Bots for Trump
by Tom Sullivan
"Suddenly we’re supposed to believe that Carter Page — a man who charitably can be described as Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot — is a martyr to American civil liberties," Bret Stephens tells Gail Collins in a New York Times conversation. The anti-Trump Stephens elaborates on the prion disease eating the brains of the Republican establishment:
Suddenly we’re supposed to think that people like Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray — both of whom were appointed by Trump — are anti-Trump villains.But why not? Fox News and the other propaganda outlets have their fans trained to lap up whatever swill they are dishing out today. Tomorrow they will be digital vectors for it. The GOP establishment, being a wholly owned subsidiary, believes and acts no differently.
Suddenly we’re supposed to think that an election that Trump won was stolen from him.
The group’s new findings are based on study of more than 13,000 Twitter accounts representing politically diverse viewpoints, including just under 2,000 pro-Trump accounts—which were identified by terms like #MAGA included on their Twitter profiles and explicitly pro-Trump content they have shared. The Oxford researchers found that those pro-Trump accounts, though comprising less than a sixth of the total accounts, were responsible for 55 percent of the “junk news” tweeted out from all 13,000 accounts, studied during the period of October 20, 2017 to January 18, 2018. The researchers also studied content from more than 47,000 public Facebook pages during the same 90-day period; they determined that about 60 percent of the total “junk news” links were posted by users that appeared to be aligned with the political far right. (The research doesn’t address whether any of these Twitter and Facebook accounts may be controlled by bots or other deceptive online operators.)Sam Woolley of the Computational Propaganda Research Project discussed computational propaganda — to include disinformation and fake news — for the For Future Reference podcast. Boing Boing introduces the effects of bots on the national conversation this way:
On January 17, 2017, Girl 4 Trump USA joined Twitter. She was silent for a week, but on January 24, she suddenly got busy, posting an average of 1,289 tweets a day, many of which were in support of U.S. President Donald Trump. By the time Twitter figured out that Girl 4 Trump USA was a bot, “she” had tweeted 34,800 times. Twitter deleted the account, along with a large number of other Twitter bots with “MAGA,” “deplorable,” and “trump” in the handle and avatar images of young women in bikinis or halter tops, all posting the same headlines from sources like the Kremlin broadcaster RT. But Twitter can’t stop the flood of bots on its platform, and the botmakers are getting smarter about escaping detection.Those bots have willing accomplices in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in right-wing media. The very sort of people who warned us as kids in the 1960s about Russian propaganda and disinformation now exult in trafficking in it. "Real Americans" marinate their brains in it.
10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.On what planet is the F.B.I. anti-Republican? the Times asks. On what planet is a lefty blogger quoting the Bible at American conservatives?
11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.