36 GENIUS INTERVIEW Taha Yasseri
It’s much more likely that the first case is also an ‘Astroturf’ number – it’s an artificial boost – that does not come as a result of social spreading. These are signs that social media platforms could use to detect and suppress artificial boosts, but it’s very difficult for normal users like us to just look at the number and say, “Oh, this seems to be a fake number.” Well, the number is real, but whether it means more than just an algorithm liking content… that’s hard for regular users to find out. FEED: Are there any good tools people can use to verify what they are seeing online? TAHA YASSERI: Yes, there are a number of different tools. One that I use when I see something going viral on Twitter and I feel a bit suspicious about it, particularly when it comes to political content, is Botometer. It’s a tool produced by my friends at Indiana University in the US and it uses multiple pieces of information. It goes through the network of followership and tweets and retweets of individual accounts, and then gives you a measure – a likelihood – of that Twitter account being a bot instead of an actual human being. Of course, there is an understandable level of error in this detection and the outcome of the algorithm is not ‘yes’ or ‘no’; it’s a probability. But then you can look further into that. If an account has a very
TAHA YASSERI: It has been shown that when we receive the same information – or the same item is being promoted to us – from multiple channels, it’s much more effective on our decision-making. If I see ten of my friends have bought the same mobile phone, I may or may not follow them and buy the same phone. But if I see two of my friends, two of my colleagues and two of my family members have bought the same mobile phone, I’m much more likely to. In the second case, there are only six people instead of ten, but because they are from different communities and from different channels, the overall effect is much stronger on my decision. Based on that, the most effective
low chance of being a human, you can see why and which parameters are suggesting this account is probably a robot. It gives a very good overview of a given hashtag or keyword or, for given followers, of an account. You can see what percentage of them might be or most likely are robots. But as I said, using the same insight that we gain from these tools, you can reverse-engineer the process and produce even more sophisticated bots or more sophisticated algorithms. FEED: What do you think is the most effective artificial means of boosting signal or a message? Is it bots and likes? What are some of the more effective methods people are using?
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