A Letter to a Younger Me

I struggled to write this. While I can speak only for myself, I’m confident if asked to describe me others wouldn’t settle on words like reserved, quiet, or shy. Yet, that’s exactly how I felt when I first sat down to look back and pen some reflections on my childhood and the man I've grown to be.

What follows is both an essay about my experience growing up in rural America and a love-letter to my younger self, a Kory who was so afraid of being found out; of being made to feel less-than; of being seen, analyzed, and judged foremost for the people he loved — rather than how he moved through the world. I see, now, looking back at that frightened yet hopeful young man how much he — we — killed off entire parts of our person, and used the scraps to fashion an armor to keep us safe. 

Queer childhood is waiting for the day to be — to make — who we’ve been all along inside. We don’t fit society’s mold; instead, many of us squish ourselves into the prescribed shape for as long as we can. Whether out of fear or some other reason, we deny ourselves the treasure of being who we really are. In our “closet” years, we live without a present. We put our lives on hold, waiting for the arrival of that promising future when we’re free to live authentically.  

Sure, it’s axiomatic that life continues in the closet. Yes, we go through high school and/or college, maybe we even try to force a heterosexual relationship, or play the sports and wear the clothes our peers do to fit in. But until we break down our own closet doors, we’re not us fully — not really. Queer people imagine, sometimes for decades, how profound it will feel to have acceptance and understanding from family, friends, and coworkers…only to find that for far too many of us those people shun, equivocate, and help craft or support draconian laws that punish us for our very being. In sum: Confirm our worst fears that kept shut the closet doors.

To the non-queer individuals reading this: The world doesn’t have to be this way. In doing nothing, or in trying to strike a middle ground, or in failing to forcefully defend queer individuals and their rights, you’re reinforcing the status quo — including queer folks’ closet doors, damning us to live in fear, and denying the world the full measure our beauty. I hope my story illuminates the real consequences of growing up in a world hostile to who you are. 

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Let me set the scene of my youth. I learned to fish before I could talk — heading out to the lake in the early, cool mornings of summer to catch spotted bass, bluegill, or walleye with my dad before the sun and humidity chased us back home. I was a menace when blackberries were in season. All I needed was for my grandma to turn her back for a second and I’d be out the house, trekking across a field toward my prize, only to return with my hands, face, and clothes stained with evidence. I spent Friday nights running around and beneath what to me then were colossal metal bleachers, attempting to convince my mom between plays on the football field that my friends and I did indeed need another five dollars — this time for nachos and a Dr. Pepper. Overall, my childhood was mostly unremarkable for a kid in rural America. Outwardly, at least. 

You see, I chose gymnastics over football, spent recess during my grade school years shelving books, and crocheted scarves or oven mitts as Teacher Appreciation Day presents. None of these were coded as explicitly queer but were plainly different from the norm. All the while, I guarded a secret I worried that if known would make me a pariah not only in the classroom but at home. I knew early on I was different — that I was gay — and my childhood was textured by the ever-present fear of being outed, shamed, shunned, killed. I knew the risks of being queer in rural America; I was afraid — I am still. If I could transport myself or deliver a letter to the 2006, or 2011, or 2015 version of me this is what I’d say. 

Kory, it’s okay to admit you’re afraid for the world to see you as you are: loud, animated, hard-of-hearing, queer, poor. You’re growing up in a place hostile to who you are. It’s not going to be easy, and you shouldn’t have to struggle as much as you will. It won’t always be bearable. I won’t wave you off the journey you’re on. You are going to grow, most of which through learning how to love yourself, an act you still find radical and at times elusive. Know, though, that you are enough. You are enough. 

You were so afraid of being othered that you carved off whole parts of yourself, and now a graying nearly-thirty-year-old man grieves those sacrifices. You didn’t have to do it, but I understand why. I only wish you’d learned to love yourself sooner — the pits, edges, ridges, and the truly beautiful parts. You are not defined by the parts of yourself you hate the most. What you hate isn’t bad or unwanted in the world. It’s just different. And difference isn’t always beautiful per se, but it is necessary. Queerness cannot be about the parts of ourselves society demands we shed. It’s being “the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent, and create, and find a place to speak, and to thrive, and to live.”[1] The real task — and beauty — is in creating a world wherein you don’t minimize yourself to survive. 

Queer folk will make progress in law and policy, arguing that the Constitution demands our nation recognize their “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”[2] The fight doesn’t stop there, it can’t. For too many federal protections remain out of reach, and they may soon be set aside in part or whole. You’ve tried to live out and proud since coming out. You abhor the thought of hiding who you are like you did for so many years. It’s your duty to be your whole self, always, in the hope that the world will recognize your humanity and dignity. 

You were outed freshman year. You helped peers with schoolwork, volunteered at the local hospital, and demanded excellence from yourself — and in doing so made friends who had your back and endeared yourself to teachers who might otherwise have set you aside out of prejudice. You made plain (while unsaid) that you demanded to be judged on the merits of your work, not who you loved. A privilege you’ll learn is not afforded to everyone or even most.

You survived the deep hurts that color adolescence but hold yourself accountable for not doing more for others: classmates who were ridiculed for their perceived effeminate behavior — their mannerisms, their style of speech, and tone of voice. You were unabashedly queer in rural, small-c conservative America, but it took a few years for you to learn an important lesson: Taking space for yourself is one giant and necessary step, holding and advancing it for others is a privilege and duty. 

Don’t beat yourself up; you’re not perfect. You did the best you thought you could at the time. Your legacy must be about clearing a path for others. The work to bring to fruition that world you sought after as an eleven-year-old is unfinished but not impossible. It’s in the doing each day that matters most.

You’ll face any number of situations that compel you to ask: Am I doing the right thing? Did I choose the right career? Did I earn a prestigious enough degree to be taken seriously? Am I seen as capable? charismatic? Boiled down those neatly fall back to: Am I enough for others to accept me? Kory, it doesn’t matter. Do work that matters to you. You’re going to fail, a lot. You won’t change every heart and mind to see your humanity. But you will create a family you cherish. Some of those folks are at Deloitte; others are from last-minute, hastily planned vacations; and still more are from merely showing people the unvarnished, unfinished you. 

We had help. Advocates and allies known and unknown handed us the proverbial mic to test our voice; carved out space for us to try, fail, and grow; and fought on our behalf. I live authentically, today, because of their struggle to yank nearer that more perfect future. Take their gift and run with it. Don’t minimize yourself because others are afraid of your queerness. You’re not responsible for their bigotry but you are on the hook for how you respond; the space you take, hold, and advance for others; and the society you help build for the next generation of queer kids in the face of that hate.

I struggle, still. I’m a work in progress. I’m writing this to you during Pride Month; so, remember that you stand on the shoulders of giants — and you’re of a lineage not of blood but chosen community, wrought out of both necessity and love. Do your best. Be visible. Be authentic. Get to doing the good work and carve a path for which a younger version of you would be proud. I know I am.

—

And to young, queer folk in places like my hometown: You’re seen, cherished, loved, and wanted in this world. Do not, do not, do not give up the fight. We need you to flourish and then lead. 

My struggle was my own, and it may not resonate or look exactly like yours. But know that it can get better. You have the agency to realize the world you wish you lived in, today. I encourage you to live visibly if you’re able. Harvey Milk said it plainly: “We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets… Rights are won only by those who make their voices heard.” Now, “[b]urst down those closet doors once and for all, and stand up and start to fight.” 

This essay may be the last closet door I break down. The splinters and cuts are worth it. 

[1] Dr. bell hooks. (2014, May 7). Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body. The New School for Liberal Arts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJk0hNROvzs

[2] Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 664 (2015), slip op., J. Kennedy writing for the majority. 

Learnings from Initial Commit of Social Bots on Twitter Analysis

Since I published Are Social Bots Ruining (and Running) Discourse Online? I’ve been working on a couple Python scripts that I’ll use to automate data collection for the analysis later this year. If you haven’t read that post, I encourage you to do so.

If you want the TL;DR version of that post, here it is: There is a claim that true social bots — those that are indistinguishable from humans — have a discorporate effect on our online discourse, particularly around sensitive topics (politics, Covid-19 information, etc.). A set of tools have been created that claim to accurately discriminate between human and social bot. My hypothesis is that those claims are a bunch of bologna. So, I’m doing my own analysis using the 2022 mid-term elections as a natural experiment.

Now, if you’re curious about my progress and methods to date, check out the repo on GitHub. Below is a summary of my progress and issues encountered to date, in prose as pithy as I’m able to muster.

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Securing Lists of Candidates in the 2022 Midterm Election

After some trial and error — determining if I can plug into an API to get information from AP, DealDesk, etc., or through some targeted web scraping — I settled on scraping Wikipedia pages related to each state’s federal 2022 elections using BeautifulSoup. Thankfully, the tables reporting winners in each primary election (for districts and senate seats) are the same across pages.

My script loops over a dictionary of pages, finds the appropriate table in each, selects the winner (thanks to a specific HTML tag) of each race, and appends that information to a list. After applying some light string manipulation to the list of winners, the state-specific output is written to a state-specific file.

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Tracking Twitter Followers of General Election Candidates

This is where the real fun begins.

A quick aside: Years ago, right as the pandemic started, I was part of College Board’s Policy team. We were tapped to track shifts to school instruction models — in-person, hybrid, remote — for schools in the nation’s largest 250 districts, and report that information back to senior leadership and program teams. At first, six of us did this by hand. Each week we’d spend more than a half-a-day going district website by district website to capture and report on any changes.

I was painfully bored, and I knew there was a more efficient way to source and report this information. So, as someone new to coding with Python, I set myself the task to write a script that would somehow gather, structure, and report this Information to our team. I settled on leveraging Twitter’s API to gather districts’ tweets each day. I applied some NLP to discern what the tweets were saying and if they reported any shifts in instruction models. Now we were in business (and I got back nearly a full day of work).

All that to say: I’m thankful I had a Twitter Developer Account already that I could use. Taking the list of general election candidates, I pass that information to Twitter through its API. I quickly hit a snag: Twitter’s API does not currently allow users to see / differentiate between accounts based on the Election Label they apply to all congressional / state-wide candidates. So, I am forced to query Twitter to return a list of accounts (based on names in the list of general election candidates as search terms) that may be a candidate for office later this fall.

Unsurprisingly, this is a pretty involved process. I pass the list of names to Twitter using a for loop — iterating over each name in the list — and receive back a set of account-specific information that I use to manually process, differentiate, and discern general election candidates from the chaff. Until Twitter includes the ability to query its service to select candidates for office via an endpoint in the API, this manual processing is required. So, I’m in for a lot of late nights later this spring / summer. (I will happy accept any contribution to this work in the form of a bottle of pinot noir or sparkling wine.)

Once I’ve figured out which accounts are actually those I want to analyze, I pass those account IDs back to Twitter and request their followers’ account IDs. These are captured in a list and written to a file specific to each general election candidate.

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Next Steps

I’ll continue to repeat this process as primaries are held: source general election candidates via Wikipedia, secure their Twitter account information, and download a list of their followers for analysis after the general election this November.

Beyond the analysis I’m already planning, I’m curious if anyone has opinions of or suggestions for additional analyses I should do in tandem. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a network analysis to determine the connection between followers of a given account and across accounts. Are some individuals following, engaging with others, and driving conversations online about specific candidates, particularly those outside their own congressional district? If so, what do these “super users” mean for our online discourse?

More to come! Stay tuned.

Are Social Bots Ruining (and Running) Discourse Online?

I consider myself a savvy consumer of news. I read widely, subscribing to organizations across the political spectrum, including the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and a slew of Substacks. By doing so I attempt to better uncover the “truthiness” of an issue. 

In an era marked by increasing political polarization and self-reinforcing echo chambers, it’s paramount that not only do we read widely but engage with high-quality news that can withstand strict scrutiny. And we must push back when we encounter articles or assertions that may feel true but lack real evidence for their claims. 

I’m not perfect — far from it. I, too, have latched onto an article, scoop, or series that seemed rigorously reported and undoubtedly reinforced my prior beliefs. I closed the browser tab and felt more secure in my position and worldview. But I was wrong. I didn’t do the legwork required — I trusted but didn’t verify.

This brings me to this post. Since 2016 I’ve read a few dozen pieces that asserted, directly or indirectly, that social media discourse — and by extension, a massive misinformation scheme — is being driven by social bots. I’ll adopt Allem and Ferrara’s (2018) definition of a social bot: 

“Social bots are automated accounts that use artificial intelligence to steer discussions and promote specific ideas or products on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. To typical social media users browsing their feeds, social bots may go unnoticed as they are designed to resemble the appearance of human users (e.g., showing a profile photo and listing a name or location) and behave online in a manner similar to humans (e.g., retweeting or quoting others’ posts and liking or endorsing others’ tweets).”

To put a finer point on it: Social bots are not the same thing as troll farms or automated bots. Troll farms exist without question and automated bots are useful tools for disseminating information — major news organizations use them to automatically post their articles on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Additionally, these tools are widely available for personal use. I’ve previously used IFTTT to effortlessly post across platforms. But such automated tools are not by definition social bots as being discussed and heralded as the harbingers of doom for public discourse and civil society in America. (Troll farms — or any orchestrated misinformation campaign by domestic or foreign actors — are a threat to genuine discourse, but I do not focus on them here.)

These articles entice readers to imagine that our discourse is directed or unduly influenced by true social bots. Let me state my position clearly: I believe social bots are harmful to society, broadly. I find articles asserting that half of the accounts tweeting about Covid-19 are bots frightening but also unfairly hyperbolic, and in particular I take issue with the current methodologies that researchers use to arrive at these findings. (If my high school teachers or college professors are reading this, I apologize for burying the lede this far down.) 

These methodologies — one in particular — are the focus of this post. How are researchers arriving at these conclusions? Are their methods sound and defensible? Are the tools we use to discern bots from humans reliable? That is to say: Do they accurately discriminate between bots and humans? If the answer is no, then, we must: (1) work to develop methods that are robust, valid, and accurate, and (2) interrogate our priors about who is doing what on social media and why. 

Finally, I commit to conducting my own analysis using the 2022 mid-term elections to test the theory that social bots have an outsized influence on public discourse, specifically our online discussions about politics. 

Methods for Detecting Social Bots

Three major methods for detecting social bots on social media platforms exist today: 

• The Oxford Method

• The Berkeley/Swansea Approach

• USC/Indiana’s Botometer

I’ll focus on Botometer’s methodology and accuracy. Researchers built a tool that allows users to input a username or list of handles to discriminate social bots from humans. Without getting too in the weeds, they employed a supervised learning method. Specifically, the authors of the tool used random forest classification. Their classification is based on more than 1,000 features and grouped into six main classes: network features, user features, friends features, temporal features, content features, and sentiment features. 

Before April 18, 2018, a list of Congress members’ Twitter handles was fed into Botometer. The result? A Gaussian distribution. Yes, the tool reported (and based on its prior learning believed) that nearly one-half of Congress members were bots — and while I disagree with many in Congress on most things, they in fact are not bots. A year later, Botometer performed remarkably better on the same list of Congress members — dropping the false positive error rate from 47% to 0.4%. You may wonder how. Well, they were manually added to the training data and tagged as human users. The tool did not suddenly increase its accuracy writ large, no, the authors of the tool patched over the issue manually. Botometer’s application to real-world scenarios remains likely just as poor. 

At issue, here, is how researchers coded and taught Botometer to function. By design Botometer incorporates a prior — an estimate of the prior probability that a substantial number of social bots exist — the previous build (April 2018) demonstrated that. 

In fact, if you navigate to Botometer and input President Biden's Twitter account, the tool thinks he's a bot. Sure he has a team that manages his social media account, unlike President Trump. But that does not a social bot make.

Using the 2022 Midterm Election as a Case Study 

Taking the assumption that social bots are substantially affecting our public discourse, specifically how we engage in political issues online, I will use the 2022 midterm cycle as a natural experiment. On the day that primaries are held and winners declared later this year, I will download a list of all followers for each winning primary candidate in the 435 House and 34 Senate races. I will pull a similar list of users on the evening of election night later this November.

I’ll analyze the net new followers and score them using Botometer. With a list of users and their “how like a bot is this account” scores, I’ll sample the pool of accounts and manually analyze them to determine their humanity. Do they take selfies? Do they post about their friends? Do they tweet about innocuous things that are local to their communities? (A snowstorm that brings I-95 to a halt? A noisy parade of motorcycles going through an otherwise quiet North Dakotan town? Do they link to their LinkedIn, work, or other online presence that supports their humanity? Did they live-tweet their tears while listening to Adele or a new Taylor Swift album?) 

In short: Are the automated methods used to discriminate humans from social bots accurate and valid when deployed at scale — and often at a scale that makes manual checks an insurmountable lift? I’m not sold that half of Twitter is driven by bots-pretending-to-be-humans, even though types of bots and trolls do exist on the platform. 

And if it’s not true if social bots are not running amok on social media platforms today, what does that say about public discourse online? Folks that do little but tweet and retweet hundreds of times a week are affecting our online discussions. But that’s their prerogative. 

Me? I’d prefer they engage with higher-quality content: Less QAnon conspiracy theories, fewer Tucker Carlson clips, less vaccine misinformation. But if the issue is that people, real flesh and blood Americans, are the purveyors of this content, then, that’s another question entirely. And it requires a different set of tools to remedy. 

I’ll start with me and what I can do. I’ll inspect the automated tools that are proffered as the panacea to our online woes. I’ll keep you updated on what I find. Perhaps I’m wrong.