As part of his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee today, in a hearing titled "Foreign Influence Operations' Use of Social Media Platforms," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that his company is exploring the idea of a transparency report f...
Twitter is considering a transparency report on suspended accounts
As part of his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee today, in a hearing titled "Foreign Influence Operations' Use of Social Media Platforms," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that his company is exploring the idea of a transparency report f...
It's not uncommon for scientists to use Amazon's Mechanical Turk for research -- they can quickly gather survey data in return for a small outlay to participants. Academics are quickly discovering the limits of the task service with the modern bot-ha...
As a general rule, AI isn't great at using new info to make better sense of existing info. Facebook thinks it has a clever (if unusual) way to explore solutions to this problem: send AI on a virtual vacation. It recently conducted an experiment tha...
The Pew Research Center has just released a report detailing the role Twitter bots play in spreading links from popular websites. Researchers analyzed around 1.2 million tweets posted by 140,545 accounts between July 27th and September 11th, 2017 tha...
Facebook and Twitter are plenty aware that Russian-backed actors have been using troll accounts to manipulate online discourse. Despite introducing transparency tools and purging lists of bots, California lawmakers don't think the companies are doing...
Twitter bots are bad enough by themselves, but it's worse when they're built using real info -- and New York wants to clamp down. State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has opened an investigation into Devumi, a company that sold over 3.5 million...
Resellers have existed since way before the internet. But with the surge of online shopping, they have found the perfect weapon to aid their business: bots, automated software that can add products to a virtual cart and purchase them faster than any...
Has it been while since you've chatted with a Messenger bot? If you use Pinterest religiously, you might be tempted pick up the habit again. The visual discovery social network has launched a Messenger bot and a chat extension that make it easier to...
The FCC's proposal to roll back net neutrality protections was up for public comment between April 27th and August 30th and while nearly 22 million comments were submitted, there's been a bit of discussion surrounding who or what registered those com...
It's no secret that bots flooded the FCC with comments supporting its plans to kill net neutrality. But just how many comments were fraudulent? All too many, according to data scientist Jeff Kao. He recently conducted a study that used natural langua...