Astroturfing

Fair warning. I am about to speak very ill of the dead. David Koch went to his eternal barbecue spit on Friday. Except for his surviving brother, Charles, no man had a worse effect on American politics since the death of John C. Calhoun. Every malignancy curr…

Share to facebookShare to twitterShare to linkedin AI in News and Journalism Pixabay The business of communicating the happenings of society might seem to be something entirely human-centric. After all, what do machines …

Sentiment toward dollar-pegged stablecoin tether (USDT) tends to foreshadow shifts in the assets market capitalization by up to 12 days before surges. A new study said those price movements are suspicious, and could be the result of  sentiment manipulation by…

A lot of Marvel fans are angry about the possibility of Spider-Man leaving the MCU, prompted by a corporate dispute between Disney and Sony. But if you look closer at the resulting hashtags, youll notice something fishy. Instead of being an organic fan campai…

Phoenix, Arizona is about to vote on a ballot measure intended to sabotage light rail expansions. A Valley Metro Rail extension to South Phoenix set to open in 2023 would be the first casualty, but Proposition 105’s ballot language would actually ban new ligh…

Share to facebookShare to twitterShare to linkedin Well, you know what they say: if you dont have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me! was a line from the play and movie Steel Magnolias. Sounds like the Inte…

You are going to hear a lot about this, it makes everybody's problems go poof. Just don't mention the CO2. The President of the United States visited a new plastics facility outside of Pittsburgh recently. Even Fox News wrote that his visit was "in keeping w…

Miller, Blake Andrew Phillip (2016) Automated detection of Chinese Government astroturfers using network and social metadata. . University of Michigan, Michigan, USA. Full text not available from this repository. Astroturfing is the practice of an org…

As someone who studies the impact of misinformation on society, I often wish the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley who enabled communication at speed had been forced to run a 9/11 scenario with their technologies before they deployed them commercially. O…

Amazons FC Ambassador Twitter accounts have hilariously backfired. On Wednesday, the internet took notice when Amazon employee-run accounts labeled FC ambassadors (FC stands for fulfillment center) swarmed Twitter with kind words about their corporate overlo…