Cyborgs, trolls and bots: A guide to online misinformation
5 years, 1 month ago

Cyborgs, trolls and bots: A guide to online misinformation

Associated Press  

NEW YORK — Cyborgs, trolls and bots can fill the internet with lies and half-truths. “You can get a lot from a bot, but maybe it’s not the best quality,” said Emilio Ferrara, a data science researcher at the University of Southern California who co-wrote the study on Twitter bots. “We have 12 ways that we spot a bot, and if we hit seven or eight of them we have pretty high confidence,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that studies connections between social media, cybersecurity and government. And yet, “It was a little grandma, who said, ‘This is me!’” Their prevalence and the difficulty of identifying them has made bots into a kind of digital bogeyman and transformed the term into an insult, used to dismiss other social media users with different opinions. “But you don’t have to have special software to make these simpler ones.” Researchers who study Americans’ changing media habits recommend that people turn to a variety of sources and perspectives for their news, use critical thinking when evaluating information on social media, and think twice about reposting viral claims.

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