Free Republic

Nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages on the social media platform about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said Wednesday. Researchers culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans.

Ukraine's intelligence service accused Russian operatives of creating a bot farm that sent 5,000 SMS messages to Ukrainian military and law enforcement officers encouraging them to defect and surrender to the Russians. On Thursday, the Ukrainian Armed Forces announced on Facebook that the Security Service of Ukraine had managed to shut down the Russian bot farm, or "special information operation," which aimed to "shake the moral and psychological state of the Ukrainian security forces." According to Ukrainian Armed Forces' Facebook post, the message read, "The outcome of events is predetermined! Be prudent and refuse to support nationalism and discredited leaders...

Report: Billie Eilish targeted by anti-Israel bots over message to Israelis Singer's Instagram page targeted by pro-Palestinian bots and inundated with "Palestine solidarity-themed comments," report says. American singer and songwriter Billie Eilish was targeted by anti-Israel bots on Instagram after promoting her new album in a video for MTV Israel, a new report by the entertainment industry group Creative Community for Peace revealed.

China's ruling Communist Party has launched a new front in its long-running, aggressive campaign to influence global public opinion: Western social media. Liu Xiaoming, China's former ambassador to the United Kingdom, is one of the party's most effective foot soldiers on this changing online battlefield. He entered Twitter in October 2019, when a flood of Chinese diplomats flooded the site, which is blocked in China. Since then, Liu has skillfully raised his public profile, amassing a fan base of over 119,000 as an exemplar of China's latest razor-sharp "wolf fighter" diplomacy, a phrase derived from the title of a top-grossing...

This is curious, I went to Bidens twitter just to see how many followers the worlds most popular politician has and found out he has only 24 million. Trump I recall, before he was banned, had 65 million, almost 3 times what Beijing Biden has, yet Beijing wins the election?

Joe Biden will formally accept the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday and deliver the primetime address to his party's virtual convention. We didn't feel like staying up to watch, so instead we programmed a bot to study hours of footage of Biden speaking during the campaign, and then forced it to write a Joe Biden acceptance speech of its very own. Here are the 10 most inspiring lines from the bot-authored speech. Enjoy!

Agadmator runs an extremely popular chess-only youtube channel / subscription and it has been on with no problems for YEARS. He has a deffinite accent so I think he is of (a guess) slavic ancestry but speaks fluent English. Has done thousands(?) of game analysis for eras from Paul Morphy to current world Grand Master Magnus Carlsen. He was doing an interactive podcast when he got blocked by Youtube about an hour in. An immediate protest was almost immediately denied. Most likely an algorithm / bot, but an increasingly obvious hyper-sensitive Youtube habit.

Presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) did not hold back Friday when responding to 2016 nominee Hilary Clinton's suggestion that she is the "favorite of the Russians" for 2020, excoriating the former secretary of State as "the queen of warmongers" and "personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party." "She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far," Clinton had told David Plouffe, host of the podcast "Campaign HQ," and the campaign manager for former President Obama's 2008 campaign. While the former first lady and...

The release of this report — you know, the one that exonerates President Trump of any and all allegations of Russia collusion, is, arguably, the biggest news of the last two years — and in the heat of this massive news cycle that lands directly in Maddow’s sweet spot, a huge chunk of her audience just up and disappeared.

You have 2 days (48 hours) to pay. (I have a special code, and at the moment I know that you have read this email). If I don't get bitcoins, I will send your video to all your contacts, including family members, colleagues, etc. However, if I am paid, I will immediately destroy the video, and my trojan will be destruct someself. If you want to get proof, answer "Yes!" and resend this letter to youself. And I will definitely send your video to your any 11 contacts.

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them.The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up...

Many German lawmakers were flooded with messages during the recent debate on the UN migration pact, in what appeared to be the work of social media bots, said Ralph Brinkhaus, the head of the parliamentary group of the ruling conservative CDU party. The emails “often had same blocs of texts”, Brinkhaus told Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in an interview published on Sunday. “But most of all, this wave of untruths and defamation was unleashed online and on social media,” he added, urging a series of measures to fight disinformation. On social media, a “bot” is a label used for automated programs...

Video Now, in this 2018-midterm election season, as some predict a blue wave of resistance to Trump, his policies and alarming authoritarianism, Republicans want to split up the Democratic political opposition and divide black and Latino voters. And Russia looks like it wants to help here, too. But this time it won't work. The most recent example of this strategy is the #WalkAway hashtag, which is presented as a grassroots effort by former Democrats who are critical of the party's alleged intimidation, confrontation and lack of civility and want people to walk away from the party. .....

It what may be an early onslaught of Kremlin-linked Twitter attacks ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, Russia bots appear to be fueling a wave of criticism against Democrats in part over a lack of “civility” and intimidation in political confrontations, according to bot trackers. Attacks with the hashtag #WalkAway purport to be from a “grassroots” wave of one-time Democrats who have left the party in part because they say they are so incensed by the hateful and divisive behavior of party members. The message is to “walk away” from ugly confrontations, “intolerance” and hate — and from the Democratic...

White nationalist provocateurs, a pair of fake news sites, an army of Twitter bots and other cyber tricks helped derail Democratic Senator Al Franken last year, new research shows. While everyone has been focused on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to support Donald Trump, the Franken takedown originated in—and was propelled by—a strategic online campaign with digital tentacles reaching to, of all places, Japan. Analysts have now mapped out how Hooters pinup girl and lad-mag model Leeann Tweeden's initial accusation against Franken became effective propaganda after right-wing black ops master Roger Stone first hinted at the allegation.

"The other staff mentioned are very incidental. I mean, it seems like they put down all the names they could get. Some were people who worked there in 2014 — but most of these guys didn’t work for the troll factory for a long time. They didn’t even work there during the elections."

Dear Mike Le Deplorable [my Twitter handle], As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency. Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period. This is purely for your own information purposes, and is not related...

Quit eating Hermione's family, Ron, and what's with the Hufflepuff House pig? Is there a spell that can write more Harry Potter books that aren't robotic-sounding? Warner Bros J.K. Rowling, you're in no danger of being replaced any time soon.The bright Muggles at Botnik Studios trained predictive keyboards (one for narration, one for dialogue) on all seven Harry Potter books and produced a brand-new chapter about the young wizard. And great sizzling dragon bogies, is it awful."Our web keyboard app analyzes text files and offers the most common word sequences as suggestions to the human user, to help them write...

Elections in 18 separate nations were influenced by online disinformation campaigns last year, suggests research. Independent watchdog Freedom House looked at how online discourse was influenced by governments, bots and paid opinion formers. In total, 30 governments were actively engaged in using social media to stifle dissent, said the report. Educating users to spot fake news and making tech firms police their networks could combat the manipulation, it said. The different tactics used to influence online speech included: * automated bots that echoed official messages * armies of paid commentators that swamped discussions with pro-government views * false news sites...

BERKELEY — It didn’t take long for fake news about the shooter in Sunday’s church massacre to spread across the internet. Now, a pair of computer-savvy UC Berkeley students are trying to do what lawmakers have been begging Twitter to do for months: call out automated bot accounts that spew false, deliberately divisive political propaganda under the dangerous guise of being real people with legitimate views. On Halloween, while most of their fellow students were donning costumes and preparing for a night of celebration, Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte officially launched Botcheck.me, a Google Chrome browser extension and website that...