This MIT Tech Review article from May is making the rounds again. It was based on a press release from CMU with no study to back it up. It is baseless, in my opinion. This NYT article interviews both me and the CMU researcher in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/science/social-media-bots-kazemi.html https://twitter.com/histoftech/status/1299980291902189569

I tried to see if the bot study was published since then. It was not. But Carley at CMU has co-authored several papers on COVID and social media, and one of these papers claims the 50% bots thing. You know what it cites? The media coverage of Carley's press release with no paper!

Here's the paper I'm talking about and the citation chain. I can't believe that researchers are allowed to get away this kind of stuff at an institution like CMU.

Like seriously, I feel literally fucking crazy when I actually read some of these papers on social media disinformation and follow the citations

How much of academic research is people going "wow I hope nobody closely reads this paper"? Like... what even IS peer review at this point in history? Is all knowledge production a scam? I'd like to think it isn't! I can't say for sure that it isn't!!!

Btw here is a link to the PDF of the Memon & Carley paper that cites Carley's earlier press release https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.00791.pdf

Link to an older thread (which links to more of my threads, etc) about the CMU press release cited in the original MIT Tech Review article at the top of *this* thread https://twitter.com/tinysubversions/status/1268220365790015488