Down the Rabbit Hole

I'm always the first to admit that I am a rather odd type of person.  I mean, there is plenty of evidence that I am a very odd sort of person indeed.  After all, I freakishly aced my Statistics final.  That, in itself, qualifies me to fall under the "freak" title for many people, let alone my fellow classmates who gaped open mouthed at me when my Statistics professor proudly announced my test results.  The funny thing is that I am most certainly not a mathematical genius.  On the contrary, my experience with Calculus was so rough that I could list a thousand other things that I would prefer doing, such as drinking a gallon of milk that I'm allergic to, over doing Calculus.  The reason why I aced my statistics final is because I am, quite simply, a bit of a freak.  Where others can, presumably, go on through their day without ever once noting any sort of trend or pattern in the conversations of those around them, I'm spotting patterns and innately calculating probabilities for just about everything.  

I jokingly call all of this "finding patterns in the cosmos through license plates" but really, that is a joke.  I only look for patterns in license plates out of sheer boredom when stuck in rush hour traffic.  Really, when you're pinned in your car for 45 minutes with nothing else to look at but the back of cars as you crawl slowly forward, it's not a bad activity to do but one certainly isn't going to find patterns in the cosmos there.  Despite my tendency to spot patterns, I am, in fact, a devout Occam's Razor applicant. To sum up Occam's Razor for those who may not know the term: the correct explanation for an occurrence or even set of occurrences frequently tends to be the simplest one until proven incorrect.  The combination of the three tend to be very effective in predicting outcomes for just about anything involving human behavior and, as a result, I'm very rarely surprised by what people actually do.  It's not to say that I am always right.  That would be statistically impossible and I can be wrong.  There are always alternatives that I did not consider because they were outside of my awareness.

All this being said, I find people extremely interesting.  One of my chief pastimes is to simply listen to the chatter, or in some cases, read the chatter.  What are people saying, thinking, feeling?  What thoughts, ideas, or statements are trending about specific subjects?  Twitter makes this last bit fun and easy as you can easily plug in a term with a hashtag to see what people are saying.  There is one minor issue with Twitter, however, and that is that the people on it may not be what they seem.  Sometimes, while watching the chatter, I see things that I find very curious indeed and happening with a frequency that would fall outside of a statistical norm of human behavior and probability. 

Rabbit Hole Exhibit A (apparently, somebody somewhere didn't like this image--tsk tsk, it's been effectively censored):

The first peculiarity would be the usage of the precise same wording in each of these purportedly independent tweets.   For an individual to use the same exact wording for a tweet as 4 other Twitter users is pretty odd unless it's a "retweet".   A retweet would be the fastest way to spread information; however, none of the above tweets are retweets.  A retweet would have a "RT"before it and would signify the original tweeter.   In this case, the video being linked to is being hosted by PatDollard so one would reasonably expect to see "RT @PatDollard Romney Flawlessly Handles #Occupy Hecklers: bit.ly/AqbyZM".   This is not the case in the above tweets.  None are retweets.  Other than some mild variety in hashtag use (#tcot, #twisters), the core tweet itself is virtually identical.  That could be considered a statistical anomaly until one actually views the video.  The title of the video is called "Romney flawlessly handles Occupy Hecklers".  Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that an individual giving a link to a video would most likely use the name of the video as their tweet.  However, one could also expect to see additional commentary based on the opinion of the twitter user of the video they are spreading to help encourage its spread or viewership, such as:  "Way to go, Mitt! Romney Flawlessly Handles #Occupy Hecklers: bit. ly/AqbyZM".  We humans tend to enjoy sharing our own opinions with others.  The absence of opinion being added in addition to the video title is, in itself, rather anomalous.

The most glaring but perhaps unnoticed peculiarity is the timing of the tweets.  Each one was tweeted at nearly precisely the same time or "38 minutes ago".  This is well outside the norm of expected human behavior, especially considering that the source of the video is listed second in the tweets in the sharing of it.   When a video is normally released through some online medium, it takes a bit of time for it to be passed through the populous.  In a normal scenario, Pat Dollard would have made the originating tweet with a link to the video.  Individuals would then spot Dollard's tweet and watch the video themselves.  The video in question is 1:34 long.  It would be reasonable to assume then that what would normally be seen would be Dollard's tweet and then, either a. retweets of Dollard's tweet or b.  tweets about the video roughly two minutes after the originating tweet--at the minimum.  One has to account for the time it takes for the individual to: 1.  spot the tweet, 2. click on the video, 3.  load it, 4. watch it and then 5. type out the tweet to share it.  It is statistically impossible for human beings to do all of this instantaneously.

I remember a few years ago while playing a game where myself and a few other friends tried to coordinate our characters to play a variety of in-game musical instruments at the same time.  We were all on Ventrilo and it took some practice because we had to account for varying lag between the players on the side of the game and also lag due to the Ventrilo program, itself.   It wasn't easy but we finally did it and had our near instantaneous unison going in game to other players' delight.  Despite my own experience with this, it's hard to imagine that 5 human beings would be doing the same to spam twitter all at once with the same message and video.  Can you imagine that they were on a Ventrilo program or conference call, all waiting for the other to hit "tweet" at the same moment?   To do so would be highly ineffective and transparent of motive.  What you see in the above image was somebody's mistake in their usage of sock puppets.  Sock puppets are supposed to seem like real human beings in aiding the spread of information or disinformation.  What happened above is aberrant to human behavior.  There was definitely a human being behind the message being spread but it's highly likely that there was only one human being doing the spreading--not 5.

The moral of this trip down the rabbit hole is this:  question everything.  Just because you see a number of people saying similar things does not mean that a number of people actually believe it.  In today's world, it's so very easy to utilize bots to promote specific ideas, thoughts, or even generate controversy.  If you see something get repeated over and over again, keep in mind the above statistical anomaly and be suspicious.  Your mind should be your own.  Don't let it be swayed.

Edit:  Mike found this.  One of the accounts hasn't apparently slept in the past 24 hours.  You have a one hour break in posting between the 12th and 14th hour over the last 24 hours. Doubt it was sleep because bots don't need sleep. https://twitter.com/#!/Snarky_Basterd