Socialbots Start Their Own Country, Declare War on the United States

Russia doesn't usually take the spotlight on the Fake Stage, but we've got a couple good ones here:

Russian trolls' chief target was 'black US voters' in 2016
Oct 2019, BBC News

People smuggler 'built fake Russia-Finland border posts'
Dec 2019, BBC News

Social media platforms leave 95% of reported fake accounts up, study finds
Dec 2019, Ars Technica

A questionably real user commented thus, and I can't agree more:

"If an algorithm wishes to identify as a human, who would be so insensitive as to delegitimize its perspective?"

Post Script
Google steps up battle on 'deepfakes' with data release
Oct 2019, phys.org

A dataset of fake faces has been standardized so it can be used to judge the fakeness of future faces. 

A 'Jackalope' of an ancient spider fossil deemed a hoax, unmasked as a crayfish
Dec 2019, phys.org

Local Chinese farmers skillfully craft a deceiving ancient spider fossil onto a not-so-ancient crayfish not-so-fossil. 

People do this with dinosaur fossils pretty often, as it can make good money. In this case, it's different because the fake spider is not just making money, it's making a new entry into the book of life -- this new spider was given its own scientific name, which was eventually taken back.

US and China clash over Uyghur harassment in Australia and 'fake police cars'
Dec 2019, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

"In an interview with ABC News Breakfast last Thursday, US ambassador Arthur B Culvahouse Jr said China was monitoring and intimidating Uyghurs living in Australia, and that this involved the use of fake Chinese police cars."

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Number 45

When Anne Hathaway comes out with a new movie, Berkshire Hathaway's stocks go up.

That's an easy one to figure out (unless, of course, you don't know that robots now run Wall St).

The following story, however, is much more indicative of the nonsensical, illogical (by any human measure or current definition of the word) behavior of the nature of emergent phenomena as presented by complex algorithms, in this case, copyright bots.

BBC and others targeted by Microsoft copyright takedown request
8 October 2012
modified article:

Sites such as BBC, CNN, Wikipedia, and the U.S. Government were wrongly identified by software which crawls the web for attempts to illegally share Microsoft content, and requests that the sites be taken down due to copyright infringement.

The [copyright holder's takedown] request, sent in July, contained hundreds of addresses, and appeared to pinpoint articles and pages containing the number 45.

For example, a BBC page following Day 45 of the Olympic Torch Relay was on the takedown list, as was a Wikipedia article on Caesar's Civil War, which ended in 45BC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19869316

45?
Yes, 45.
And tell me again exactly what made Kony 2012 the most powerful virus of its kind to date.
(personally, I think it was the 4.20, not 45.)

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/08/algos.html
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/09/more-algos.html
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/09/socialbots.html

Post Script for good measure:


Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week
John Melloy, 8 Oct 2012

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49333454