I'm not a Twitter user so I personally can't comment either way on this, but if you are one that likes to tweet, or reads tweets, did you notice anything out of the ordinary recently.

The story or stories I'm referring to are the re-opening of America?

In more than a few news outlets there is a report being shown by the Carnegie Mellon University research team that "Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots."

How do you feel about that, you tweeters (and probably the same in other areas of social media) that your platform didn't detect them?

That you didn't notice, or did you? Can you cite any personally?

How much of news or commented opinion is really real anymore?

Who is responsible?

Researchers: Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely BotsResearchers culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans.www.npr.org

I never noticed it. But that's probably because I don't follow random accounts on Twitter, only accounts I know are actual people who have a face.

This morning I was captivated by two stories about Twitter and Facebook. One was exceptionally well written by Kara Swisher, whom I know, about what to do when Trump tweets harmful or vile misinformation. It’s a nasty problem to solve.

Opinion | Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump StainThe president is spreading a vile conspiracy theory on the platform. Maybe Twitter should finally hold him to its rules.www.nytimes.com

Artificial intelligence processes account information and looks at things such as the number of followers, frequency of tweeting and an account's mentions network.

You can buy followers on Twitter, so how do they account for these false negatives?

A lot of the analysis you see on bots is focused on content being tweeted by an account at the same time every day. That’s called an auto-scheduler, which is a common tool used by influencers to share content with their followers around the world, even when they’re sleeping.

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But to the question of whether I can tell if the “person” tweeting is a bot or a real person, I don’t think that I can ever tell for sure.

Even if I only follow people who I know are real, how do I know that the content that they retweet is from someone who is not real?

As I'm not a NYT subscriber and maybe others aren't we can't see that piece so makes me wonder if after a little searching its in a similar vain to this one of found in Yahoo news, which is free, and more than a little biased

Trump threatens to crack down on social media after Twitter posts a fact check of his tweets on voting by mailThe president's threat came one day after Twitter declined to remove his tweets demanding an investigation into the death of a Florida woman after her widower's request.www.yahoo.com

If it's TLDR, then at least read this snippet -

Last year, Facebook said it wasn’t removing an ad from the Trump campaign that contained lies about former Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine. The previous month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Trump had a surprise meeting at the White House, which the president referred to as “nice.” Facebook announced a change in policy five days later: It would not fact-check or remove content by politicians even if the posts violate the company’s rules.

Even if I only follow people who I know are real, how do I know that the content that they retweet is from someone who is not real?

Exactly

There was another, related article from the Wall Street Journal covering a leaked presentation within Facebook about how the algorithms feed divisiveness to get engagement. It’s simply human nature and it’s part of their business model. Here’s a paragraph from the story:

The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less DivisiveThe social-media giant internally studied how it polarizes users and how it might address the resulting harms, then largely shelved the research.www.wsj.com

so the elephant in the room question -

Does Cake have anything set in place to counteract or sift out unchecked data? or is it something the team is working on, setting up Cakes own algorithms?

It is the elephant in the room for for a bigger reason than you might imagine. I spoke to an investor about Cake who said he would invest in anything I started, but then said, "except Cake."

His argument was that what people say they want — and what they majority actually uses — are two very different things. What the majority say they hate about Facebook, Twitter and Reddit is the divisiveness and conspiracy theories, but what they actually use are Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. "You are building a site that attempts to bring people of different views together, debate their differences, and sort out fact from fiction. It will never happen. It goes against human nature."

That's a conundrum for sure, and one you went through with ADVrider on a much smaller scale

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey just told shareholders what the thinking is behind it:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Explains Why They Haven't Deleted Donald Trump's Tweets About Joe Scarborough, Says They Are Part of "Conversations Around What's Happening"Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that Donald Trump's conspiracy tweets about Joe Scarborough are better left to the public conversation, "especially with our global leaders," app...deadline.com

Yeah, I’m pretty selective about who I follow on Twitter for this very reason.

That's what I do too.

I spoke to an investor about Cake who said he would invest in anything I started, but then said, "except Cake."

My sense of the VC paradigm is that they do everything possible to reduce the risk of their investments. A firm will invest its money in multiple startups, rather than just one, to diversify its risk. It will also weight the risk of each startup investment with the goal of not exceeding some pre-determined average risk for the entire portfolio.

Meaning they can only invest or allocate so much of their portfolio to high risk investments.

Cake is a moonshot.

It is incredibly difficult to pull off the vision for Cake. And you could add to the list of challenges consumer inertia, unwillingness to add another app, predisposition to write in 288 characters or less since blog communities died out five years ago, etc.

But even this past weekend’s virtual panel, on mathematics for pete’s sake, shows that there is a real desire among experts to share their thoughts in more than 288 characters per post; and based on how much my notifications blew up on Twitter, there’s a huge demand from passionate readers to consume that content.

Wow, Twitter is all up in the news today.

Facebook and Twitter clash over fact-checking as Trump threats intensifyFor years, Twitter and Facebook have enjoyed a healthy rivalry: They've competed for acquisitions, talent and advertising dollars, and sometimes gone so far as to copy each others' features in the never-ending pursuit to grow their audiences.www.cnn.com

Personally, I take Dorsey’s side on this debate.

Apparently, the study by those researchers was pretty shoddy. Thread:

For a more thorough approach to the problem of 'inauthentic behaviour', check out the work of Stanford Internet Observatory: