If They Can Do This to Twitter....

50,000 Russian Bots

....Think What They Can Do to "Comments!"

There has been a lot of attention to all the bots on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc. My fixation has been on "Comments" bots/trolls.

It all started with the bots on Breitbart for me. That's where I coined "NASTYBOT," (More examples)
Go ahead. Pet me. 

...those gross insults that were amping up the snarling, the American-on-American hatred. Somehow Breitbart was the perfect platform for these Russian cyber-clusterbombs. Actual nasty humans jumped right in and became "NASTYBODS," ever eager to follow the worst bully on the schoolyard.

Gradually, the word is penetrating the semi-attentive among us to understand how many millions of bots are polluting the social media environment. It took a long time. HOW LONG?

The Really Big Story (of course) came in the New York Times. And this army of bots doesn't even count the Russian ones!!

The OTHER REALLY BIG STORY (reported mostly here on Sr.Jr) is how many bots are in the "Comments" sections of dozens of right wing sites. I'm estimating about 37% of ALL such comments are Russian bots, and 82% of the really nasty insults are. Whew!

Again, I "predict" (recommend, actually) a blockchain-based "Real Human American Certificate," so you can tell if you are arguing with a bot or not.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teddy and Bernie

Image
By Gosh, I Think I've Got It! Bernie caught some gaff for having a narrow focus campaign. Here's how he's going to broaden it out. IMHO. And that doesn't mean he's running for anything,  just being Bernie. * Teddy as the model for... ...The New Bernie campaign? * I was zapping through the pile of political pitches I get everyday on my old fashioned e-mail (wduffer@aol.com), zap, zap, zap... Congressmen from Colorado, Florida, Ohio... on and on, Democrats I never heard of, but I'm on "The List." I don't get irritated, I just get rid of the ads; I mean after all, they're Democrats. After I finished my zapping, I had a snack and set to recording another audiobook chapter. Then it hit me, based on one of the ads I zapped.  Here 'tis: It was when I dragged it up again that I noticed it was a Bernie ad, and I said, "That's it!" Do you how many great quotes flowed from Teddy R? About half of them ar...
Read more

Scooter Duff's Theory of Cosmology [UPDATED 5.4.24]

Image
 [Olde Duff Gets Seriouser] SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES  ARE MOSTLY PRIMORDIAL  DARK MATTER [Draft 8/19/2023] [UPDATED 5.4.24] & [9.25.24] THE BIG NEWS.. ..Is from the James Webb Space Telescope. There were furiously active galaxies very soon after the Big Bang, not that long after the first generation stars happened. This implies supermassive black holes at the centers of the new galaxies.  The question, "how did these giant black holes get there so early?" seems not quite answered by the two main contenders, "Giant dust collapse," and "Many stellar black holes consolidating." Thus I decided to toss this hat into the ring: At the big bang, and dark matter was the first matter of any kind to form (perhaps during the mysterious “inflation” event -- my personal theory).  It’s mutual gravitational attraction and lack of interaction to any electromagnetic force allowed it to exist and start to coalesce, even in the heat of the BB, long before baryonic matter ...
Read more

Bot Spotting - Seriously

Image
If you have opinions, and you have "proof," better check your sources! TWITTER IS THE BOT SWAMP Here is a detailed method of spotting bot tweets; twelve techniques: The trick in some cases is finding the non-human  number of tweets. @BlackManTrump, a hyperactive account, posted 89,944 tweets between August 28, 2016 and December 19, 2016 (see archive   here ), an average of 789 posts per day. The account  @sunneversets100 , an amplifier of pro-Kremlin messaging, was created on November 14, 2016. On August 28, 2017, it was 288 days old. In that period, it posted 203,197 tweets (again, the exact figure can be found by hovering the mouse over the “Tweets” entry). Watch for " Amplification " When a fake news story gets re-tweeted a bunch, you might think "Gee, it must be true. I see it everywhere." You are the victim of classic BIG LIE propaganda technique in the social media world. Remember, the Russians are the world leaders in weaponiz...
Read more