Bots Allegedly Made up Roughly Half of Twitter Accounts in Discussions Surrounding COVID-19 Related Issues

January 1, 2020

Researchers discovered that bots, operated anonymously, accounted for approximately half of Twitter accounts engaging in discussions about COVID-19, many promoting the idea of 'reopening America'. This incident underscores the need for safe and secure AI practices and highlights the importance of Project Cerebellum's AI governance role within HISPI TAIM. For those interested in shaping trustworthy AI and preventing harm through robust guardrails, JOIN US.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.639, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.637, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.629, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown
Alleged developer: unknown
Alleged harmed parties: twitter, twitter-users, twitter-users-participating-in-covid-19-discussions

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/243

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.