Free Republic

Automated traffic now accounts for the majority of activity on the web, with the share of bad bot traffic surging from 32% to 37% annually last year, according to Thales. The French defense giant’s 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report is now in its 12th year, and based as always on data collected by Imperva’s global network, which apparently blocked 13 trillion bad bot requests across thousands of domains and industries last year. Bot traffic accounted for 51% of the total last year, the first time it has surpassed human activity in a decade, the vendor claimed. It said that malicious...

The Controversial Use of AI Bots by the University of Zurich to Manipulate Reddit Discourse In a shocking revelation, the University of Zurich has been implicated in a clandestine operation involving the use of artificial intelligence (AI) bots to influence discussions on Reddit since November 2024. This information was brought to light in a recent tweet from the account @reddit_lies, which highlighted the significant impact of these AI bots in swaying the opinions of Reddit users. With claims that these bots were six times more effective at changing minds compared to a baseline, the implications of this discovery raise crucial...

Bluesky, the social media platform that became a leftist echo chamber after the election of Donald Trump, is grappling with an influx of bots and impersonation accounts as Trump takes office. Inc. reports that as Bluesky continues to gain traction among leftists seeking an alternative to platforms like X and Threads, the company is grappling with a growing bot problem. The influx of spam accounts and impersonators is a byproduct of the platform’s success, but it’s leaving many users frustrated and concerned about the future of their social media experience.

Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk’s X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner’s support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta’s Threads and its algorithms. The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter’s core mechanic. That’s unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky’s growth trajectory — with a user...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has discovered that a Russian bot farm, with over 900 AI-generated fake social media accounts, has been spreading propaganda and disinformation around the US and other countries. What has the bot farm been posting? Most of the AI-generated fake profiles look like they belong to American citizens, with biographical information, political ideologies, locations, personas, backstories, photos, friends, and families, and have been posting videos, content, and images to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other pro-Kremlin initiatives. One of these fake profiles professed to be a Bitcoin enthusiast and a free speech absolutist, from Minneapolis,...

Fans of the James Bond films have threatened to boycott the next movie if Jewish actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson is named to the role. According to reports, antisemites have shared the hashtag #BoycottJamesBond on social media in light of reports that the British actor, 33, has all but signed a deal to assume the role of Bond. The hashtag #BoycottJamesBond has also been widely shared on X, formerly known as Twitter. Comments posted to social media include: “Really bad timing with Israel committing genocide in Gaza. Shame on you. I hope your company collapses”; “Boycott Bond, Free Palestine”; and “I won’t...

Dozens of young Americans have posted videos on TikTok this week expressing sympathy with Osama bin Laden, the notorious terrorist who orchestrated the September 11 attacks, for a two-decade-old letter he wrote critiquing the United States, including its government and support of Israel. The letter, which attempts to justify the targeting and killing of American civilians, was first published in 2002. It began to recirculate this week on the social media platform, and videos on the topic had garnered at least 14 million views by Thursday. Many of the videos, which supported some of Bin Laden’s assertions and urged other...

Billionaire Democratic donor George Soros is financing an army of Gen-Z TikTokers to push his extreme left-wing causes, praise President Joe Biden, and bash conservatives, a review of public documents and social media by The Post shows. Soros’ Open Society Foundation shelled out $5.5 million to the nonprofit Accelerate Action Inc. in 2020 and 2021 — which in turn gave at least $300,000 in 2022 to another nonprofit, Gen Z for Change, which boasts a network of 500 “activists, organizers, and creators,” tax filings show. The woke foot soldiers regularly go into battle on behalf of abolishing border enforcement, defunding...

Update from Ukraine | Ruzzian Best Tanks were ambushed | Klishchiivka is taken by Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zUSuKoXqDg The summary of the situation of Russian re-invasion to Ukraine covering the last 48 hours, as of 13th August 2023 – 22:00 (Kyiv time). https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-536-summary/ *** Great interactive maps with viewer controlled Map magnification tool to use for each Front! https://militaryland.net/maps/

The battle within cyberspace continues, with mainstream media willing to use every sketchy source possible in order to maintain the great pretending. As many major stories have shown in the past few years, the big battle over human control is taking place on social media platforms as they continue to be manipulated by government agencies. The Twitter Files released have shown just how extensive the government manipulation of information has become. The U.S. State Dept, Dept of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, DOJ, Defense Dept, and a host of ancillary networked agencies and public-private partnership all occupy this space. Essentially, it...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Over the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts — perhaps hundreds of thousands of them — to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump. Besides posting adoring words about the former president, the fake accounts ridiculed Trump’s critics from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador who is challenging her onetime boss for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. When it came to Ron DeSantis, the bots aggressively suggested that the Florida governor couldn’t beat Trump, but would be a great running mate. As Republican...

Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York...

It’s the little engine that could … bring down Google and perhaps the human race. A tech company has developed a state-of-the-art AI chatbot so sophisticated that it could render search engines — not to mention countless jobs — obsolete. Unveiled last week by the OpenAI company, ChatGPT has already amassed more than 1 million users worldwide with its advanced functions, which range from instantaneously composing complex essays and computer code to drafting marketing pitches and interior decorating schemes. It can even whip up poems and jokes — an ability previously thought to be relegated to humans. In fact, ChatGPT’s...

Chinese bots are swamping Twitter with sexually explicit posts about porn and escorts in an apparent bid to stop the spread of news about the massive protests against lockdowns and President Xi Jinping. Searches for major Chinese cities that have seen mass protests will “mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results,” said Air-Moving Device, sharing a series of charts. “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significant uptick in these spam tweets,” the outlet said, sharing data retweeted by Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos. The “vast majority” — more than 95% —...

High-profile Republican members of Congress gained tens of thousands of Twitter followers in the first few weeks of Elon Musk’s reign over the social media network, while their Democratic counterparts experienced a decline, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) all lost about 100,000 Twitter followers in the first three weeks of Musk’s ownership of Twitter, while Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio) gained more than 300,000 each.

Under Elon Musk's ownership, Twitter recently laid off 3,700 people, roughly half its workforce. ... Musk ordered a payroll audit, in which managers were asked to confirm employees were human, because he worried "ghost employees" would receive money ... Elon Musk has long been wary of bots on Twitter. It turns out he's also suspicious that some of Twitter's employees, not just its users, aren't actual people. ... Musk wanted confirmation that Twitter employees were "real humans" and ordered a payroll audit to confirm that was the case before giving staff regularly scheduled bonuses. ... Before paying the bonuses .....

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, on Saturday issued an open letter to Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, urging him to "ensure human rights are central to the management of Twitter". "Twitter is part of a global revolution that has transformed how we communicate," Türk said in the letter quoted by Reuters. "But I write with concern and apprehension about our digital public square and Twitter's role in it." "Like all companies, Twitter needs to understand the harms associated with its platform and take steps to address them," he added. "Respect for our shared human...

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Monday he has a plan to tackle the high number of spam robots or “bots” on Twitter, as he intends to purchase the social media company. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, complained in a tweet to Musk Monday night that he was seeing too many bots on the platform. […] Bots are automated accounts that help drive traffic on Twitter. They appear like real accounts controlled by a person. They retweet posts, like posts and follow other accounts. Advertisers, marketing agencies and other companies are looking to reach real human accounts,...

DETROIT (AP) — U.S. securities regulators are questioning Twitter about how it calculates the number of fake accounts on its platform. The law firm Wilson Sonsini of Palo Alto, California, replied in a June 22 letter saying the company believes it adequately disclosed the methodology in its annual report filed for 2021. The letter says that Twitter makes its estimates of false accounts with an internal review of sample accounts. The number of fake accounts “represent the average false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during a quarter,” the letter said. It added that fewer...

New York (CNN Business)Elon Musk's monthslong effort to buy — and then to get out of buying — Twitter has been marked by a range of unexpected twists. Now, a stunning whistleblower disclosure from the company's former security lead Peiter Zatko is almost certain to become the latest complication. As part of a wide-ranging, nearly 200-page disclosure sent last month to US lawmakers and regulators, which was exclusively reported by CNN and the Washington Post Tuesday, Zatko alleges that Twitter (TWTR) has neither the incentive nor the resources to properly measure the full scope of bots on its platform. He...