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The current US administration and Twitter/Facebook bots are in your standard strange bedfellow relationship. The GOP benefits from divisive [0][1] speech not

The current US administration and Twitter/Facebook bots are in your standard strange bedfellow relationship. The GOP benefits from divisive [0][1] speech not unlike that employed by bot accounts. As long as rhetorically the bots share the same intentions as the administration, namely: divisiveness and promotion of nationalistic views, there will be minimal effort in chasing down the full extent to this defrauding. The intentions are clear - what will happen is not. The problem is you cannot prove malicious inaction. [0] https://newrepublic.com/article/125952/gop-party-fear https://newrepublic.com/article/125952/gop-party-fear [1] http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/352768-gop-senator-russian-trolls-using-nfl-spat-to-push-divisiveness-in-us http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/352768-gop-senator-russia...

rtx 9y ago
You mean to say all those anti Trump bots replying to his tweets are doing him a favour?
- FilterSweep 9y ago
  I mean to say all of those pro Trump bots organizing rallies for him in America out of Russia ;) [0] [0] http://thehill.com/policy/technology/351557-russian-actors-may-have-organized-pro-trump-rallies-on-facebook-report http://thehill.com/policy/technology/351557-russian-actors-m...
  - makomk 9y ago
    Ever noticed how Russian groups creating Facebook pages for fake pro-Trump rallies that don't exist and don't have any attendees is "Russian groups organized pro-Trump rallies on Facebook", but them creating fake (say) BLM events that don't exist and don't have any attendees is "Russia fakes black activism on Facebook to sow division"? Also, it requires a rather curious definition of "bots" to include actual people manually doing stuff like this. One that's political rather than technical.
barsonme 9y ago
Both parties benefit from divisive speech. It allows them to argue about purity of ideas instead of the ideas themselves which is _fantastic_ for party loyalty. It's not a GOP- or Democrat-specific problem. Plus, it's not like there's only "right-leaning" bots on Twitter. Back during the election there were a couple times I tweeted something negative about DJT and my tweet was instantly retweeted and liked thousands of times by blatantly "left-leaning" bots. They hit up both sides of the aisle to stir up drama. It's practically their stated goal.
- FilterSweep 9y ago
  > Both parties benefit from divisive speech. This is correct until you ask "how much" does one benefit from divisive speech. There is one nationalist branch of the Owner's Party of America, and the other is Democrat.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- galaxyLogic 9y ago
  More than the US political parties it is foreign adversarial nations like Russia that benefit from dividing the US electorate. When two guys fight they both get a black eye. It is the third guy who got them to fight that gains the advantage over them.
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  There are far, far, far more 'right-leaning' bots on Twitter than anything else. As someone who was replied to by a 'real' account connected to the bots, I got to watch the waves of fake retweets and likes on a regular weekly schedule, often a hundred or more on a Saturday morning around 2 or 3am. And this on tweets that were 2 to 3 weeks old already. It's an amplification technique to make it seem like more people support the views. You can watch it happen live in the replies to many of Trump's own tweets with accounts with names that are a combination of the words, trump-maga-america-patriot-red-right and mom or veteran or whatever and often a random number. Often accompanied by a profile picture lifted from elsewhere online. These accounts have 30k+ followers and generally post nothing except pro-Trump memes. Some do nothing except like and retweet from other areas of the botnet.

rtx 9y ago

You mean to say all those anti Trump bots replying to his tweets are doing him a favour?

FilterSweep 9y ago
I mean to say all of those pro Trump bots organizing rallies for him in America out of Russia ;) [0] [0] http://thehill.com/policy/technology/351557-russian-actors-may-have-organized-pro-trump-rallies-on-facebook-report http://thehill.com/policy/technology/351557-russian-actors-m...
- makomk 9y ago
  Ever noticed how Russian groups creating Facebook pages for fake pro-Trump rallies that don't exist and don't have any attendees is "Russian groups organized pro-Trump rallies on Facebook", but them creating fake (say) BLM events that don't exist and don't have any attendees is "Russia fakes black activism on Facebook to sow division"? Also, it requires a rather curious definition of "bots" to include actual people manually doing stuff like this. One that's political rather than technical.

barsonme 9y ago

Both parties benefit from divisive speech. It allows them to argue about purity of ideas instead of the ideas themselves which is _fantastic_ for party loyalty. It's not a GOP- or Democrat-specific problem. Plus, it's not like there's only "right-leaning" bots on Twitter. Back during the election there were a couple times I tweeted something negative about DJT and my tweet was instantly retweeted and liked thousands of times by blatantly "left-leaning" bots. They hit up both sides of the aisle to stir up drama. It's practically their stated goal.

FilterSweep 9y ago
> Both parties benefit from divisive speech. This is correct until you ask "how much" does one benefit from divisive speech. There is one nationalist branch of the Owner's Party of America, and the other is Democrat.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
galaxyLogic 9y ago
More than the US political parties it is foreign adversarial nations like Russia that benefit from dividing the US electorate. When two guys fight they both get a black eye. It is the third guy who got them to fight that gains the advantage over them.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
There are far, far, far more 'right-leaning' bots on Twitter than anything else. As someone who was replied to by a 'real' account connected to the bots, I got to watch the waves of fake retweets and likes on a regular weekly schedule, often a hundred or more on a Saturday morning around 2 or 3am. And this on tweets that were 2 to 3 weeks old already. It's an amplification technique to make it seem like more people support the views. You can watch it happen live in the replies to many of Trump's own tweets with accounts with names that are a combination of the words, trump-maga-america-patriot-red-right and mom or veteran or whatever and often a random number. Often accompanied by a profile picture lifted from elsewhere online. These accounts have 30k+ followers and generally post nothing except pro-Trump memes. Some do nothing except like and retweet from other areas of the botnet.