Fake Game Strong

Israeli soldiers duped by Hamas 'fake women' phone ruse
Feb 2020, BBC News

Hey, let's chat!
Who the f*** downloads a link to get pictures on their phone? Nobody: 1998 dial-up users:

North Carolina Facebook page labelled fake news
Feb 2020, BBC News

50,000 followers in one month is apparently a good score for a fake news site. They did all the right things: labeling the page "satire" gets it past the fact-checking algorithms, and so does using real stories. Only thing is, the stories could be from anywhere and old as hell. Doesn't matter, got clicks.

The site administrators also said they were a research group from North Carlina University  conducting social media research, good one.

Facebook removes 'foreign interference' operations from Iran and Russia
Feb 2020, BBC News

"Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour"

All 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the Museum of the Bible are fakes
Apr 2020, Ars Technica

Somebody stop me! "The Museum of the Bible" though.

Researchers use machine learning to unearth underground Instagram 'pods'
May 2020, phys.org

More inauthentic coordinated behavior.

Fake game on overdrive with this one. This press article starts with a good rule of thumb -- not all engagement is organic.

NYU/Drexel researchers found a coordinated group of inauthentic users who game algorithms and artificially amplify content. And they give us a new term as well -- "reciprocity abuse".

Reciprocity abuse can only be done with groups of disingenuous agents all working together; this is not something that one can do by themselves, especially in a social network where the power lies in the network and not in the individual.

Some findings:
Seventy percent of users experienced a two-fold or greater increase in interaction level on control posts after they began posting in pods, and on average, these users saw a five-fold increase in comments

Each pod had, on average, about 900 users, though some had as many as 17,000 users

And there's way more to come: "Already there is evidence of recently increasing adoption of this strategy: the pods we discovered have emerged at an accelerating pace over the last two years." -NYU Ph.D. student Janith Weerasinghe

'Fake' meat on the menu as China reopens restaurants
May 2020, BBC News

Can't tell whether this is fake fake meat or just fake meat. Must investigate. Meatgate.

And would you look at that, it's just China trying to get-in on the plant-based burger wave. Guaranteed headline by next summer, "Fake fake meat on the menu...".

Fake America Great Again
Aug 2018, MIT Technology Review [soft paywall]

Reminding us of the origins of deepfake in reddit and porn, and also generative adversarial networks.

Fake Drugs, Fake Board Games, Fake Blog Posts
Network Address, 2018

-image source: Fake America Great, Bruce Peterson
As I look at this picture of the iconic red Make America hat and with the eyes of a draughtsman, I conclude that the text is shopped, because it doesn't match the curve of the hat as it turns away, especially visible on the bottom half where it should start tilting upwards after the midpoint. But the letters do get smaller as they recede. Maybe it's just a great photo taken at just the right angle.

The Meme Wars Instruction Manual May Be Written By Robots

In light of the text presented here, I can't help but think about this story on using SocialBots to manipulate people online...we are in for one confusing future.

E-mail use model appears to follow "Clash of Civilizations" prediction
Bob Yirka, March 8, 2013

Researchers at Stanford University have built a model based on the frequency of e-mail interactions between groups of users of Yahoo! e-mail throughout the world. Their results appear to adhere to societal boundaries as described by Samuel Huntington's 1992 book "The Clash of Civilizations."

Huntington famously suggested in his book that the primary axis of global conflict was no longer ideological or economic but cultural and religious, and that this division would characterize the "battle lines of the future."

Their model is based on over ten million e-mail messages sent from Yahoo! users the world over. To show the degree of interaction between groups, the team used nodes and lines between them—the more transactions between groups, the closer they appear together on the model. To form geographic areas, the team compared IP numbers attached to messages with the location noted in a user's profile, using only those that coincided.

The resulting color-coded graphic model offers near instant visual clues regarding groups bound together by culture and perhaps religion. Perhaps more importantly it also shows boundaries, which State and his team claim, resemble the model first proposed by Huntington. Western nodes are clustered to form a single group with just a few outliers, for example, as are others such as those deemed Islamic, or South American.

The model doesn't hint at tensions between groups of course, but does seem to indicate that groups tend to communicate more via e-mail with others in their same group than they do with others from other groups, --even if they share a physical border.--
More information: The Mesh of Civilizations and International Email Flows, arXiv:1303.0045 [cs.SI]

The Mesh of Civilizations and International Email Flows, arXiv:1303.0045 [cs.SI]

Your favorite blogger could one day be a computer
a start up company that has developed computer software capable of generating articles that read as though they were written by a living, breathing person.
http://narrativescience.com/

The technology works by taking data — like sports statistics and company financial reports — and turning it into convincingly human-sounding news articles. According to Kris Hammond, one of Narrative Science's founders, the key concept behind the software is composition; "this is not just taking data and spilling it over into text," Hammond said.

The New York Times' Steve Lohr explains how the software might "compose" an article about a recent sporting event:

The Narrative Science software can make inferences based on the historical data it collects and the sequence and outcomes of past games. To generate story "angles," explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science, the software learns concepts for articles like "individual effort," "team effort," "come from behind," "back and forth," "season high," "player's streak" and "rankings for team." Then the software decides what element is most important for that game, and it becomes the lead of the article, he said. The data also determines vocabulary selection. A lopsided score may well be termed a "rout" rather than a "win."

[a commentor on io9 points out that the algorithm works well within subjects that have high statistical significance, like sports and finance; whereas it might be less impressive at deconstructing the layers of authenticity found in Banksi's Exit Through the Gift Shop.]
source
via

Racter: Writing Robots
March 7, 2013
SocialBots
September 14, 2012
Recombinant Memetics and Narrative Networks
05-2013