[THEME MUSIC]
COY WIRE: Happy Friday eve, everyone.
I'm Coy, a.k.a.
Bald Dude, a.k.a.
Handsome Squidward, and I'm thankful to be hanging with you
this week right here on "CNN 10."
Today, we have an awesome show for you, so let's go.
Now, we've talked a lot this year
about inflation, when prices go up,
and your money doesn't go as far.
It's been a constant concern for families,
consumers, and investors, and in the US, it's been growing.
A new report this week shows it's up 8.3% from a year ago,
and it's at a nearly four-decade high overall.
This news has worried financial markets,
and analysts are concerned it could mean
the start of a recession, though some economists have
argued we're already in a recession right now.
On Tuesday, stock markets recorded
their largest daily loss in two years in reaction
to this inflation report.
Up until now, consumers have mostly powered through
and haven't been spending less.
New data is showing that many families are starting to spend
less on things like electronics and furniture
as the price of basic essentials,
like food, get more expensive.
Still, the current job market continues
to show signs of being strong, but economists
fear that the only way for the Federal Reserve
to slow inflation is to continue to raise interest rates so
high that unemployment increases and potentially
cause an official recession.
This new inflation report is bad news
for President Biden, who said that the economy was on its way
to recovery.
The report instead showed that the US
economy has a long way to go before inflation
is under control.
For now, workers have lost buying power,
with inflation moving more quickly than wage increases.
And the price of basic necessities
is becoming unattainable for many families.
RAHEL SOLOMON: These inflation numbers seem
to catch everybody off guard.
Most economists were expecting price rises to cool in August.
Instead, headline inflation actually rose by 0.1%
compared to the previous month, and that's despite the fact
that a key driver for inflation, the price of gas,
actually fell.
So that means that price rises have
spread beyond energy and into other areas of the economy.
The cost of shelter, medical care, and food
all rising sharply.
Investor's shock was reflected on Wall Street,
with the deepest losses for stocks since the darkest days
of the pandemic in June 2020.
The Dow Jones Industrial average fell by more than 1,200 points.
Tech stocks took the biggest hit.
The likes of Apple, Facebook parent Meta, and chipmaker
Nvidia all seeing huge losses.
Judging by the reaction on Wall Street Tuesday,
it seems investors are betting that a so-called soft landing
is becoming less and less likely.
Rahel Solomon, CNN, New York.
COY WIRE: Next, some news out of Northern California,
where firefighters are battling a major wildfire they're
calling the Mosquito Fire.
It's the largest wildfire currently
burning in California.
It began west of Lake Tahoe on September 6,
near Mosquito Ridge Road.
That's where it's got its name from.
Now, it came after weeks of extreme heat.
So far, the fire has consumed over 50,000 acres
and is spreading into the Sierra Nevada mountains,
and it was only 20% contained on Wednesday.
More than 11,000 people have been forced to flee.
It's burned 46 structures overall and at least 25 homes.
And the fire is a triple threat.
The blaze is now headed toward a dry forest area
amid a water shortage and in a drought-ravaged area,
making the homes and land fuel for the fire.
But the Mosquito Fire is just one of many fires
burning across the country.
There are 93 large, active fires across the western part
of the US right now.
More than 800,000 acres have already burned this fire
season, and local fire teams are using everything
they can to contain the blazes.
- The Mosquito Fire reared its head Tuesday,
but fire crews came out swinging.
- Tanker drops have been flying over at treetop level.
- Tankers whisking above the treeline,
dumping retardant by the thousands of gallons
to meet the advancing flames.
[HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING]
Helicopters disappearing into choking smoke
plumes to drop water.
Ground crews ready to stop their foe with lines built by hand
tools, sweat, and strength.
Massive machinery deployed in the form of dozers,
carving wide lines in the earth.
And a firing operation, initiated by those boots
on the ground, creating a human-made line of fire,
with the goal of stopping the fire
in this stubborn, dry terrain.
COY WIRE: All right, animal lovers.
Here's your totally random fact of the day.
Did you know, in Switzerland, it's illegal to own
just one guinea pig.
That's right.
Under article 13 of Switzerland's Animal Protection
Ordinance, guinea pigs are considered
to be social creatures and must be
given adequate social contact with animals
of the same species.
Hashtag #squadgoals.
So next time you're at your pet store,
remember, no lonely guinea pigs.
Now that's random.
Next, details about Elon Musk's potential purchase
of Twitter, which he agreed to buy for $44 billion
back in April.
Within a couple of weeks, though, Musk was like, hold up,
and he tried to back away from the deal,
accusing Twitter of having too many bots
and lying about the number of fake accounts on the platform.
Let's hear more details from Clare
Duffy, a CNN business writer covering
the business of big tech.
She'll also dive into a new tool from Twitter
that helps the platform determine what's a bot
and what's not.
CLARE DUFFY: In April, Elon Musk agreed
to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but within a couple of weeks,
he started to get cold feet.
He accused Twitter of having too many bots
and of lying about the number of bots on its platform.
One of the tools that both experts and Elon Musk
have used to better understand the prevalence
of bots on Twitter's platform is called Botometer.
To test out how it works, we can look at my Twitter account
and see how it rates me.
[TYPING]
The Botometer's score is from 0 to 5--
0 being most likely to be a human account,
and 5 being most likely to be a bot account.
As you can see, the tool rated my account a 0.5 out of 5,
so most likely to be a human.
Another cool thing about this tool
is if you go into this details section,
you can see tweets by time of day and day of the week.
Now, with a bot account, you might see that the account is
tweeting all through the night because it's managed
by a software, and it doesn't need a human to get
up and tweet late at night.
You might also see that they send the same number of tweets
every single day of the week, which a human
just typically wouldn't do.
It's important to know that the tool
doesn't actually prove whether an account is a bot or not.
What it does is it looks at the behavior of an account
and decides whether it looks more like a human account
or something that's automated, something
that's managed by a software.
SAN WOOLLEY: We won't know how many bots there are on Twitter.
I don't know if we'll ever know how many
bots there are on Twitter because bots
exist on sort of a gradient.
There's human on one side and bot in another side,
but many, many accounts on Twitter
are run by some combination of humans and bots.
CLARE DUFFY: There are also some good bot accounts, automated
accounts that help spread news or information
about events in the world.
We can take a look at this account, Earthquake Bot, which
tweets about earthquakes that are
happening all around the world to warn
people when they've happened.
Botometer rates this account as a 4.1 out of 5,
most likely to be run by automated software,
and the account does say in its description that it's a bot.
It's run by a computer.
Twitter does allow these good bots.
It even has a label where they can transparently identify
themselves to viewers who might not otherwise know that they
were run by a computer.
Now, of course, there are the bad bots that you've probably
seen if you're on Twitter.
The bots that might be trying to get you to buy
cryptocurrency or that might be impersonating
another real human account.
Elon Musk, for one, would say that these bots can detract
from the user experience and could
take away from the long-term value of Twitter.
SAN WOOLLEY: Everyone's known that bots have existed
on Twitter since its inception.
It's been incredibly well reported.
One of the things that I'm a little bit skeptical of here
is the idea that you would know that bots exist on Twitter
and that they're just part of the ecosystem.
They're part and parcel to the platform in many ways.
CLARE DUFFY: Twitter, of course, is--
it does a lot to detect and remove those bad bot accounts.
The company says that it uses both human and automated
systems to review accounts and that it removes about a million
bot accounts every day.
SAN WOOLLEY: This is a huge, huge task,
and it's really challenging, in particular
because it has to be scaled through AI or machine learning.
You basically can't have humans go through 300
million accounts, right?
And so AI and machine learning are not perfect tools.
They will have a lot of false positives and false negatives.
They will say "this account is a bot"
when it's not and vice versa.
[ELECTRIC GUITAR RIFF]
COY WIRE: We can't wait to hear what you think about the "10
out of 10" we found for today.
The first-ever four-door Ferrari.
This model was just revealed by the Italian carmaker.
It's called the Purosangue.
The new car is their first full-size-seater ride,
so you can bring your whole crew if you wanted to.
With over 700 horsepower, it's set
to be the fastest SUV in the world,
going 0 to 60 in 3.3 seconds and hitting top speeds of more
than 190 miles per hour.
But before you rush to the local Ferrari dealer, warning,
it ain't cheap-- $400,000.
Hooey.
All right, now to my favorite part of the day.
We want to give a friendly shout-out
to St. Jude Apostle Catholic School
in Sandy Springs, Georgia.
We see you, and we hope you and everyone watching around
the world have a wonderful one.
I'm Coy.
Thanks for watching "CNN 10."
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