Middle East Eye: Saudi Arabia’s bot army flourishes as Twitter fails to tame the beast. “You only need to search Twitter for a hashtag relating to a country in the Middle East to find one of these bot accounts. They typically copy-and-paste the same content, and feature a video clip with the distinctive Saudi 24 logo in the bottom right corner.”
bots
The Atlantic: Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It
The Atlantic: Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It. “Presidential-campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: Artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: artificial-intelligence-driven text generation and social-media chatbots. These computer-generated ‘people’ will drown out actual human discussions on the internet.”
Analytics India: Top Chatbots, Assistants & Facial Recognition Tools Launched In 2019
Analytics India: Top Chatbots, Assistants & Facial Recognition Tools Launched In 2019. “Chatbots have emerged as the preferred interface as more and more searches are shifting from text to voice. While globally, banking bots have moved beyond answering transactional queries to full-service mode, the Indian BFSI sector bound by regulatory norms is still in an evolving stage. They are now moving to full-fledged virtual assistant mode, thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
The Next Web: 2020 will mark the death of the chatbot as we know it
The Next Web: 2020 will mark the death of the chatbot as we know it. “According to recent research, only 9 percent of customers felt that they would be best served by a chatbot for serious enquiries, whereas the figures for a voice call were in excess of 80 percent. But with 80 percent of contact centers wanting to adopt chatbot technology by 2020, what is does this industry know that we don’t? Well, they are seeing the bright and not-so-distant future of this technology, and it doesn’t look like a thing like your average chatbot.”
Nieman Lab: Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists
Nieman Lab: Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists. “…there are probably few topics that have changed people’s perspective of what’s happening online so quickly and found their way into people’s lives and daily conversation than ‘fake news’ — a label that rose quickly and fell sharply after everyone seemed to agree that better terminology was needed. And now, in 2019, about 75 percent of Americans believe that at least some of the news they consume consists of disinformation — i.e., deliberately placed false information.”
BBC: How bots are stealing artwork from artists on Twitter
BBC: How bots are stealing artwork from artists on Twitter. “Artists have told the BBC how their artwork is being stolen from social media and sold for profit online. They claim malicious individuals are finding their art, often with the aid of an automated system known as a bot, and uploading it on to a website where it can be sold on a T-shirt without the artist’s permission.”
Quartz: How to avoid another Russian-troll misinformation nightmare in 2020
Quartz: How to avoid another Russian-troll misinformation nightmare in 2020. “We typically think of social media platforms—Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.—as distinct from one another…. This is true for most users. But it’s also true for the trolls and bots that drive disinformation campaigns. This phenomenon helps explain what happened when the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) targeted US social media during and after the 2016 US presidential election.”
