Nikhil Sonnad

“Gathering and analyzing comments from the public is an important part of the Federal Communications Commission’s rulemaking process,” the American agency says on its website. But analyzing those comments increasingly means reading the thoughts of spambots. Automated comments are now part of political reality: During 2016’s US presidential race, a large proportion of tweets supporting both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton came from automated accounts. These bots send messages en masse, originating from one source and usually conveying a particular ideology. Some are easy to spot.

Journalistic earnings stories can feel robotic, even when written by a news organization as prestigious as the Associated Press. Acknowledging this fact, the AP has decided that it will just have robots produce stories on companies’ earning reports.

The AP announced that it will be moving toward full automation of 150- to 300-word earnings reports. The system, to be rolled out in August, will work by pumping data from Zacks Investment Research into Automated Insights, a firm that specializes in computer-generated prose. Naturally, the reports will still conform to AP style, the system of grammar and word choice that is standard in much of American journalism.

There are obvious benefits to having robots write earnings reports. For one, it facilitates a massive increase in the volume of content. The AP hopes to ramp up from providing 300 manual reports each quarter now to as many as 4,400 with the new system. An automated system also frees up reporters to work on more creative efforts, including analyzing the reports and writing stories based on them.

“The Internet is creating a global community,” a thought leader probably said recently. But take a closer look at Internet traffic data, and the theory that the web is turning the world into a borderless digital utopia doesn’t hold up.

There’s no question that Internet traffic in general is skyrocketing. And more of this data crosses borders than ever before. Global flows in a digital age, a report released by McKinsey Global Institute, attempts to quantify the circulation of three major types of “flows”: financial, human, and digital.

Using data from TeleGeography, McKinsey estimates that the total transfer of data across borders has increased 20-fold from 2005 to 2012, from 2.2 trillion megabytes per second to over 41 trillion. This is a dramatic rise, no doubt, but a little context makes it clear that data flow -- or the growth of that flow -- is not inherently international. In fact, cross-border web traffic has barely kept up with the sum total of Internet activity. The vast majority of digital transactions are still domestic.