16 ms·
Twitter is suspending pro-Bloomberg accounts, citing ‘platform manipulation’
- qrbLPHiKpiux 7y agoIt's spam - just like anyone else. Sensationalized because it's connected to someone special.
- ganstyles 7y agoSorry, what? This is spam, but the potential effect is significantly greater. This is someone trying to buy an election and circumvent democracy. I'd say it's not sensationalized enough given the stakes.
- Jorge1o1 7y agoI’ve never fully understood why bots are seen as subverting democracy when things like flyers, posters, and yard signs aren’t. If I go to an empty lot and I put up 50 Mike yard signs, what’s the difference between that and a bot that makes 50 Mike tweets?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- merpnderp 7y agoSeems like it is the context. The bots are pretending to be something they're not - normal Bloomberg supporters, instead of a paid political campaign. If someone sees 50 signs in an empty lot, they're likely going to assume they were stuck there by Bloomberg's campaign staff.
- mytherin 7y agoThe difference is that the bot is pretending to be a person. People are herd animals, they are easily manipulated to follow views that the herd sees as "correct". Having bots that are pretending to be people expressing their views is essentially an attempt at large-scale psychological manipulation. It is not simply about making people aware of a candidate or a certain point of view, it is about trying to make people believe many others believe that point of view to try and manipulate them into believing it as well.
- nneonneo 7y agoExactly this. A single person can put up 50 yard signs. Seeing 50 signs for a candidate just means there’s someone really enthusiastic about that candidate (or paid by them), it’s not automatically an indicator of wide support. On the other hand, if every second house in a large area suddenly sprouted a sign for a candidate, you might rightly interpret that as strong support. Having 10,000 likes on a post is akin to this latter scenario - showing that there’s a whole lot of “actual people” who are on the bandwagon.
- miscPerson 7y agoPeople do things like a single person post a flyer on every power pole in a neighborhood, to have the first case appear like the second. This is normal in politics.
- CivBase 7y agoHow are signs not also an example of people attempting "large-scale psychological manipulation"? Signs don't just grow naturally out of the ground. Someone had to make them and put them there. And those signs aren't there to decarate yards. They're there to convince passerbys that a lot of people support a particular candidate.
- vinniejames 7y agoThere is absolutely no difference. Why is it ok for politicians to pay for signs to be posted in front yards, show to all of the neighborhood "network". Yet, the same action is somehow evil when the "neighborhood" is instead a social media platform?
- dwallin 7y agoIt’s because this exists in meatspace where there is almost always a significant Proof of Work required. This helps limit/prevent the most egregious abuses.
- ijpsud 7y agoIt's fine to create bots if the social media platform allows it. Just make it clear that they're bots if that's the platform's policy. If you disagree with Twitter's policy here, then that's a separate question, but here's my (I think, uncontroversial) opinion on that: Banning the automatic creation and puppeteering of masses of fake people seems like a pretty good policy along a number of dimensions - especially just for keeping authentic users from leaving your platform.
- vinniejames 7y agoThese are not bots, the article doesn't imply they are. They are campaign supporters expressing their support for a candidate, paid or not. How many of these folks do you presume would post the same messages if paid by Trump 2020? I'd argue very few would.
- numpad0 7y agoEverything that has come out of human society is either arbitrary or due to our animal nature if you think about it
- chestervonwinch 7y agoadvertising != false advertising We have laws to protect consumers against the latter. Why should advertising in politics be held to different standards?
- Aunche 7y agoI don't think they're even bots in the first place. If he's spending hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm assuming he can get real people to post for him. It's the same thing as canvassing for a candidate.
- shakna 7y ago> If I go to an empty lot and I put up 50 Mike yard signs, what’s the difference between that and a bot that makes 50 Mike tweets? Because you're viewing it as solely advertising, you're missing it. If you go out and buy a newspaper, and direct them to publish only favourable articles about certain people, you begin to run into problems. Like laws that govern bias and fairness. Because this isn't advertisement - this is where people, rightly or wrongly, are going to get their information.
- bluk 7y agoOut of curiosity, what laws which govern bias and fairness are you referring to? I tried searching for some, and the closest I found was the FCC fairness doctrine which was revoked (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine).
- cma 7y agoI agree this crosses a line, but a lot of other things do too (the presidential debates cut to commercials from drug companies).
- allovernow 7y agoHow is a distributed advertisement campaign different from bots on Twitter? Should we ban automated mail as well? >This is someone trying to buy an election and circumvent democracy The only differences between Bloomberg's behavior and that of a typical candidate are that Bloomberg is a late comer and he isn't beholden to donor interests - that doesn't mean he can't represent the people (not saying he can either). If anything this is dangerous on the part of Twitter because now it's approaching publisher territory where it chooses which bots are allowable and which campaign bots are not. Twitter deciding the outcome of an election is far less democratic than a bunch of people possibly being swayed to vote for a candidate because of advertising. You can't apply different standards to a campaign you don't like - that's partisan and undemocratic. Buying ads is not.
- UweSchmidt 7y agoFirst of all there could easily be a scenario where bots crowd out people by some order of magnitude. People would realize it and lose trust in Twitter and leave. Then it is absolutely unclear what Twitter and other web companies are, or should be. There is a lot of moderating, banning and rule setting going on and these platforms are currently absolutely not "infrastructure". I hope that in the end we'll have something that brings people together and makes everyone better informed.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoHow? Every campaign spends money on advertising.
- lleolin 7y ago>It's spam Semantically accurate >Sensationalized because it's connected to someone special It can be spam and it can be spam from 70 pro-Bloomberg accounts at the same time. I don't understand what's sensationalized about that.
- kauffj 7y agoArchive link: http://archive.is/59nJN http://archive.is/59nJN
- DailyHN 7y agoDoesn't work, try https://outline.com/LWxMUu https://outline.com/LWxMUu
- asymptotically2 7y agoAre you using a broken DNS server, like 1.1.1.1 from Cloudflare?
- Dylan16807 7y agoCloudflare merely asks for the IP and returns what it is given. Which in the case of archive.is is a fake result, but Cloudflare can't help that.
- therusskiy 7y agoI wish they would do it for Kremlin bots as well, they do a lot of propaganda here in Russia
- raws 7y agoThat's probably a requirement for twitter to stay in russia.
- mlvljr 7y agoSo true.
- tenpies 7y agoWhy is Russia so special and unique in this regard? I am honestly curious because there are countries with more impactful and tangible geopolitical interests (e.g. Saudi Arabia - who owns a substantial portion of Twitter), and yet it's only the comic-book villain, Putin's Russia who apparently does this. The other alternative is that Russia does this, but so ineffectively that they stand out, but that seems unlikely because it would also imply that other countries do it so effectively that no one notices. The third alternative I can think of is that interested parties are okay with the direction in which some foreign powers want to sway American public opinion. Those interested parties control the mainstream media - or enough of it - to be able to decide which countries' bots get reported on and which get ignored. Honestly it's this option that I find exponentially more likely.
- luckylion 7y agoThat isn't about Russia trying to influence the US, I believe, but using bots to influence the public in Russia. Also, I'm fairly certain that "let's influence the US public" is such a large undertaking that most small countries won't even attempt it. And you need to be strong enough to not get bombed if it becomes public, that narrows down the pool of countries a lot, so it's basically only Russia and China, possibly India (but they are allies), everyone else is either too small or too weak (ignoring Europe, they are much too close to the US). Smaller / weaker countries might try to just buy influence, like Saudi Arabia, by hiring a PC agency and printing fancy brochures, or using lobbyists.
- frou_dh 7y ago> As part of a far-reaching social media strategy, the Bloomberg campaign has hired hundreds of temporary employees to pump out campaign messages through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These “deputy field organizers” receive $2,500 per month to promote the former New York mayor’s candidacy within their personal social circles Accusations of paid shills have been thrown around so freely on the Internet, it's refreshing to have actual textbook examples for once!
- Proven 7y agoPaid shills? All government employees should be banned from participating in elections related discourse because they are paid shills for big government and never support small government and balanced budget. If private sector employees shill for their boss, that's none of my business and likewise Twitter should leave them alone.
- ForHackernews 7y agoWow, how can get paid $2,500/month to post Bloomberg spam? That sounds like a fantastic deal! If you extrapolated that to an annual salary, about 35% of Americans work jobs that pay less than that.
- skizm 7y agoI mean I guess at least Bloomberg is being honest about it. Every other campaign is doing the exact same thing, but pretending they’re not.
- pojntfx 7y agoAny data to back that up, especially on Bernie? The other candidates are all just a centrist blob anyways
- dannyw 7y agoCan you source your statement that other candidates are paying people to promote campaign messages on their own social circles, without disclosure?
- dbuder 7y agowithout disclosure...source. c'mon man
- lern_too_spel 7y agoThis article says the people are disclosing. "We ask that all of our deputy field organizers identify themselves as working on behalf of the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign on their social media accounts."
- thinkingemote 7y agoWe can point to Shareblue as something similar for a pro-Democrat, anti-Trump marketing organisation. However there's no evidence that they have hired hundreds of people to work for them. Basically it's marketing. Every other campaign does run marketing and there are going to be some employees devoted to that, but I don't think we have any reports of hundreds of paid employees. Even Russian troll farms are opaque in their hiring practices. edits: Shareblue has changed to https://americanindependent.com/ https://americanindependent.com/ it appears. Mainly anti-trump. Can't see any specific pro-bernie content.
- ta999999171 7y ago
- osrec 7y agoI'm surprised they don't do it for the obviously fake accounts posting in favour of Donald Trump. There's something very fishy with some of those comments, and the profiles that they come from are very sparse. It should be easy enough to flag/detect automatically.
- altcognito 7y agoI've had sarcastic supported upvoted by Trump bots as true support to the tune of hundreds of accounts. It's almost embarrassing how manipulated Twitter is. Facebook is a lost cause. The climate change stuff they repost alone convinces me we're not going to win the 21st century propaganda war.
- osrec 7y agoFunnily enough, my original comment is now being down voted now, after a series of up votes. That's unusual...
- osrec 7y agoI don't know why you're getting down voted. Perhaps I exist in a bubble, but everything you say makes complete sense to me, and I can corroborate it with my own experiences. I can't imagine why someone would down vote it, unless...
- wpietri 7y agoTwitter does remove a lot of bot/spam accounts, and always has. But you don't generally notice it, because you only see the accounts that remain. Because of a quirk in how some spammers operate, one of my accounts gets a few spam DMs requests per day. I know about them because I get an email about the DM. But when I look at my DMs, those accounts have almost always been removed by the time I get there.
- fartcannon 7y agoI don't believe proof of shilling is necessary. It should be considered fundamental small group primate behavior.
- whatshisface 7y agoHow would it get status as a recognized "fundamental small group primate behavior" without proven examples? You're saying that you want the 200th floor penthouse without any of the apartments below it.
- ta999999171 7y agoWait, are these comments saying they're unaware of proven examples of shilling/astroturfing?
- pixl97 7y agoSome people have purposely avoided studying any of the last 3000 years of human history involving communications. Especially those involving deception.
- throwaway2048 7y agoTake a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383919 Despite the fact that Dang explicitly tells users that this user is involved in some kind of multi-year pro Google campaign, there are dozens of posts protesting that the very concept of a thing could ever exist.
- nneonneo 7y agoThe more I look at platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the more I start liking the WeChat “anti-viral” timeline concept. Posts on your WeChat timeline show only likes from your friends. This applies even on posts from other people - you can only see likes on those posts from your friends, not any of that person’s friends. Boom - no more platform manipulation, since everything on your timeline is 100% driven by your friends. Unfortunately the Chinese government can and will censor posts on these feeds, which is made super easy by how slow things usually spread on that platform - but that’s a different issue entirely. I’m not advocating literally switching to WeChat - just that the concept feels at once far more “social” and rather less prone to certain kinds of manipulation.
- JD557 7y agoThat looks like a cool model, but isn't that pretty close to what Twitter does (at least if you use TweetDeck instead of the twitter webpage/app)? I only see: - Things posted by who I follow - Things retweeted by who I follow - Things liked by who I follow (I think I don't actually see this in TweetDeck)
- bathtub365 7y agoIt sounds like even the like count on posts is scoped to likes that come from your friends. So if a post has 1000 likes globally but was only liked by 10 of your friends the like count would be 10.
- geofft 7y agoDoes WeChat have an equivalent to "Trending"? Part of the strategy of campaigns like this one is to get something globally trending, and Twitter seems to like the idea of global (or even local) trends existing. It'd be interesting to have a per-user concept of "Trending," scoped to just the people you follow, but I suspect Twitter wouldn't like it because it's harder to onboard new users and get them engaged. The other part of campaigns like this is replying to major accounts to push something, so you'd have to have your "anti-viral" timeline hide replies that weren't endorsed by people you don't follow. That is, if friend A retweeted something by a famous politician, and a thousand people replied including none of your friends, and friend B liked one of those replies, only that one reply would show up for you if you looked at the tweet. Again, I suspect this is bad for engagement (so I'm wondering if WeChat actually does this?).
- vinniejames 7y ago"Twitter says duplicative messages violate its policy against platform manipulation and spam" Sounds like retweeting should also be banned under this policy. But that would require some semblance of continuity and fairness in policy enforcement.
- eesmith 7y agoYour quote isn't present in the text. I don't see the phrase "Twitter says" or "duplicative messages". The closest is: Twitter said the campaign violated its rules against “creating multiple accounts to post duplicative content,”
- css 7y agoIt is in the caption of the hero image, displayed right above the article body.
- eesmith 7y agoAhh, I see. Thanks! I couldn't use normal view to read the page without agreeing to the ToS so I switched to Firefox's reader view. That doesn't include the image. My reading is that the caption (which I can read by view-source) is a second-hand interpretation of Twitter's statements. I think the direct Twitter quote, which I copied earlier, is more relevant, and addresses vinniejames's concerns about retweets.
- vinniejames 7y agoCtrl+f
- eesmith 7y agoIn my sibling comment you'll see that I used Firefox's reader view, which didn't include that text. I don't believe that caption text correctly reflect Twitter's quoted response, which I quoted, and which I believe clarifies your question.
- rdtsc 7y agoI can see opposing candidates pretending to be Bloomberg’s paid people saying stuff to make Bloomberg look bad. Any country who wants Bloomberg to not be a viable candidate could do the same. At this point I think anyone telling me to vote for Bloomberg received a check from him. It’s not true always of course, but it’s the first thing that pops into my head.
- luckylion 7y agoValid point, it's fuzzy. I just remembered New Knowledge [1] who ran false flag operations to make it look like their opponent was supported by Russian bot nets. There's likely a bit of both. Would Bloomberg pay $2500 per month for simple copy & paste jobs? Doubtful, I'm sure he has better media people that know they could get that for tiny fraction of the price. There may be pro-Bloomberg paid posting while somebody also pays for dumb multiplication bots to spread a message (or false flag it). [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jon...
- lern_too_spel 7y agoThe Bloomberg campaign was doing this following the FEC regulations, meaning that the shill accounts had to identify themselves as such. If an account pretends to be a shill account, the Bloomberg campaign can simply show that the account was not one of theirs.
- vinniejames 7y agoThis is how democracy dies. When we, as a society, permit the election outcome to be determined by the executive leadership of a handful of tech companies. "Russia" has absolutely no power compared to the implications of this
- kyrra 7y agoLook how much money Bloomberg had spent and isn't doing all that great in national polls. Also look at the 2016 election, Hilary spent almost double what Trump spent and still lost. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-d/national/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary... https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-primary-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-primary-forecast/ Money doesn't mean automatic votes unless people agree with your message at least some. Also, Russia had very little impact in 2016 election (if you have proof otherwise, I'd love to see it). It did make much of the media and Washington go crazy for a couple years, but that seemed just an amplification of Russia's attempt to mess with things.
- wpietri 7y agoIn contrast, look at how far along Bloomberg would be if he was not able to spend any of his own money. I'd say his money has had quite an effect. The 2016 election margin was very slim. A great number of factors could plausibly have made the difference. Russian social media manipulation is likely within that margin. Russia's hack of the DNC is definitely within that margin.
- kyrra 7y agoMy money is on the email hack having the biggest impact. Especially when the FBI reopened the email server investigation right before the election. I don't think the contents of the hack had much impact, but the act of it and the investigation had one.
- rayiner 7y agoThe Bloomberg example demonstrates @kyrra’s point. Bloomberg is moving up rapidly in the polls because Democrats are desperately looking for a “not Bernie” candidate. Bloomberg is using money to get his message out there. But money alone wouldn’t have done it. Tom Steyer spent $127 million of his own money and couldn’t buy any support. Clinton spent twice as much on her campaign, and adding in pro-Clinton PACs spending on her behalf was three times as much. If money was as important as people say, it should never have been close enough for Russian media manipulation to matter.
- moomin 7y agoShould have hired the Internet Research Agency.
- SXX 7y agoGood work, Twitter! Now just ban at least 20,000,000 more of bot accounts over the world and your platform will actually become a bit better.
- netsharc 7y agoI imagine if Bloomberg (or whoever the next billionaire is) was more friendlier with the Twitter C-levels, or was a big investor, they wouldn't have dared to do anything... So that's the new first step for the next billionaire (or fake one) who wants to be president: buy a significant share of Twitter. Chilling, huh?
- on_and_off 7y agowell .. facebook limited its anti fake news effort because one right wing exec was furious that it would affect right wingers more than other groups. Sadly, it is indeed definitely a good move to make friends with whoever decides what goes on social networks.
- alkibiades 7y agothey didnt mind the hillary "correct the record" shills
- iron0013 7y agoThey obviously don’t mind the thousands of pro-trump shills, either
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ryanmarsh 7y agoWhat about all the pro Bernie Russian bots?
- abvdasker 7y agoThis is literal whataboutism.
- lokl 7y agoIs Twitter a net positive for society?
- ta999999171 7y agoSoftbank, aka, the Saudi national fund, seem to think so!
- DailyHN 7y agoBypass paywall https://outline.com/LWxMUu https://outline.com/LWxMUu
- DyslexicAtheist 7y agothis was also pretty brazen by him actively taking part in the shilling (or whoever[1] manages his account): https://twitter.com/dominicholden/status/1230522541111947264 https://twitter.com/dominicholden/status/1230522541111947264 [1] does anyone know if he manages the account?
- DeusExMachina 7y agoI'm no fan of Bloomberg, but that's clearly satire.
- blast 7y agoNor I, and yes, it is so obviously a joke that it makes the people complaining about it seem dumb.
- oplav 7y agoMaybe it’s just me, but it doesn’t seem like the Bloomberg campaign was trying to pass that video off as real. They edited crickets chirping into the audio.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y agoI hope it is satire as sibling comment suggests.
- kanox 7y agoI don't see how Bloomberg did anything wrong. Paying people to publish your message is part of normal political campaigning.
- notyourday 7y agoTwitter is upset that Bloomberg paid people and not Twitter to do the ads.
- justforyou 7y ago>> Twitter is upset that Bloomberg paid people and not Twitter to do the ads. You are ultimately correct, even if downvoted.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoThey are not correct. Twitter does not accept political ads.
- notatoad 7y agopaying people to promote your message is normal if they disclose that they're being paid (even if the disclosure is implicit) paying people to tweet nice things about you as if it's just because they like you is dishonest.
- dmix 7y agoSee for example: the professional Instagram shills like fuckjerry (of Fyre Fest fame) always mention it was paid for by Mike Bloomberg in the text area https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/instagram-meme-accounts-mike-bloomberg-fuckjerry https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/instagra... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/mike-bloombergs-sponcon-memelords-wont-be-subject-to https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/mike-bloo...
- deleted 7y ago
- css 7y agoThe tweets in their example look like people clicking a share button, which commonly use a link shortener and are often formatted like “article - link,” you can see this by searching for headlines of nearly any publisher on Twitter. Here is an example for an article currently on the NYT homepage: https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=Bernie%20Sanders%2C%20the%20Teflon%20Candidate%2C%20Faces%20Sudden%20New%20Tests&src=typed_query&f=live https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=Bernie%20Sanders%2C%20th... The OP’s hero image caption states: > Twitter says duplicative messages violate its policy against platform manipulation and spam Does this mean people should start to worry about clicking share buttons now? It is hardly bot activity to use a feature of the platform. Everyone who clicks a share button by default is tweeting the same message.
- notatoad 7y agofor another example, see here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERWNvSLVUAAomYy?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERWNvSLVUAAomYy?format=jpg&name=... no link, and replies to another tweet. definitely not clicking a share button, just a bunch of people posting the exact same thing. and even if it was the share button, twitter isn't banning based on single posts, they're banning on patterns. if 70+ accounts all clicked the same share button on the same 15 articles in a day, that'd probably trigger their bot-like behaviour detectors too, even though it's a "platform feature"
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago> Does this mean people should start to worry about clicking share buttons now? If they're getting paid to, then I certainly hope so.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwanem 7y agoMichael Bloomberg is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
- jdavis703 7y agoThe execution of this is so stupid. For $2500 they should have been getting more than copy paste content. Are there no under-employeed recent college grads who can write a few original, pro-Bloomberg tweets a day for $2500 a month?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 3PS 7y agoPerhaps there's a sampling bias? After all, copy-paste content is the easiest to find and moderate in an automated way, whereas high-quality manipulation is more likely to go unseen.
- tylerl 7y agoI donno, I think this shows that Bloomberg has a knack for government work. Pay people an extraordinarily inflated price for something that sounds straightforward on the surface, only to have them execute on the letter of the contract in cheapest and most amateurish way imaginable. The man clearly belongs.
- xkemp 7y agoThe only thing more boring than government work are tired lazy stereotypes accusing government employees of incompetence/lazyness/wastefulness.
- IceDane 7y agoOr prissy internet sissies that can't read a joke without feeling personally attacked
- IceDane 7y agoThis guy has clearly worked for the government. And by work I mean attended meetings, then status meetings about the previous meetings and so on for a couple of years until the project finally starts(already over budget) at which point enough money has been sunk into it to scrap it.
- abvdasker 7y agoI have seen this happening in other forums, particularly the comments section of the New York Times. I can't be sure that astroturfing is what's happening, but it seems pretty likely given this new information.
- artemisyna 7y agoConspiracy theory: Bloomberg is doing this cash-pump campaign so that folk are forced to talk about (and become aware of) the shady techniques that campaigns use normally anyway.
- somebodythere 7y agoTo what end?
- artemisyna 7y agoTo prime the populous for when other types of media manipulation occur - folk aren't going to dig into media manipulation if it's done by someone they like and never realize the sheer mass of it. But if it's by someone they don't... If nothing else, Bloomberg's ad budget is a solid experiment for the impact of ad budgets on elections. I don't know how much of the transparency that seems to exist around what Bloomberg is doing is normal for campaigns, but that is also a plus.
- jjeaff 7y agoSure, that's what Trump is doing too. Showing that that the executive branch has grown to have too much power and giving us an example of what an evil president might be able to accomplish. It's all just a conspiracy to make the world a better place!
- foxx-boxx 7y agoNice
- tus88 7y agoThis has to be the most embarrassing run for president in history.
- mirimir 7y agoOK, so the Blumberg campaign arguably erred by being so open about this effort. Unless, as others note, it was just consciousness raising. Or getting Twitter blamed, or whatever. But what's interesting is what this portends for the coming campaign. Will Twitter, Facebook and Instagram be suspending all accounts that post ~duplicative political content? And if their policies vary by candidate, will that be firm evidence of bias? This is going to make 2016 look like 2012, I suspect.
- adrianmonk 7y ago> Facebook’s response to the Bloomberg campaign’s novel social strategy Novel? What? The practice has been around a really long time, and it has been around on the internet long enough that the term "astroturfing" was coined decades ago. And the term "paid shill" has been around longer than that. Today it's very common in several places including Amazon product reviews and political discussions. Wikipedia gives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#History_of_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#History_of_incide...) an example from way back: 'an early example of the practice was in Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. In the play, Cassius writes fake letters from "the public" to convince Brutus to assassinate Caesar.' I'm not a big fan of the practice (it involves ulterior motives), but the most unique thing I see about this is they did a clumsy job of it.
- xkemp 7y agoDespite your (and many others in this thread) assertion, this is fundamentally new because it hasn't previously been done in political campaigns in any meaningful scale. The mere existence of a few private campaigns of the sort doen't diminish how much of a departure this is with what has previously been considered acceptable in the political realm. If we assume that the widespread every-politician-is-corrupt cynicism goes along with/is rooted in a wish to see less corruption, you are also applying rather harmful tactics: by claiming everyone plays dirty, any differences between the candidates are erased, and so are any incentives to behave ethically. The cynicism is self-fulfilling: politicians only ever getting superficial accusations with no discernable relation to their actual behaviour will soon stop trying, because why bother?
- ipnon 7y agoDemocracy is crippled when megatech decides who gets to speak and when, whatever you may think of Bloomberg in particular.
- TLightful 7y agoA little like slapping a gnat on your neck whilst an avalanche crashes down the mountain towards your timber cabin.
- golemiprague 7y agoAnd now they blame Russia for supporting Bernie, it is becoming a bit redundant. Just let whoever want to post, people don't make up their mind because of some bot posts and there are always ways to manipulate the media The big networks are doing it every day pushing their own agendas to the people, why can't other countries or candidates or whoever do the same thing? Are CNN or Fox are above us that they get the right to do it while the rest of us can't?
- dghughes 7y agoI go to Twitter and the first thing I see is Twitter's "News for you" which states "Clint Eastwood signals his support of Mike Bloomberg".
- shadowprofile77 7y agoAs much as I generally dislike and have wariness of these sorts of selective suspensions from the giant tech communications platforms, Micheal Bloomberg himself is such a thoroughly detestable individual that it's hard not to be pleased. Whether you're a republican conservative type or a liberal democrat, Bloomberg has the worst of either world to offer you in his smugly authoritarian, elitist and humorless tendencies. Grotesque in so many ways.
- twittermoneh 7y agoEveryone with a monetary interest in Twitter should be ashamed of themselves — shareholders, employees, etc. they are all “people” without a moral compass. Or rather, the compass exists, but it just points to money.
- twittermoneh 7y agoWho gives a crap about Bloomberg. Everyone with a monetary interest in Twitter should be ashamed of themselves — shareholders, employees, etc. they are all “people” without a moral compass. Or rather, the compass exists, but it just points to money.