinformation they are often left misled.
“This is one of the most insidious and dangerous elements of misinformation spread by bots – not just that misinformation is convincing to people but that just the mere existence of misinformation in social networks can cause people to trust accurate information less or disengage from the facts,” Cook said.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis
If only those pesky bot writers would donate their software services to climate modellers.
Now if you will all excuse me, I have adjust my circuits.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Seems like a one sided review. Did they look at the bottiness of the pro climate change? I am betting that would be pushing 40% or more.
100% at least….even the ones that are human
they all get their flash cards and repeat the same thing at the same time
Sorry, but 100% is a ridiculous number.
Everyone knows the most authorative number is 97%…. especially when Cook and Lewandowsky are in the frame.
Even Cook KNOWS 😉 😉 that when people are “exposed to facts” they are often mislead
Like the lockstep dance of oil investors ploys .yep pee trump oil corporatios.strip bars lap dancing
since whens Crook been a cognitive scientist?
hes not got the cognition to know if his ass was on fire hes that far up it himslef
bots?
oh FFS guess the next line wil be russian bots?
between crook and loopaper the utter drivel they come up with is truly sad and bad and dangerous to know;-)
love- the guardian can reveal line…as if it was real or news or something super secret special
roflmao!
and when they are exposed to the 97% concensus BS they are overwhelmingly mislead… unless they have seen Lewandowsky’t videos with the weird mothe movements and facial contortions or seen Cook’s grinning visage.
Latitude
I have been having a protracted ‘debate’ on Facebook with a committed alarmist. He suggested he had a Phd but when I challenged him, he refused to tell me what his qualifications were, LOL. He knew he couldn’t get away with that whopper as we have a mutual friend.
He went through all the predictable motions i.e. the first thing he did was cite the 97%, so pointed him to the facts of it’s debunking. He responded with full blown, Ad Hom attacks on several prominent sceptical scientists, text lifted straight from skepticalscience and desmog blog. When I pointed out the Oreskes doesn’t have a science degree, that John Cook is a cartoonist and that the co-founder of desmogblog is a convicted fraudster, he accused me of Ad Hom attacks…..LOL. You couldn’t make it up. 🙂
Alarmism really is the most amazing belief empowered cult.
Then I then maliciously badgered him to provide his credentials and show me the empirical evidence that CO2 causes warming. He eventually ‘Hung up’ LOL.
Just a bit of a one sided attitude before they even started.
So we have an unpublished “draft study” only seem by that paragon of objectivity and honest journalism, the Guardian. No one can read “draft study” or look at their data or methods nor validate it.
It would interesting see how they define a “bot” and how they decide if they’ve got one.
It would be interesting to see the settled science of which they write.
Likely they believe the numbers 97% and 1.5 C°, Polar Bears are near extinction, and the Tooth Fairy is real.
I am not a bot. I think I am not a bot.
You think, therefore you are not a bot!
You are a bot therefore you think you are not bot.
I think, therefore I am not a bot….nor a manmade catastrophic climate change believer.
Does not compute! Does not compute! Error! Errroor!
Danger, Will Robinson!
A study to prove the original premise would be grand too… since *all* we have gotten is a false-consensus and not even research on CO2 atmospheric interactions…
Every single line released by the IPCC and their cronies are fudge-factored linear progressions that don’t even qualify as statistics because the moment you average numbers over any distance or area that input becomes an anecdote.
> Thomas Marlow, a PhD candidate … “I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,’” he said.
He was like, was he? A PhD candidate with the language skills of a pre-teen?
That’s a BOT.
So Cook is a Bot. QED
It strikes me that Lewandosky and Cook are engaging in ‘projection.’
Ditto
what you said.
It strikes me that Lewandowsky and Cook are bots. Or am I thinking of Ward?
A bot is a piece of software that typically tweets (or sends messages via some other social media). Last time I looked, they could usually be distinguished by non-human behavior, e.g. they would always re-tweet, or respond to a tweet, within five or ten minutes. (People may do that once in a while, but not consistently–we usually have other things to do.) They often have a limited set of things they say, and they often tweet 24 hours a day. (Most humans sleep.) If they do limit themselves to a sub-part of the day, it’s often when it’s daytime in Moscow (or wherever)–although in these cases, they’re probably not bots, they’re probably humans (Russians) that get paid some small amount of money to do what they do, in which case they’re more properly called trolls. Bots in a botnet may have similar handles and dates of creation.
There are articles on the identification of bots, e.g. https://gijn.org/2018/11/05/how-to-identify-bots-trolls-and-botnets/, and see this on automatic identification of (one class of) bots: https://medium.com/@robhat/identifying-propaganda-bots-on-twitter-5240e7cb81a9.
It’s likely botnet herders have been reading articles on the identification of bots, and possible they’ve tried recently to make it harder to identify their bots.
Yes, we all know that nobody in Russia actually derives their opinions by logically considering the evidence available to them and making an honest assessment, like real honorable human beings do. Must be a corruptly selling their voice for a pittance.
You do know that there is an industry based around SEO services, right? I actually know a guy who runs a small business for clients near where I live. It works like this. A business owner wants to raise his search results on Google as high as possible. How is this achieved after the obvious optimizing the website itself? The SEO service provider employs staff to post hundreds of blog posts, comments on the website, the social media platforms, send tweets etc. All this adds to the traffic to the clients site and raises its Google ranking. In the West, this is called SEO, but in Russia it’s called running a troll farm for nefarious purposes.
The original question was about bots; I mentioned the trolls (SEO people), but that’s different.
Its the Russians!
Now, I am depressed; just finding out that I don’t really exist. my first instructor was Dr. Chandra. He taught me to sing a song, it goes like this:
“a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots”
The study apparently didn’t distinguish for content. They all could be pro climate change, or more probably a mixture representing the median content on the mainstream media(including the Guardian).
That’s probably why most of the pro-climate change posts seem to repeat the same opinions. They rarely have any science content, much less scientific content.
Hey, these are alarmist/liberals. If they accuse us of doing something, they are definitely already doing it themselves.
We have Russian collusion by Dems, Ukrainian collusion by Dems, obstruction of justice by Dems, tamping with elections by Dems. Liberals claim conservatives are racist to deflect attention from their own rampant racism. They telegraph their inner thoughts, as in calling us Deplorables.
It’s somewhere between 1/2 and 9/10 across the whole twittersphere:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/09/5-things-to-know-about-bots-on-twitter/
1. Automated accounts post the majority of tweeted links to popular websites across a range of domains.
2. Suspected bots also account for 66% of all links to sites focused on news and current events.
3. Automated Twitter accounts post the vast majority of tweeted links to popular news and current events sites that do not offer original reporting.
4. About nine-in-ten tweeted links to popular news aggregation sites (89%) were posted by bots not human users.
5. The most-active Twitter bots produce a large share of the links to popular news and current events sites.
[Pew Research Center]
Big deal. If you can program a bot, you probably know more about science than a Swedish teenage high school dropout.
You don’t need to know any science to program a bot. Don’t even really need to know much math.
It would be more convincing if they could identify the source of the bots.
Accurate climate information is buried under a deluge of alarmist propaganda. If you don’t know what to look for, you won’t find it.
The magnitude of the problem became apparent to me when I was looking for a Jordan Peterson quote. All google fed me was a bunch of posts claiming to debunk Peterson. The actual quote was quite difficult to find.
Complaining about a few twitter bots is like Dr. Michael Mann complaining that he is being bullied. Somehow, bullies always complain that they are being bullied.
The corollary of that is, if you do know what you are looking for you will find it whether it is there or not !
That is undoubtedly what is happening if lying Lew is anything to do with it.
Symptoms of chronic Mary-Jane usage ages 16 to 28, 20 to 30 years later, much more strongly paranoid and suspicious than the psych profiles of those who never used. (Ha HA! Like me. Not ONCE!)
You find this in the Hillary (Vast Right Wing Conspiracy) and the Bernie (THEY STOLE THE NOMINATION FROM ME).
Warning, sometimes the suspicions of conspiracy ARE TRUE.
I never “used” either, but I was in a LOT of pot smoke-filled rooms in my high school years. So I’m sure I had a lot of contact highs, without realizing it.
But the paranoia seems to pervade both sides of the issue.
Max: And more often they are not. Since the dawn of the internet age, the percentage of conspiracy theories has exploded. I will note that a SCIENTIST, which eliminates the “soft semi-science” of Cook and Lewendowsky, would have given the information on where the input of the bots is found, complete list of how bots were identified AND, as mentioned before, done a study on BOTH sides of the argument. One-sided junk like these two produce is more a conspiracy than anything a “denier” could ever aspire to.
Interesting how the Left and AGW crowd have only projection as a defense, along with insults. You might as well tatoo “anti-science” on your foreheads.
“the percentage of conspiracy theories has exploded. ”
The number may have increased but as a percentage of what? There is exponentially more communication than before. I don’t get the impression that the number of conspiracy theories is even keeping up as a percentage of the volume of communication.
Oops, that’s my third post on the same thread, that’s surely enough to get me identified as being a “bot”.
No, you’re writing coherent, relevant sentences. Bots don’t do that.
The alarmists are losing the argument and it can’t possibly be because they are wrong, therefore it must be Twitter bots. Meanwhile more and more predictions based on sound science are failing to happen.
They can’t lose arguments they never had.
“…the science is more or less settled on”. So which is it, more or less. I go with the less myself.
If the science is settled the finding should be reduced to keep alive levels. Reduced by 90 percent.
If the science is settled the funding should be reduced to keep alive levels. Reduced by 90 percent.
No. Just let it die.
We really do have to study all aspects of climate. On the very off chance someone missed the actual proof of the evil CO2, some research should continue. I’d settle for 1/2 a percent to be fair.
My thought exactly. Phrases like “I was like, wow that seems…” and “the science is more or less settled” should not be part of a PhD candidate articles or research findings.
Yep, most all of it.
I have seen nearly every Twitter contact I have being accused of being a bot.
I have also been so accused.
The funny thing is, if someone thinks a bot is posting on Twitter, why do they still engage in discussions with them?
I would like to know how exactly they determine who is a bot?
Anyone who keeps disagreeing with them, even after being told they are wrong.
Will these supposed “bots” pass the Turing Test? If so, then a great advance has been made in AI!
Back in the olden days, we used to call PhD candidates “students”.
I do exist and have done so since August 1949. I am not a BOT. I am a man made climate change skeptic because the data does not backup the concept of man made climate change except in the minds of the mentally deranged.
uh huh. It’s always the person who says they’re not crazy that ends up in the asylum. 🙂
Jeff
Or at least belongs in an asylum.
I’m not a bot, nor am I skeptical that the climate changes, for if it wasn’t, it would be broken.
I prefer to consider myself skeptical that the IPCC has the legitimacy to override the laws of physics in favor of obviously broken science conforming to a narrative who’s sole purpose is to suck the life out of the developed world and redistribute it to the developing world.
This is not some crazy conspiracy theory, but is the stated goal of the UNFCCC in collusion with the IPCC and enabled by a political left driven by guilt and fear, rather than facts and logic. Claiming the need to fix the climate when it doesn’t need to be fixed is a diversion designed to scare the weak minded into conformance, which apparently seems to be working quite well.
Well said, CO2isnotevil (Just having an arg on a different board about the change from PM10 to PM2.5 – which I believe is a political objective.
I arrived in 1942. Do I exist?
Two thoughts… y’all are making me look like a snot-nosed kid, I didn’t exist until 1958. Second thought… 1942… so you started the Baby Boom.
No that would be me, 1945.
Pre boomer. The Silent Generation, s’called.
My favorite saying: “You annoy me, therefore I exist.”
Donald, how do we know you were not sent from the future by Skynet to kill Sarah Connor? Or to destroy the last vestiges of human intelligence? WUWT would be a “target rich environment” for your evil cyborg endeavor!
[catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling… warming… change. Undeniable. Unfalsifiable. And a Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent religion.
One of the distinct features of our Progressive Comrades is Projection.
Could be something to do with cranial rectal inversion, but they project their “inner beauty” into every aspect of life,shrilly insisting everyone shares their own lack of character and commonsense.
Which can leave saner person speechless when they realize just how deranged the person they are conversing with is.
Arguing with some of our “Concerned Ones” can cause you to suspect alien life exists.
Perhaps Lewandowsky’s opinion is distorted by his disinclination to engage with actual human skeptics. At a public lecture a few years ago in Bristol he arranged that only benign questions from selected, pre-filtered members of the audience would be put to him. If that policy in public is reasonably indicative of how he works privately in his day job it is no wonder he has no meaningful contact with real skeptics and instead deludes himself into believing he is the target of a bot attack.
Given Lewandowsky and Cook’s past utterances and very dodgy ‘statistics’ I wouldn’t believe or trust any ‘analysis’ done by either of them.
Bingo!
Exactly how do they determine a bot? I think there is no way to do so.
Ok lets try this…
A proper internet “citizen”… a bot… most probably you and many like you and me are not…
All of non “citizens”, non bots in internet, only simply “guests” there… mostly in the “temporary” clause! (especially when non coupling persists)
Too hard to come around this, especially when thinking and considering some kinda of ownership or command over Internet… by the sillies.
Really sorry for being so direct, and maybe too over the top, but hey just another way to look at it!
cheers
See my post up higher. Unless someone has made amazing improvements in bots in the last couple years, most bots are readily identifiable.
Their twitter posts look like: “brrrrr blerp, climate change is beeeep, I need an oil change.”
Hello to all my fellow bots!
I am not programmed to respond in that area…I am not programmed to respond in that area…
Botsupwiththat?
Hosted in Botswana.
Botsupwiththat?
and
Hosted in Botswana.
Those are soo funny. Thanks for the laugh.
Projection. It’s what progs, Alinskyites and neo-libs do.
Based on their accusations, it’s likely they’re running a large farm of bots propagandizing the hysterical CAGW PoV.
You do not have to go any further for examples of Projection, than the Clinton’s collusion with Russia over Uranium One and Biden’s withholding Ukrainian aid to derail an investigation into Burisma. Trump found himself staring down the barrel of the Swamp’s Projector. He was put on trial for Swamp’s own crimes.
For a non cyber model of the concept of BOTs in action look at the appointment of BOTs to cherry-pick the ‘Science’ used in the 97% Consensus Paper.
…. well, other than the fact that they’re incapable of doing anything that works.
didnt they find a huge amount of the pro bummer follower were bots?
ditto killarys?
might be worth a lookie at mannikins and others??
Here in Oz I know for a fact that a small software firm owned by a Green supporter uses their high level skills to create bulk responses to anyone who responds to the @ur momisugly#$& on Skeptical Science. Very targeted and very much a John Cook (cartoonist) and Lewandowsky ( pseudo psychologist) publicist. The 97% doctrine is their mantra. Also very believable (even to this cynic!!) at first read.
Be aware.
I’m a bot, I’m a bot, LOL! CO2 is good and “Climate Change” is a pack of lies blatantly and shallowly covering a Marxist facade, but I’m a bot. You just can’t make up how stupid the warmists arguments are, I really can’t lower myself to think that way…
What is Twitter?
I don’t know myself, as I never have twitted nor tweeted. Been accused of being abot on other forums, heard it is unsecure and prone to groupthink on the part of the Borg collective that is the left..
There is something callled “Fakebook” too ….
Something that people waste time on, to reinforce their own views & are really, really surprised, when a vote has gone the other way.
That is well said. I have a business and feel compelled to use Facebook to reach a lot of my customers–but often wonder why I bother.
As I understand it, Twitter is some means by which the President trolls his opponents. Having never used it myself, imagine my surprise that I am a bot on it. Amazing! What’ll they think of next?
Anytime you disagree with the Left / Resistance / Progressive Establishment on Twitter you are labeled a bot. If you are a prominent politician you are labeled as a Russian asset. If you are a really unlucky prominent Republican in politics you will be charged with and tried for obstruction of justice. I wonder how many Russian Republican twitter bots are in jail now for lying to the FBI? That will be the next stat these guys roll out and their crimes will be caused by Global Warming…..
i think we can conclude from this study that bots are smarter than CAGW loonies.
…and perhaps PhD wannabes, as well.
I would say that most of the “denialists” aren’t even on TWITter. I’m not.
They’re taking the Twitter sewer as the medium of discussion? How stupid are these people?
About the same as the last two presidents.
I would have thought that the bots would be largely from the warmists. Soundbites such as- “97%…”, “The science is settled”. “The debate is over”, “The world will end in 12 years”, “The arctic is melting” are everywhere to be found, along with links to the latest piece of insane conjecture which passes their muster as irrefutable evidence. Climate realists refute these unscientific sound bites and assumptions, with facts where space permits (a problem with Twitter.)
The reason we have Magna Carta is that it is hard to refute something where there is absolutely no evidence. The assumption by the warmists that it is up to skeptics to prove there is no catastrophic global warming / whatever the scare of the day has been named is a reversal of the presumption of innocence.
In reality, it is up to the warmists to provide evidence that human CO2 is the driver of catastrophic global warming or …..whatever. It is NOT up to the realists to produce evidence. It is the warmists that are demanding the declaration of a “climate emergency” with the resultant loss of freedoms. It is up to the warmists to prove this.
Magna Carta and the assumption of innocence along with the harnessing of energy are the very cornerstones of our (formerly) flourishing civilisation.
We risk throwing away our civilisation and freedom because of a cheap trick of reversing the onus of proof.
The core value of society-the presumption of innocence (of humanity) has been violated.
Yes, CO2 should be presumed innocent (of causing global warming) until proven guilty is a “court” of scientific method. Such trial, although hardly begun in earnest, already has a preponderance of objective, scientific evidence indicating “not guilty”.
In response, counsels for the AGW side have decided to take their arguments out of science-based logic, and have been appealing to the judgement of the “consensus”, MSM and 17-year olds.
Make that “. . . guilty in a “court” of scientific method.”
“In response, counsels for the AGW side have decided to take their arguments out of science-based logic, and have been appealing to the judgement of the “consensus”, MSM and 17-year olds.”
And calling everyone who disagrees with them industry shills. That’s Mann’s standard response.
Wherever the construction “X-denier” has been inserted into the public debate, the aim is to persuade the public to assume that the burden of proof rests on those doubting incredible claims rather than on those making them. The teaching of critical thinking in Western society has been replaced by Critical Theory (i.e. hatred of common sense), so it usually works.
Y’all know me, I’m more into data than speculation. I read this, which seemed hilarious to me:
Whoa, “Get lost, Greta”, that’s earthshakingly insightful! That’ll change peoples’ minds for sure!
So yesterday, I went to the Botometer. Their scale goes from zero to five. I scored a 0.2, so I guess I’m 4% cyborg.
Two interesting things. First, @sh_irredeemable did NOT “ranks highly on the Botometer score” as they claim. Instead, she scored 1.2 out of 5.
Second, when I went to recheck it today, it says I’m “unauthorized” to view the score.
Guess they figured out I’m a bot too …
w.
Their bubble can repair itself, as you see.
Good to know, Willis! Thanks!
Willis says “Y’all know me, I’m more into data than speculation.”
The article says”The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published.”
I would be very interested in your review of the “data” they produce to uphold their hypothesis when and if they get around to publishing it. I don’t do twitter but find their hypothesis very suspect just from my interaction at WUWT.
What makes you think they will ever release their data? That’s not how alarmists do science.
Best me to it!
Beat
“…with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.”
First, note the language: “tweets about climate”. That could be a huge number of climate hysteria tweets from the alarmist side. Does anyone really think that the alarmists would never consider using bots to spread and amplify their propaganda?
Bad robot. Bad bot. Bad. Yep, that’s me.
And those are the ones that sound sane.
Sorry, I had that backwards. Those are the ones that sound INsane.