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Ed Webb

Syria's Twitter spambots | Jillian C York | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - 1 views

  • In Morocco, Syria, Bahrain and Iran, pro-revolution users of the site have found themselves locked in a battle of the hashtags as Twitter accounts with a pro-government message are quickly created to counter the prevailing narrative
  • Another set of accounts, however, managed to inundate the #Syria tag. Using a Bahraini company, EGHNA, bots are sending messages – sometimes several a minute – using various Syria-related search terms.Under the heading "Success stories", the EGNHA website says:"LovelySyria is using EGHNA Media Server to promote interesting photography about Syria using their Twitter accounts. EGHNA Media Server helped LovelySyria get attention to the beauty of Syria, and build a community of people who love the country and admire its beauty. Some of their network members started translating photo descriptions and rebroadcasting them to give the Syrian beauty more exposure.LovelySyria is using their own installation of EGHNA Ad Center to generate the Twitter messages, their current schedule is two messages every five minutes."Other accounts, such as @SyriaBeauty, @DNNUpdates and @SyLeague, perform similar functions. Their messages are sometimes political, sometimes not, but all were created recently and all serve the purpose of diverting attention from the Syrian protests.
  • although Twitter shies away from moderating content and removing users, the search functionality favours users with a complete username, profile and photograph, and users who automate their tweets can be removed from search.
Ed Webb

Muzzled by the Bots - www.slate.com - Readability - 0 views

  • It's through such combination of humans and bots that memes emerge
    • Ed Webb
       
      Android meme production
  • with just some clever manipulation, bots might get you to follow the right humans—and it's the humans, not bots, who would then influence your thinking
  • The digitization of our public life is also giving rise to many new intermediaries that are mostly of invisible—and possibly suspect—variety
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  • It's the proliferation—not elimination—of intermediaries that has made blogging so widespread.  The right term here is “hyperintermediation,” not “disintermediation.”
  • a single Californian company making decisions over what counts as hate speech and profanity for some of the world's most popular sites without anyone ever examining whether its own algorithms might be biased or excessively conservative
  • this marriage of big data and automated content moderation might also have a darker side, particularly in undemocratic regimes, for whom a war on spam and hate speech—waged with the help of domestic spam-fighting champions—is just a pretense to suppress dissenting opinions. In their hands, solutions like Impermium's might make censorship more fine-grained and customized, eliminating the gaps that plague “dumb” systems that censor in bulk
  • Just imagine what kind of new censorship possibilities open up once moderation decisions can incorporate geolocational information (what some researchers already call7 “spatial big data”): Why not block comments, videos, or photos uploaded by anyone located in, say, Tahrir Square or some other politically explosive location?
  • For governments and corporations alike, the next frontier is to learn how to identify, pre-empt, and disrupt emerging memes before they coalesce behind a catchy hashtag—this is where “big data” analytics would be most helpful. Thus, one of the Russian security agencies has recently awarded a tender12 to create bots that can both spot the formation of memes and to disrupt and counter them in real-time through ”mass distribution of messages in social networks with a view to the formation of public opinion.” Moscow is learning from Washington here: Last year the Pentagon  awarded a $2.7 million contract to the San Diego-based firm Ntrepid in order to build software to create fake multiple online identities13 and “counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.” “Big data”-powered analytics would make spotting such “enemy propaganda” much easier.
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