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Twitter Is Crawling With Bots and Lacks Incentive To Expel Them (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Wednesday, the exterior of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters bore an eerie message: "Ban Russian Bots." Someone -- the company doesn't know who -- projected the demand onto the side of its building. Bots, or automated software programs, can be programmed to periodically send out messages on the internet. Now Twitter is scrambling to explain how bots controlled by Russian meddlers may have been used to impact the 2016 president election. Twitter was designed to be friendly to bots. They can help advertisers quickly spread their messages and respond to customer service complaints. Research from the University of Southern California and Indiana University shows that 9 to 15 percent of active Twitter accounts are bots. Many innocuously tweet headlines, the weather or Netflix releases. After the election, there was little discussion inside the company about whether the platform may have been misused, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because it is private. But the ubiquity and usefulness of bots did come up. At one point, there were talks about whether Twitter should put a marking on bot accounts, so that users would know they were automated, one of the people said. Yet most of the conversation after the election focused on whether Trump's tweets violated Twitter's policies, the person said.
Why is there no outrage about David Brock spending $1 million per month on paid trolls for Clinton during the election? Hell they were proud to brag about it at the time. Those same people are now pushing The Russians! nonsense.
You cannot use big words like "disinformation". You need to use smaller simpler words that people more easily understand. Like "fake news". Even better, those words should be emotionally charged. Don't use words like "intelligence" or "educated". Use words like "the elite". Even entire phrases like "obscenely rich paying a fair share" can be replaced with "tax burden".
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Have we really forgotten to thank Correct The Record for Trump's historic election victory? They single-handedly turned every online Hillary supporter into a suspected paid shill, all for the low, low price of $6,000,000!
Joke of the day: Hillary Clinton was asked if Harvey Weinstein's behavior reminded her of her husband. She said: "Close, but no cigar".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Why is there no outrage about David Brock spending $1 million per month on paid trolls for Clinton during the election? Hell they were proud to brag about it at the time. Those same people are now pushing The Russians! nonsense.
David Brock is an American Neo-Liberal political operative, author, and commentator who founded the media watchdog group Media Matters for America.
Source: Wikipedia (emphasis mine)
It's not illegal for Americans to exercise their 1st amendment rights to political speech.
Spending money to get out a political message is constitutionally protected speech, per the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.
The whole reason David Brock can spend money like this is because of the conservatives behind Citizens United.
That's right: Your problem with David Brock is your chicken, come home to roost.
Now, the emphasis above: He is an American citizen.
Americans can spend all the money they want to influence American elections.
However, foreign nationals, foreign companies, and foreign countries cannot do this.
Americans who knowingly accept money from foreign nationals, foreign companies, or foreign countries to influence elections are breaking federal law, and headed for federal prison.
And now you know why there is no outrage about David Brock (exercising his rights as an American), and there is outrage about Russian influence.
>> 9 to 15 percent of active Twitter accounts are bots
Having worked in marketing briefly (shudder), I'd be surprised by any ratio that isn't close to 50/50. And a good chunk of the remaining 50% of humans also seem to be in marketing, either tuning their bots, watching what competitors bots are doing, or otherwise looking busy to keep pulling their social media paycheck. Personally, I've probably posted about 10K tweets, almost all through engines that magnify/schedule/repeat through networks. But I can't say I have enough time to actually follow Twitter for my own interests unless I'm actually at a con or other event where the feed provides some value, and the only email I see from Twitter is when someone contacts me directly.
So rational with political experience and who understood so much that she lost to probably the worst President in US history. lol.
How is that a good thing? Honestly, that speaks more against her than anything about Trump. He is obviously better at winning the general election than her.
Even if she's as evil as you claim, that would still have made a better president than Trump
Now you are deluding yourself. Trump is probably the worst President in US history because he is stupid, evil or both. You just said that Clinton understood government with experience and campaigned on getting things done. If Clinton was evil and was able to do her evil agenda then that is more dangerous than an idiot or an evil idiot.
It seems impossible to put Clinton in a good light with your comment. Was that your intention?
The Russians! narrative is not meant to convince any Trump voters, it's meant to create an excuse for Democrats so the corrupt machine can remain in control of that party. There's not a single Trump voter saying to themselves today "Dang, the Russians tricked me!"
Of course not, all Trump voters know they're infallible, and that the coal jobs are coming back, and the wall is going to keep out the damn Mexicans.
Fanatically anti-fanatical