The Problem With Mental Health Bots
Teresa Berkowitz’s experiences with therapists had been hit or miss. ”Some good, some helpful, some just a waste of time and money,” she says. When some childhood trauma was reactivated…
How Bots Corrupted Advertising | WIRED
When Aleksandr Zhukov went on trial last year, he stood accused of defrauding US companies, including The New York Times and pet care brand Purina, out of millions of dollars.…
Bot Hunting Is All About the Vibes
Christopher Bouzy is trying to stay ahead of the bots. As the person behind Bot Sentinel, a popular bot-detection system, he and his team continuously update their machine learning models…
The Quest to Find Twitter’s Elusive Bot Team
I turn my attention to Dublin, where I find Fabian (not his real name), a former moderator who, until earlier this year, worked for Twitter via the outsourcing company CPL.…
I Love Twitter Bots and I Cannot Lie
“I love bots” feels like a controversial statement now, given the rise of troll farms deploying them and the proliferation of egg accounts spreading bad information or engaging in harassment.…
This Student’s Side Project Will Help Decide Musk vs. Twitter
August 5 was not a normal day for Kaicheng Yang. It was the day after a US court published Elon Musk’s argument on why he should no longer have to…
A Sprawling Bot Network Used Fake Porn to Fool Facebook
In November 2021, Tord Lundström, the technical director at Swedish digital forensics nonprofit Qurium Media, noticed something strange. A massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was targeting Bulatlat, an…
Not All Bots Are Bad, and Twitter Knows It
But bots don’t even need to be useful. “I don’t think bots have to do something worthwhile,” says V Buckenham, founder of Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, a free tool that…