I usually don’t post stuff like this, but it’s so gloriously silly I can’t help it. And heaven knows we all need a laugh these days. TNW: Wikipedia titles you can sing to the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ theme song, tweeted. “A while back, XKCD – a webcomic you should definitely be following – published a list of Wikipedia articles that have the same syllable stress pattern as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song. You know, something like ‘Puerto Rico Lizard-Cuckoo.’ Well, this has been taken a step further by enterprising Twitter user, __eel__. They created a Twitter bot that only posts real life Wikipedia articles whose titles can be sung to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme.”
bots
EurekAlert: New application can detect Twitter bots in any language
EurekAlert: New application can detect Twitter bots in any language. “Thanks to fruitful collaboration between language scholars and machine learning specialists, a new application developed by researchers at the University of Eastern Finland and Linnaeus University in Sweden can detect Twitter bots independent of the language used.”
Twitterbots: Anatomy of a Propaganda Campaign (Symantec)
Symantec: Twitterbots: Anatomy of a Propaganda Campaign. “One of the main talking points of the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign involved attempts to surreptitiously influence public opinion using social media campaigns. In the months after the election, it quickly became apparent that a sophisticated propaganda operation had been directed against American voters. Not surprisingly, news of these campaigns caused widespread public concern, prompting social media firms to launch investigations into whether their services had been misused. In October 2018, Twitter released a massive dataset of content posted on its service by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian company responsible for the largest propaganda campaign directed against the U.S.”
Get All of Your Bots in a Row: 2018 California Bot Disclosure Law Comes Online Soon (National Law Review)
National Law Review: Get All of Your Bots in a Row: 2018 California Bot Disclosure Law Comes Online Soon. “During the 2016 election, certain Russian operatives used fake social media profiles to influence voters and also created bot accounts to add likes to and share posts across the internet. And more recently, in January 2019, the New York Attorney General and Office of the Florida Attorney General announced settlements with certain entities that sold fake social media engagement, such as followers, likes and views. Moreover, many of the social media platforms have had recent purges of millions of fake accounts. Thus, it’s clear that bots and automated activity on social media platforms has been on everyone’s radar…including state legislators’ too.”
AdWeek: Hockey Fans Can Lace Up a New Facebook Messenger Bot From the NHL
AdWeek: Hockey Fans Can Lace Up a New Facebook Messenger Bot From the NHL. “The National Hockey League teamed up with chat engagement platform GameOn on a new Messenger bot that debuted just in time for the Stanley Cup Final. The NHL Chatbot gives hockey fans access to content including news updates, game previews, notifications, scoring alerts, schedules, standings and in-game highlights in both video and GIF form.”
Congressman Mark DeSaulnier: Congressman DeSaulnier Introduces Legislation to Study the Impact of Social Media Bots on Elections and Public Discourse
Congressman Mark DeSaulnier: Congressman DeSaulnier Introduces Legislation to Study the Impact of Social Media Bots on Elections and Public Discourse. “Today, Congressman Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11) announced the introduction of the Bots Research Act (H.R. 2860), a bill to establish a task force of experts at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to determine the impact of automated social media accounts, commonly known as ‘bots,’ on elections and public discourse.”
Engadget: Many of the Brexit Party’s Twitter followers appear to be bots
Engadget: Many of the Brexit Party’s Twitter followers appear to be bots . “It’s not shocking to see Twitter bots latch on to a political campaign, but it’s not often they do so soon after a campaign starts — let alone on a large scale. That appears to be the case with the UK’s Brexit Party, however. The no-deal EU withdrawal party is only a few months old, but researchers talking to BuzzFeed News found that many of its Twitter accounts are networks of bots and other inauthentic users.”
