Twitter – Needull in a haystack

Twitter and the bots. Who will win?

Again, to be totally clear, this anecdotal take is still subject to less dramatic results, like genuine accounts or harmful-yet-simple trolling efforts from bored teens. But if it turns out that accounts like these continue to be run and operated by paid troll-farm services—bounced around via VPNs to avoid IP address scrutiny, operated by minimum-wage workers in third-world countries, possibly fostered by ad purchases using American bank accounts—then the big question is, what’s their end game? American political disruption certainly seems possible, especially in the cases where they pop up specifically to offer thoughts on political issues as big as assault rifles and as small as city council meetings.

The complete article

Sam Machkovech — Ars Technica

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Humorous article looking at how Morse with his Morse code was in fact social media’s true inventor.

Standage noted a journalist’s complaint from an 1891 issue of Atlantic Monthly.

“America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence,” the complaint went. “The effect is disastrous, and affects the whole range of our mental activities. We develop hurry into a deliberate system … the pursuit of novelties and sensations into the normal business of life.”

The complete article

Michael S. Rosenwald — The Washington Post

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