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“.

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Alleged: 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

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.