most of us communicate with bots, on the daily, and unbeknown to us.

Fortunately, at least, these bots are programmed by humans, for now.

Sadly, in a not so distant future these bots might be writing their own programming.

Certainly scary not knowing, right now, as you read this: Did a bot write this?

0011101 0011001.... " I like your shoes"

I'm all about that bast, bout that bas

Something like that won't go widespread thankfully. Can't put all the programmers out of work at the same time you're letting robots put the workers out of work.

According to your link, the study was only looking at 200,000 tweets. 253 still seems like a small number, however.

I don't think the number of tweets matter so much as the number of times those tweets were retweeted and shared. Maybe I missed it, but I don't see those specific numbers in the CNN article or the study linked above. If millions of people ended up seeing these tweets, it doesn't really matter that there were only 253 actual tweets by Russians. Sometimes all it takes is planting the seed and letting others spread it from there.

Yup, and clearly no one had heard about the vaccine debate prior to these 253 tweets that may have been retweeted millions of times.

That's not what I'm saying at all. The debate has been going on for a long time now, but it has really ramped up in recent years. This was just adding more fuel to the fire. I'm not saying they were for sure shared millions of times - or zero times - because I don't know. Google trends doesn't show anything for that hash tag, but that was only for some of the tweets.

All of that is beside the point though. The fact that they were even trying to encourage these arguments should be worthy of discussion, even if they weren't effective at it. If they are pushing propaganda for both sides of a fight (like they were reportedly doing for several other topics), we shouldn't just say "Oh, no big deal since it wasn't that much propaganda".

Oof, that's making me feel old. 2007 feels like "recent years" to me but that's over a decade ago. That's definitely when it became mainstream, but I have seen no evidence of it dying off after 2014. Just my own personal experience, but I've seen more social media posts about vaccines (pro and con) within the last three years than back in the 2007-2014 range. Could be that I just hang in different circles now or that different groups of people are the ones being more vocal about it now.

Okay, I can agree that the response to the propaganda is sensationalized and is also propaganda. It's all propaganda.

You'd have to be beyond retarded to inject that shit into yourself/children. Really THINK about it for half a second.

And yet that is about the most blasphemous thing you can say in today's climate

It's up there. People are fucking DUMB.

Make Polio Great Again

or guillain barre syndrome, rather

my right eye has been twitching non stop since i got the yellow fever vaccine the other day

What is wildly hilarious, let's look at the study itself. Nothing major to see other than the dramtic title.

Now lets look at all the shares of this "study". Notice anything interesting? I see a bunch of twitter bots sharing this story, verbatium. Looks like they are lock in step with the projection, no?

So please CNN, Spare me the dramatics of your so called Army of Russian Bots. You are pathetic.

sowing discord... the bar is being lowered and lowered and lowered...

Two hundred and fifty three seems like a small number, but it looks like they were very likely favorited, re-tweeted and promoted by hundreds or thousands of fake accounts.

For example, one could make only 100 reddit submissions in a year, but what if they got 20 to 60 fake upvotes from sockpuppets or bots within the first hour? They would get high visibility, and if they were inflammatory enough, would get a lot more upvotes.

Same with Facebook posts and fake likes, fake views on YouTube to fool the algorithms and make them go viral.

For example, this fake Russian account created as a black woman that hates Hillary was extremely popular on Twitter.

https://blavity.com/popular-twitter-account-russian-trolls

So was this fake GOP account.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-russian-twitter-account-tennessee-gop-20171018-story.html

What's lost in the Russian bot or Russian troll arguments is that these accounts may have simply been latching onto topics like vaccinations or gun control or gay rights and or other political topics so as to gain followers and gain access to said followers attention, personal information, and in a round about way - profit from it. Like Facebook, Instagram, any free app, or free game etc etc etc. The idea that these trolls are sowing discord is intriguing but the general population doesn't need outsiders to sow discord when both sides have their fair share of icons. To imagine that a handful of tweets or a few Facebook ads or stupid memes had the sway that is attributed is beyond laughable in comparison to the reach that Ann Coulter or Rachel Maddow have had over the past decade plus. IF these accounts are even Russian, why does the media insist they were trying to disrupt the harmony of civil public discussion rather than a few people half a world away trying to make a fast buck so they can buy some beets and vodka.

^ really good take away ^

MMR vaccine cancer connection creates all the discord I need.

Maybe because "Russian bots" is the new liberal boogey man?

why do the trolls have to be russian, ffs there is an entire world out there...

No way man. Didn't you know. Russia is the boogey man. There could be literal Russians hiding under your bed.

This is mot going to be PC but how of the vaccine stupidity is because people think autism is a new thing instead of being the new pc way of saying (slow, retarded, mentaly challenged) its not like there was an announcement on it being the new pc way. Crazy people will believe crazy stuff some not so crazy get fooled. I for a while thought that autism was something new but didnt connect vaccines to autism. Bottom line, I didnt know words changed.

The American military industrial complex will allow your country to be controlled by some shit posting on the internet.

Step away slowly...

American Corporate Media is a gaslighting farce that exists to project its own vile delusions onto the designated enemy du jour.

Propaganda.

Moral of the story: You’re all bots. I knew it.

Yup, and clearly no one had heard about the vaccine debate prior to these 253 tweets that may have been retweeted millions of times.

That's not what I'm saying at all. The debate has been going on for a long time now, but it has really ramped up in recent years. This was just adding more fuel to the fire. I'm not saying they were for sure shared millions of times - or zero times - because I don't know. Google trends doesn't show anything for that hash tag, but that was only for some of the tweets.

All of that is beside the point though. The fact that they were even trying to encourage these arguments should be worthy of discussion, even if they weren't effective at it. If they are pushing propaganda for both sides of a fight (like they were reportedly doing for several other topics), we shouldn't just say "Oh, no big deal since it wasn't that much propaganda".