62% of the 1,000 most influential retweeters — appeared to be bots,

The First Amendment absolutism of the 20th century is not only irrational in the way I pointed out yesterday, equating anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, fascist, Communist, Nazi, white supremacist, etc. ideologies that call for enslaving, oppressing, robbing and murdering people with egalitarian, democratic ideologies, enabling the lies of those who are hell bent on destroying anything decent in life because lies are more powerful in persuasive power than the truth often is,  First Amendment absolutism is dangerous because it magnifies the power of liars EVEN WHEN THOSE LIES ARE GETTING LITERALLY TENS OF THOUSANDS,  VERY POSSIBLY IN THE FUTURE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS AND MILLIONS KILLED TODAY.   It is criminal insanity that this is allowed under the slogan of "freedom of speech" or of the press or of whatever slogan of undeveloped minor 18th century poetic brevity you might raise to protect lies. 

From Business Insider: 

There's been a surge in bot activity in the past month in online discussions about reopening America from COVID-19 shutdowns, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said this week.

The researchers analyzed over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 and found that roughly half the accounts were likely bots.
They identified the bots by looking for accounts that tweeted more frequently than humanly possible or whose location appeared to rapidly switch among different countries.

It's unclear who's behind the surge in bot activity or whether they're originating from the US or abroad.

As parts of the US have lifted shutdown orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, there's been a fierce argument online about the risks and benefits of reopening. New research suggests that bots have been dominating that debate.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers analyzed over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 and related issues since January and found that roughly half the accounts — including 62% of the 1,000 most influential retweeters — appeared to be bots, they said in a report published this week.
That's a far higher level of bot activity than usual, even when it comes to contentious events — the level of bot involvement in discussions about things like US elections or natural disasters is typically 10% to 20%.

The researchers identified bots using artificial-intelligence systems that analyze accounts' frequency of tweets, number of followers, and apparent location.

"Tweeting more frequently than is humanly possible or appearing to be in one country and then another a few hours later is indicative of a bot," Kathleen Carley, a computer-science professor who led the research, said in a release.

"When we see a whole bunch of tweets at the same time or back to back, it's like they're timed," Carley added. "We also look for use of the same exact hashtag, or messaging that appears to be copied and pasted from one bot to the next."


The researchers said they found that among tweets about "reopening America," 66% came from accounts that were possibly humans using bot assistants to spread their tweets more widely, while 34% came from bots.

The article claims that they don't know where this is coming from but we know where it's almost certainly coming from, out of the internet firms owned by billionaire criminals of the United States,  the Putin crime mob, those in other countries, out of the Republican-fascist establishment that imposed the most selfish, self-centered, ignorant, vain, criminally irresponsible and stupid chief executive of our lifetimes, wreaking disaster on the United States, harming We The People in unprecedented ways.  We know that this would be done in concert and with those motives.  WE KNOW THAT IT IS AN OPERATION THAT FAVORS TRUMP AND REPUBLICANS.  We know it is done by those who are bent on destroying American democracy, one of the goals of fascists and other gangsters around the world.  And the American judiciary in the form of the Supreme Court is telling us there is nothing whatever to be done about it because the First Amendment's language prevents that.  

Those on the alleged left who bought into that are some of the biggest chumps in the history of human culture.  Most of them professional writers and journalists and others in the allegedly intellectual professions.  And they have learned nothing from seeing how lies mixed with modern technology are destroying democracy because the slave power protectors, Madison and his buddies, unenthusiastic from the beginning of the proposed Bill of Rights, made believe they were poets instead of lawyers, writing vague opportunities for corruption instead of a carefully written contract.  

Words have the power to kill, they have the power to kill us at cross purposes with other words that claim to protect us.  It is clear from the Trump phenomeon, the depths of criminal depravity which remain in office, that the Constitution does not protect us in present circumstances.  That happens when those using the words in them lie with those intents or not minding all that much if that is the result.  Our legal system, the media, the academic establishment that pushed first amendment absolutism have had more than a century to see the results and, mostly privileged, white, mostly affluent, mostly those who the current system works out for, many of them actual fascists themselves*  are entirely OK with those results because they figure they won't impinge on them.   This is what comes of the kind of easily dismissing the most important absolutes of morality in the way that modern materialism not only permits but demands.   It is the ideology which is the enforced absolute of respectability in modern America if you want to get ahead and stay within the bounds of conventional respectability.  

If we don't do better at thinking this through and changing those words, we will die from them, American democracy is gasping without a ventilator under the Republican-fascists in the executive, the Senate and on the Supreme Court, we don't have much time left.  If we don't do it, we will die.