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Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots
and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate
Objectives.
To understand how Twitter bots and trolls (
“
bots
”
) promote online health
content.
Methods.
We compared bots
’
to average users
’
rates of vaccine-relevant messages,
which we collected online from July 2014 through September 2017. We estimated the
likelihood that users were bots, comparing proportions of polarized and antivaccine
tweets across user types. We conducted a content analysis of a Twitter hashtag asso-
ciated with Russian troll activity.
Results.
Compared with average users, Russian trolls (
c
2
(1)=102.0;
P
<
.001), so-
phisticated bots (
c
2
(1)=28.6;
P
<
.001), and
“
content polluters
”
(
c
2
(1)= 7.0;
P
<
.001)
tweeted about vaccination at higher rates. Whereas content polluters posted more
antivaccine content (
c
2
(1)= 11.18;
P
<
.001), Russian trolls ampli
fi
ed both sides. Un-
identi
fi
able accounts were more polarized (
c
2
(1)= 12.1;
P
<
.001) and antivaccine
(
c
2
(1) = 35.9;
P
<
.001). Analysis of the Russian troll hashtag showed that its messages
were more political and divisive.
Conclusions.
Whereas bots that spread malware and unsolicited content disseminated
antivaccine messages, Russian trolls promoted discord. Accounts masquerading as le-
gitimate users create false equivalency, eroding public consensus on vaccination.
Public Health Implications.
Directly confronting vaccine skeptics enables bots to le-
gitimize the vaccine debate. More research is needed to determine how best to combat
bot-driven content. (
Am J Public Health.
Published online ahead of print August 23, 2018:
e1
–
e7. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567) |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| cauz |
Feb. 2, 2019, 3:14 p.m. |
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| Shawn Fanning |
Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas. |
| Annie Jacobsen |
Back in the 1950s, there was a top-secret program code-named SUNTAN being conducted at a top-secret facility called Skunk Works. Its objective? To develop a liquid-hydrogen-powered spy plane. Because liquid hydrogen is incredibly volatile, early experiments were conducted inside a bomb shelter with eight-foot-thick walls. |
| Pico Iyer |
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. |
| Stephen Cambone |
The users are not going to be in the position of accepting what's been collected; they're going to be in the position of being able to demand collection. |
| John Edward |
I think that the majority of messages are validating messages to confirm the survival of conscious. And many times that validation message is negative or sad. |
| Quinton Aaron |
I do believe in sending positive messages. I am a Christian, so I do believe in a lot of positive messages. |
| Anant Agarwal |
The online credential, the online certificate is very different from an on campus certificate. And we really believe that online learning and the EdX platform and the EdX portal, these are ways in which - you can think of them as a rising tide that's going to lift all boats whether for students worldwide or on our campuses. |
| Barry Eichengreen |
Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing. |
| Bryan Callen |
If you actually get down to the nitty-gritty of the average Pakistani, the average Indian, the average whoever, what you really do know emotionally is that they're exactly the same. |
| Jesse James Garrett |
User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process. |
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Russian Trolls Tried -- and Failed -- To Push Divisive Content On Vaccines (fortune.com) 190
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 25, 2018 @10:34AM from the thinking-of-the-children dept.
Russian trolls "seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society," according to a new study shared by long-time Slashdot reader skam240. "The topic became another issue the Russian trolls seized upon to widen existing rifts in America and turn citizens against each other," reports NBC News.
But Fortune reports there's more to the story:...
This post is a comment.
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Do Social Media Bots Have a Right To Free Speech?
One study found that 66% of tweets with links were posted by "suspected bots" -- with an even higher percentage for certain kinds of content. Now a new California law will require bots to disclose that they are bots.
But does that violate the bots' freedom of speech, asks Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas.
"Even t...
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Advanced Hybrid Peer to Peer Botnet. The botnet requires no bootstrap procedure.
The botnet communicates via the peer list contained in each bot. However, unlike Slapper [8], each bot has a fixed and limited size peer list and does not reveal its peer list to other bots. In this way, when a bot is captured by defenders, only the limited number of bots in its peer list are exposed.
A botmaster could easily monitor the entire botnet by issuing a report command. This command instructs all (or partial) bots to report to a specific compromised machine (which is called a sensor host) that is cont...
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Russia's Anti-VPN Law Goes Into Effect
A Russian law that bans the use or provision of virtual private networks (VPNs) will come into effect Wednesday. The legislation will require ISPs to block websites that offer VPNs and similar proxy services that are used by millions of Russians to circumvent state-imposed internet censorship. It was signed by President Vladimir Putin on July 29 and was justified as a necessary measure to prevent the spread of extremism online. Its real impact, however, will be to make it much harder for ordinary Russians to access websites ISPs are instructed to block connections to by Russian regulator Roskomnadzor, aka the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media. The law is just one part of a concerted effort by t...
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Facebook Filed a Patent To Calculate Your Future Location
Facebook has filed several patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for technology that uses your location data to predict where you're going and when you're going to be offline. BuzzFeed News reports:
A May 30, 2017, Facebook application titled "Offline Trajectories" describes a method to predict where you'll go next based on your location data. The technology described in the patent would calculate a "transition probability based at least in part on previously logged location data associated with a plurality of users who were at the current location." In other words, the technology could also use the data of ...
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It seems like the way to go is just to have a huge variety of different possible captchas, but I would think that once you have more than a couple bots working together to build models not even that would hold up forever. Abstractly, though, doesn't it boil down to this - Is there a set of problems that a human can answer easily and a computer cannot, but the computer can still recognize a correct answer easily? My instinct is that as soon as you define that set you can build a machine to generate solutions. But I guess the answer to the real question of whether it's worth it depends on if you can build a machine that builds machines that generate solutions. And I think for just the images alone the answer is probably yes - audio/video I'm less sure about.
This post is a comment.
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Equifax Has Been Sending Consumers To a Fake Phishing Site for Almost Two Weeks
For nearly two weeks, the company's official Twitter account has been directing users to a fake lookalike website. After announcing the breach, Equifax directed its customers to equifaxsecurity2017.com, a website where they can enroll in identity theft protection services and find updates about how Equifax is handing the "cybersecurity incident." But the decision to create "equifaxsecurity2017" in the first place was monumentally stupid. The URL is long and it doesn't look very official -- that means it's going to be very easy to emulate. To illustrate how idiotic Equifax's decision was, developer Nick Sweeting created a fake website of his own: securityequifax2017.com. (He simply switched the words "securit...
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Referring a user to amazon through your affiliate link gets you 24 hours to 90 days tracking cookie where you can earn commission on anything the user purchases in the time period from Amazon, the biggest online store in the world. 1 million product pages will bring long tail search traffic and careful analytics will reveal the most promising niches/products which new hyper focused niche sites can be created around.
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Anytime I get a spam message in my inbox I read it. Because lord knows you are doing high quality spam if you are inboxing my Gmail. On that note, how the hell did this not get flagged?
"do you suspect your partner of cheating?
do you need live evidence for any issue?
do you need immunity and protection for your online accounts?
do you wish to double your bitcoins, ethereum,lite coin, etc
every ...
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Wana Decryptor Ransomware Using NSA Exploit Leaked By Shadow Brokers To Spread Ransomware Worldwide
A ransomware attack running rampant through Europe today is spreading via an exploit leaked in the most recent Shadow Brokers dump. Researchers said the attackers behind today's outbreak of WannaCry ransomware are using EternalBlue, an exploit made public by the mysterious group in possession of offensive hacking tools allegedly developed by the NSA. Most of the attacks are concentrated in Russia, but machines in 74 countries have been infected; researchers at Kaspersky Lab said they've recorded more than 45,000 infections so far on their sensors, and expect that number to climb. Sixteen National Health Service (NHS) organizations in the U.K., several large telecommunications companies and ...
This post is a comment.
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