I published:
#DeleteFacebook: Perspective from a platform that doesn’t put democracy in peril
@Gargron This is awesome, and I'll be sharing it widely. But, I also think now is the time to start talking about how we stop the likes of #CambridgeAnalytica / #Palantir from abusing the Fediverse's model, too. I work for scrapinghub.com - I can see how easy it would be to map and monitor the entire fediverse right now. From there to hyper-targeted fake profiles is a small enough step. How do we harden ourselves against #Twitter / #Facebook-style manipulation without damaging the social fabric?
@jannamark And how will we distinguish the bots from actual humans? :)
I do not pretend to be an expert in bot detection, but there are some out there.
@jannamark There are, but they range from solutions that impose mass-surveillance (invasively probing visitors' browsers, storing that info, correlating devices), to those that simply ban things that don't look like browsers (and screw all the outliers, like blind readers), to sketchy solutions that rely on referer / request history information (again, surveillance..).. nothing's perfect. Some of these measures, in careful doses, are useful. But in the main, you can't tell people from bots.
@jannamark That should be a testament to how amazing your brain is, because computers would find that sort of distinction extremely hard, in a realistic war-on-bots scenario. Twitter's bot problem has many cases that would be trivial to fix, but they never bothered; that's not the kind I'm concerned with, though. They basically didn't fight back, so the attackers never bothered with sophistication. Usernames like "frank92754719" are laziness, not a required bot feature. :)
@cathal I'm going to think about this a bit, because, overall, I found I could tell which were bots and trolls yelling at me on twitter and facebook, and which were people with different opinions, who wanted to engage.
Also, I agree/understand that there's a difference between the ham-fisted but successful efforts of a Trump or Brexit campaign, and a subtle gas-lighting or whisper campaign more commonly associated with the psychological manipulation now relegated to bots.