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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...

Appearing on Media Buzz with Howie Kurtz on Fox News to discuss Elon Musk’s refusal to move forward with his acquisition of Twitter, Fox Business Network correspondent Charles Gasparino mentioned the f-word: fraud. Stating that if Musk’s contention is correct, that Twitter has been lying about the prevalence of bots in its traffic since its IPO in 2013, that would constitute securities fraud, and could land Jack Dorsey and other executives at Twitter in prison. On the other hand, Musk could face incarceration if he loses his case now that Twitter has hired a legal team to attempt to force...

In the wake of Elon Musk’s decision to pull out of his Twitter purchase because of the social media giant’s hesitation to share information on bot accounts, one has to wonder, what are they anyway? What do they do, and why are they so important that Hillary Clinton partially blamed her 2016 election loss on Russian bots?In late April, Twitter estimated that fake accounts and spam “accounted for less than 5 percent of its daily active users in the fourth quarter of 2021.” However, with a user base of at least 330 million, that’s still an awful lot of non-human...

Twitter is giving in to Elon Musk's request for access to its" firehose" of internal data, according to a report from the Washington Post. A weekslong battle over the proprietary data stream has slowed down Musk's proposed takeover of the social-media platform. Musk's proposal to buy and privatize Twitter has been plagued with strife and chaos from the jump. Musk has noted that he can walk away from the purchase, which has recently thrown off his efforts to finance the bid. Previously, Musk attorney Mike Ringler wrote that Twitter was "thwarting" requests for data about fake accounts and spammers. Meanwhile,...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation against "Twitter for potentially deceiving Texas consumers" as well as Texas businesses, over fake bot accounts on the platform. This comes after Elon Musk's attorney filed a letter saying that the $44 billion acquirement deal could be on the rocks if Twitter doesn't reveal the number of fake accounts on the platform. Paxton released the information about the investigation that Twitter is in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, saying "Twitter has received intense scrutiny in recent weeks over claiming in its financial regulatory filings that fewer than 5%...

U.S.—A recent study has audited Joe Biden's Twitter followers to determine whether or not they are in fact real followers. The results have left the world stunned as everyone discovered half of his followers are somehow real people. "11 million of Biden's followers are real? That seems high," said Mike Vanders, a social media analyst. "The American people can't even follow what he has to say, much less follow him on Twitter." According to sources, most experts had estimated that maybe a dozen or so of the President's followers were real and that the remaining 22 million were all fake...

Nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages on the social media platform about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said Wednesday. Researchers culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans.

Ukraine's intelligence service accused Russian operatives of creating a bot farm that sent 5,000 SMS messages to Ukrainian military and law enforcement officers encouraging them to defect and surrender to the Russians. On Thursday, the Ukrainian Armed Forces announced on Facebook that the Security Service of Ukraine had managed to shut down the Russian bot farm, or "special information operation," which aimed to "shake the moral and psychological state of the Ukrainian security forces." According to Ukrainian Armed Forces' Facebook post, the message read, "The outcome of events is predetermined! Be prudent and refuse to support nationalism and discredited leaders...

Report: Billie Eilish targeted by anti-Israel bots over message to Israelis Singer's Instagram page targeted by pro-Palestinian bots and inundated with "Palestine solidarity-themed comments," report says. American singer and songwriter Billie Eilish was targeted by anti-Israel bots on Instagram after promoting her new album in a video for MTV Israel, a new report by the entertainment industry group Creative Community for Peace revealed.

China's ruling Communist Party has launched a new front in its long-running, aggressive campaign to influence global public opinion: Western social media. Liu Xiaoming, China's former ambassador to the United Kingdom, is one of the party's most effective foot soldiers on this changing online battlefield. He entered Twitter in October 2019, when a flood of Chinese diplomats flooded the site, which is blocked in China. Since then, Liu has skillfully raised his public profile, amassing a fan base of over 119,000 as an exemplar of China's latest razor-sharp "wolf fighter" diplomacy, a phrase derived from the title of a top-grossing...

This is curious, I went to Bidens twitter just to see how many followers the worlds most popular politician has and found out he has only 24 million. Trump I recall, before he was banned, had 65 million, almost 3 times what Beijing Biden has, yet Beijing wins the election?

Joe Biden will formally accept the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday and deliver the primetime address to his party's virtual convention. We didn't feel like staying up to watch, so instead we programmed a bot to study hours of footage of Biden speaking during the campaign, and then forced it to write a Joe Biden acceptance speech of its very own. Here are the 10 most inspiring lines from the bot-authored speech. Enjoy!

Agadmator runs an extremely popular chess-only youtube channel / subscription and it has been on with no problems for YEARS. He has a deffinite accent so I think he is of (a guess) slavic ancestry but speaks fluent English. Has done thousands(?) of game analysis for eras from Paul Morphy to current world Grand Master Magnus Carlsen. He was doing an interactive podcast when he got blocked by Youtube about an hour in. An immediate protest was almost immediately denied. Most likely an algorithm / bot, but an increasingly obvious hyper-sensitive Youtube habit.

Presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) did not hold back Friday when responding to 2016 nominee Hilary Clinton's suggestion that she is the "favorite of the Russians" for 2020, excoriating the former secretary of State as "the queen of warmongers" and "personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party." "She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far," Clinton had told David Plouffe, host of the podcast "Campaign HQ," and the campaign manager for former President Obama's 2008 campaign. While the former first lady and...

The release of this report — you know, the one that exonerates President Trump of any and all allegations of Russia collusion, is, arguably, the biggest news of the last two years — and in the heat of this massive news cycle that lands directly in Maddow’s sweet spot, a huge chunk of her audience just up and disappeared.

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