A well backed as usual peice by Benn Jordan on the basics of how misinformation farms work according to their own internal documentation, the goal of creating a post truth world, and why a sizable percentage of twitter users start talking about OpenAi’s terms of service every time they update it.
Absolutely incredible breakdown of the problem. In addition to twitter, I strongly suspect Reddit is infested with a similar increase in bot accounts, which would explain how a sub I used to moderate there has some of the highest page visits its ever had, yet its actual user engagement hasn’t changed at all, or even gone down.
Corporate websites, who have a financial incentive to allow the bots, have become completely unusable. The difference in interaction on Lemmy is incredibly stark, which goes to show that the fediverse seems to be far more resilient against bots since we can defederate from an instance that gets taken over, like cutting off an infected limb to stop the spread.