Say what? Crazy Rich Asians becomes Loopy Wealthy Asians as Russian news bots’ synonym hunt goes awry
News ‘spinning’ bots automatically rewrite articles about the hit summer movie starring Michelle Yeoh, but change the title of the film to Loopy Wealthy Asians using synonym-finding software
Being a bot in 2018 requires a diverse skill set. If you’re not influencing global politics, disseminating propaganda and spreading anti-vaxxing myths, then you’re rewriting entertainment pieces to manipulate Google search rankings.
Some bots are programmed to snap up online articles from legitimate news websites, sprinkle a little linguistic trickery, and regurgitate something a little strange.
Amid the excitement around the new Crazy Rich Asians movie, the Post’s eagle-eyed Style editor, Jacqueline Tsang, spotted that her section’s stories were being lifted and rewritten by article-spinning automatons. The outcome was “Wealthy Loopy Asians” – the product of poor automatic rewriting, or “article spinning”, as it’s known.
Say what? Rather as a student on deadline would use a thesaurus to evade plagiarism software, bots will replace certain words with synonyms to appease Google’s search algorithms, which prioritise articles that are linked to a lot by other articles, but punish any sign of duplication. Article spinning can help get around this, as it doesn’t get flagged as duplicate content.
It’s a solid plan, unless the piece includes any proper nouns.
