Astroturfing

This looks set to be a bad election for traditional Irish electioneering, and a good one for digital campaigns. A brief, rainy campaign, and greater security, is grim news for canvassers. Meanwhile, short, dark days limit the value of street posters. So here are five things to watch out for…

While looking for something else I fell into a nest of automated accounts pretending to be Andrew Yang supporters. Photo credit Gage Skidmore How It Started: The MAGA Bots For the past month or so I have been building software to find, track and visualize …

Anonymous AI is coming We are nearing a new age of ubiquitous AI. Between our smartphones, computers, cars, homes, the internet of things, and social media, the average citizen of developed countries might interact with some sort of AI system dozens of times every day. Many of these applications will…

Citation: Pierri F, Artoni A, Ceri S (2020) Investigating Italian disinformation spreading on Twitter in the context of 2019 European elections. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227821. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227821 Editor: Fabiana Zollo, Ca Foscari Uni…

BBC Duped into Promoting Marketing Scheme for Microdosing Psychedelics Advocates are hailing psychedelics as the next big thing in healthcare; proclaiming their utility for everything from treatment resistant depression, to managing inflammation, to increasi…

For anyone seeking a comprehensive overview of the global distance running scene, it’s hard to think of a better resource than LetsRun.com. In addition to its own exhaustive previews and race reports of marquee events like the Berlin Marathon or the NCAA Cros…

Grave of Qasem Soleimani (photo by Mohammad Ali Marizad for Far News Agency) Watching the internet react to US-Iran relations has been quite the trip. With each new development comes a refreshed sense that we may soon be in another protracted war. President …

In 2017, the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) gave the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) over $1 million to launch an aggressive climate litigation campaign against Americas top energy producers, according to a new Energy In Depth ana…

The London-based startup maps connections created by Twitter conversations On 17 April 2018, Starbucks announced it would close 8,000 US stores for an afternoon, to allow its 175,000 employees to undergo racial-bias training. The training was an attempt to a…

Submission + - Facebook Caught Astroturfing in Teen Vogue (businessinsider.com) Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13, 2020 @05:41PM An anonymous reader writes: Teen Vogue published “How Facebook Is Helping Ensure the Integrity of the 2020 Election.” It’s a 2,000-plus-word story comprising a series of interviews with various senior…