this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Unpopular opinion: "the other side is just bots" is the new "the other side is just paid protestors."
Bot warfare is a very real and very serious form of information warfare but the idea that any particular political actor is using it disproportionately is pretty difficult to prove. This article, for example, identifies a study which found a third of internet traffic is made up of "bad bots." The study shows that the VAST majority of bad bot traffic is targeting Gaming (virtual currency farming), IT (DDoS), and Data Scraping, with propaganda bots making up less than 2%.
I checked the report, but it seems at no point it seems to clarify what they consider "bot traffic". Is it measured in api calls, page views, or bytes? Generally the term traffic is meant as raw data transported, but in that context those numbers make no sense.
For example, one of the biggest traffic consumers in the Internet is video streaming. There's no way in hell that half, or even a tenth, of that data is fake - it would simply cost too much to waste it on bots. Both for the bot owners as well as the streaming providers.
This level of vagueness and lack of transparency (what do the numbers mean, and where do they come from) does not fill me with confidence on this report.