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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBots Unite to Automate the Presidential Election
Donald Trump understands minority communities. Just ask Pepe Luis Lopez, Francisco Palma, and Alberto Contreras. These guys are among the candidates 7 million Twitter followers, and each tweeted in support of Trump after his victory in the Nevada caucuses earlier this year. The problem is, Pepe, Francisco, and Alberto arent people. Theyre botsspam accounts that post autonomously using programmed scripts.
Trumps rhetoric has alienated much of the Latino electorate, a fast-growing voting community. And while its unclear whos behind the accounts of Pepe and his digital pals, their tweets succeed in impersonating Latino voters at a time when the real estate mogul needs them most.
Bots tend to have few followers and disappear quickly, dropping propaganda bombs as they go. Or they just sit around and do nothing. According to the site TwitterAudit, one in four of Trumps followers is fake, and similar ratios run through the accounts of the other presidential hopefuls. Even if most of these bots are inactive, they still exaggerate a candidates popularity. Our team of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Oxford tracks bot activity in politics all over the world, and what we see is disturbing. In past elections, politicians, government agencies, and advocacy groups have used bots to engage voters and spread messages. Weve caught bots disseminating lies, attacking people, and poisoning conversations.
Automated campaign communications are a very real threat to our democracy. We need more transparency about where bots are coming from, and we need it now, or bots could unduly influence the 2016 election.
http://www.wired.com/2016/05/twitterbots-2/
PufPuf23
(8,859 posts)Bots and other internet schemes to influence elections, policy, and public opinion appear to be a fact of life now.
The effort and expense put into these types of propaganda and public relations are likely far more common than most of us realize already.
malaise
(269,365 posts)I wonder how many of the fakes post at DU
bemildred
(90,061 posts)The one thing you can be sure of is they will have a limited range of subjects and not very subtle things to say.
And no sense of humor, no ability to deal with indirection or sarcasm, repetitive.
malaise
(269,365 posts)The sad truth is they have no clue about the moron they support
bemildred
(90,061 posts)There might even not be any fakes, hard to tell. Not enough info. But computers don't do inductive thinking well, or at all, in the end they are always predictable, machines, "programmed". There are posters in that thread that I am sure are people, humans.
A smart dog is way the hell smarter than a bot. The dog can "read" you and infer what you want. Bots don't read at all, they see combinations of letters.