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3Apr

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TECHNOLOGY

The Question Is Difficult To Answer And Misses The Point – How Many Bots Are On Twitter?

Twitter reports that fewer than 5% of accounts are fakes or spammers, commonly referred to as “bots.” Since his offer to buy Twitter was accepted, Elon Musk has repeatedly questioned these estimates, even dismissing Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal’s public response. Later, Musk put the deal on hold and demanded more proof. So why are people arguing about the percentage of bot accounts on Twitter? As the creators of Botometer, a widely used bot detection tool, our group at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media has been studying inauthentic accounts and manipulation on social media for over a decade. We brought the concept of the “social bot” to the foreground and first estimated their prevalence on Twitter in 2017. Based on our knowledge and experience, we believe tha...

The Unprecedented Facebook Outage – The Few Clues Point To A Problem Caused From Within

David Tuffley, Griffith University Suddenly and inexplicably, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus services were gone. And it was no local disturbance. In a blog post, Downdetector.com, a major monitoring service for online outages, called it the largest global outage it had ever recorded — with 10.6 million reports from around the world. The outage had an especially massive knock-on effect on individuals and businesses around the world that rely on Whatsapp to communicate with friends, family, colleagues and customers. It took Facebook nearly six hours to get services back online, albeit slowly at first. Ironically, the outage was so pervasive Facebook had to resort to using Twitter, its rival platform, to get updates out into the world. The internet and its outwardly v...

Could This Be A Turning Point For The Industry? States Have Never Had This Much Money For Child Care

Biden’s American Rescue Plan allocated $39 billion for child care — a historic infusion. But states are relying on small staffs, old systems and a short timeline to get the money out equitably. Chabeli Carrazana Originally published by The 19th This story was supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems. When it was passed in March, President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan included the single largest allocation for child care in the nation’s history: $39 billion. That’s more money than the United States has spent on child care in the past five years combined. The aid was disbursed to states and tribes in mid-April, and earlier this month, the administration released its guid...