Incident 243: Bots Allegedly Made up Roughly Half of Twitter Accounts in Discussions Surrounding COVID-19 Related Issues
Description: Bots by anonymous actors were found by researchers to make up roughly half of Twitter accounts participating in COVID-19 discussions, many of which posted tweets about “reopening America“.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: unknown developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Twitter , Twitter Users and Twitter users participating in COVID-19 discussions.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
243
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2020-01-01
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
gizmodo.com · 2020
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This might not come as a surprise if you ever use Twitter, but it turns out bots are driving the push to “reopen America” on the platform.
According to Business Insider, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found that about half of m…
businessinsider.com · 2020
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As parts of the US have lifted shutdown orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, there's been a fierce argument online about the risks and benefits of reopening. New research suggests that bots have been dominating that debate.
Carnegie Mellon …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.