Astroturfing

Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced abruptly though the timing was certainly not accidental that the platform would soon disallow any and all political advertising. This is the right thing to do, but it's also going to be hard as hell for a lot of r…

As President Trump and Congress weigh e-cigarette bans amid an outbreak of deadly lung injuries, a fight has erupted over whether vaping supporters online are real people or bots funded by an industry under attack. The fight was sparked by a controversial re…

Political disinformation campaigns on social media threaten to sway political outcomes, from U.S. elections to Hong Kong protests, yet are often hard to detect. A new study, however, has pulled back the curtain on one type of campaign called astroturfing, wh…

Intel’s 10nm is broken and unfixable, two strong economic arguments show why. SemiAccurate has been saying this for a while and now it is time to lay out why 10nm is unlikely to be viable at Intel. Authors Note: This is not a piece on Intel’s financial outlo…

A new study from researchers at The University of Manchester investigates the sophisticated network of agents on Twitter who work to distribute fake news during election campaigns. The paper"Political Astroturng on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation…

NEW RESOURCES N World: Database reveals decade of violent deaths in Middle East. “More than 335,000 people have been killed or injured in drone and missile strikes, roadside bombings and suicide attacks in the last nine years with about three-quarters of the…

How can you distinguish real netizens from participants in a hidden influence campaign on Twitter? Its not easy. Conservatives say Google and Facebook are censoring them. Here's the real story. Hidden campaigns leave traces We examined eight hidden propaga…

The government has to step up its fight against online disinformation in the wake of the federal election, says Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould. "Going forward, there is still a sense that more needs to be done to address the spread of disinfor…

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Political disinformation campaigns on social media threaten to sway political outcomes, from U.S. elections to Hong Kong protests, yet are often hard to detect. A new study, however, has pulled back the curtain on one type of campaign call…

We've long discussed the problem that is astroturfing and companies that abuse website reviews sections by inputting fake positive reviews for their own products. These fake reviews break the ecosystem of sites like Yelp and many others, where a big part of t…