I’ve run across a mention of this on NewScientist, but this D-brief report is somewhat more complete. Apparently someone has assembled an “army” of Twitter bots which are characterized by their tendency to spout Star Wars quotes:
Two researchers from University College London claim to have discovered an army of 350,000 such bots hiding in plain sight, distinguished by their affinity for tweeting quotes from Star Wars novels. And, like Aragorn bursting into the throne room at Helm’s Deep to deliver the news of an encroaching orc army, they have come to warn us.
The researchers are Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou. The report continues,
Vast legions of malleable Twitter accounts are valuable to both corporations, for whom they can pump up follower counts, and to individuals and organizations interested in flooding Twitter with spam or creating the illusion of a consensus around controversial issues. A small percentage of the bots may have already been sold, they say, as they appear to follow accounts outside of the bot network. As older accounts are more valuable — it’s hard to trust a Twitter account created two days ago after all — their shadowy master could simply be waiting for his investment to mature.
The researchers say that they were lucky to find this bot army, and that there are likely other networks of automated Twitter accounts hiding among the social network’s more than 300 million accounts. In fact, they say that they recently discovered another, even larger army of some 500,000 bots, also of mysterious origin.
Put it in the fake news category – not the report itself, nor the work of Juan and Shi, but the bot “army” itself, because they’re fake people. I don’t use Twitter, never tweeted, no account, only read a few tweets – and I don’t understand the charm. Communications appears to be fragmented and, given the space limitations, coarse. So what’s the point? So companies can gather up followers and pump their stocks? So you can wonder if that latest tweet is from a real person or a fake person? Or is it just the usual – to get feedback from readers?
So you can see the latest bit of insanity from our President?
