Greetings Professor
This week I am talking to Dr. Kathleen Carley, Ph.D., Professor at Carnegie Mellon University – School of Computer Science – Institute for Software Research & CEO of Netanomics. She heads up the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) that focuses on combatting disinformation online. In this recent feature on NPR: Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots their research showed that 45% of Twitter content could be coming from bots. So for the current volume that would mean some 225,000 tweets per day are bot-generated. As Kathleen points out not all bots are bad actors and generating discourse but a lot of this content does and is.
There are clear signals that nation actors are using these channels to (successfully) sow division in this country and others. This is Propaganda in the social age and it’s damaging our world and our values. We discuss the real-world harm induced by some of these stories (England has seen a number of wireless towers targeted and set on fire as a result of completely false stories suggesting links that don’t exist). They play to human behavior and the social effect that others and information have on everyone. These countries have sown distrust, messed with our elections and appear intent on sowing distrust and panic on an already fragile state induced by the worldwide Pandemic of COVID19
We discuss how to approach combatting these attacks and the challenge of any automated approach that does not include human involvement as we learned with WOPR
Greeting Professor Falken
Shall we Play a Game
If you are wondering about the title click on the video links to see the relevant clips from “War Games”
Listen in to hear us talk about the early journey as they started pulling in information from FourSquare, Facebook and Twitter and how they have developed sophisticated bot Hunters, Troll Hunters, and Country Hunters to dive into huge amounts of data using Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Process and Machine Learning techniques
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