The Follower Factory
The New York Times can graph and identify bots, and other publications / bloggers have been able to identify networks of them. Supposedly, the best and brightest get recruited by companies like Twitter and Facebook, but for some reason they're incapable of identifying and shutting these things down?<p>What is all the hubbub about machine learning, and things like neural networks, if they aren't being actively employed by the tech giants?<p>There's only a couple possible scenarios I can come up with for why this continues to occur:<p>1) The best and the brightest actually don't work for any of these companies; they're just constantly trying to catch up to teams of developers more highly skilled than them. They are bright, and decent, but ultimately mostly average.<p>2) The developers in these companies <i>are</i> on par with those who can graph and identify these networks of malicious and fake content makers, but they just don't care because # == $.<p>3) The companies actually have their head so far in the sand that they don't have the technology, or the resources, to combat this.<p>I find it hard to believe that people outside of the ecosystem of these companies have more skill, knowledge, or capabilities (1). It also pains me to think that hundreds of millions or billions of dollars simply cannot run a company that can combat this (3).<p>So that seems to leave complacency (2), which is disturbing and definitely should send up more red flags about whether we should be giving these networks any attention at all.<p>I'd love to hear other possibilities or maybe more information to back up any of the other scenarios.