Shout out to @colleendoran for not only working so hard to bring us such a beautiful graphic novel, but ALSO (I saw on Screenrant) not watching Good Omens till she's done.
On The Subject Of Bots: A Former Bot Farm Operator Speaks On The Process (Also spread this video all over this website. I mean it. Spread it. For a whole set of reasons-one of them being antiblackness)
ID [ Close up of a woman in a car wearing a green shirt. She has a dark brown ponytail. She says: 'I'm a a former tech employee that created and sustained a bot farm between 2015 and 2018 in California USA.
Wanna give you guys some information because American bot farm operators are pretty rare. Most bot farms operate oversea. I don't know if there's anyone like me in the US that can tell you this stuff is what I'm saying.
I'm typically way secretive about this but it's gotten so bad I need to talk about it
So what is a bot farm ? Something that an individual or a company purchases. You get a set amount of bots that look like normal people, go out, and spread your message. And here's the work that goes ino that:
I as a operator have to create each individual fake person. I have to create a bio. I have to create a username, a real name, then I have to generate content that has to be supportive of the message the client is paying for.
Positive opinion of the company or the individual. If anyone has ever tried to create content (you know that) that takes time and also that takes ideas; it's not easy.
Finally you need to program these bots based on activity. Bots respond to what you do.
You think that you going around and liking things is invisible. It's not. You're leaving a footprint across the app. That footprint is tracked by people like me. So based on what other people like or comment on, I program my bot to go and search for those people, find them, and then interact with them with my content that supports the message that I created.
This programming also includes research to find the people that are the most susceptible to believing the message that you're selling, and targeting those people. This is just a scratch on the surface of what it takes to program one of these. And people are buying hundreds of them.
Now here's the interesting part. The software to run all these bots is not free. And the time that it takes to create all the things that I just told you about also not free. All of this stuff costs money.
And it represents money when you see it. If you're seeing non stop videos posted with a certain agenda, someone's paying for that. So when you see a dump/ a ton of media that's telling you all the same message, do not say wow what a thing happening right now.
Please instead say wow who's trying to buy my opinion on this topic ?
Wolfie and Four friendship appreciation doodles! They're shared secrets besties! I hope Four's distrust of the shadow crystal doesn't drive anything between them. Wild found his way into this compilation with a force. It seems I can't draw Wolfie and not include him too!
Since the outbreak of armed conflict in Tigray in November 2020, Amhara security forces and interim authorities have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Tigrayan population in Western Tigray, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Recent Human Rights Watch research found that two officials, Col. Demeke Zewdu and Belay Ayalew, who were previously implicated in abuses, continue to be involved in arbitrary detention, torture, and forced deportations of Tigrayans.
“The November truce in northern Ethiopia has not brought about an end to the ethnic cleansing of Tigrayans in Western Tigray Zone,” said Laetitia Bader, deputy African director at Human Rights Watch. “If the Ethiopian government is really serious about ensuring justice for abuses, then it should stop opposing independent investigations into the atrocities in Western Tigray and hold abusive officials and commanders to account.”