Twitter is overrun not just by bots but also what seem to be fake accounts which exist in networks that don’t seem to support one party or the other.
For instance @UncleSal07 is probably not a bot but his tweets seems to mainly focus on racial divisions, the “deep state” and various conspiracy theories. He has the max number of followers (5k) and he’s being followed by 2k. One of those followers is @realDonalTrojan, another purely poltical account that is against Trump, his supporters, family mainly through retweeting memes and shit. ~4k followed to ~4k followers. And if you look among the followed/followers you find anti-hillary accounts, anti-trump accounts, #deepstate, anti-NWO etc. etc.
It goes on and on, thousands of accounts that follow each either directly or through networks, despite often being on opposite sides and with only one thing in common: propagating discord, divisions, chaos.
These accounts seem to post once or twice a day so a person hired to “handle” them would need to invest no more than a few mins of daily work to use them. If one person controls 150 accounts daily and they have 100 colleagues, we get a network of 15k accounts functioning non-stop. Tie the human network to a bot network which controls hundreds of thousands of accounts and you have a cheap, reliable, easy to use and and vast propaganda machine.
It’s hilarious, and I’ve seen this stuff before with Russian support for the NRA. it’s hilarious because it highlights how it’s really not about gun rights at all, but just a convenient political cudgel for the right, as the Russian entities involved don’t allow Russians to have guns.
Twitter is finally cracking down on Russian bots … and Trump supporters are furious, FURIOUS that their God-given right to be followed by an army of foreign bots on a privately owned service is being infringed!!!1
I’m pretty sure Twitter isn’t required to give anyone a forum for their thoughts. The whole internet would be upended if that weren’t the case. /r/the_donald would have to un-ban everyone, for example.
Yes, sort of … unless people argue that twitter and facebook are like media companies and newspapers (equal access platforms), becoming a public commons that everyone has a fundamental right to access, and less like social media.
Yeah I dunno but you could argue that any human without a fundamental right to access Facebook (or Twitter) has been disadvantaged in terms of career, job prospects, access to basic communication, etcetera.
Say you kicked someone off the entire telephone network because you didn’t like what they were saying on the telephone? That argument.
Not my argument, necessarily, but I can see where they are coming from. My personal response is that Facebook should be dethroned, and (MANY!) alternatives should exist.
Twitter and Facebook are private companies so they can do whatever they want for the most part.
Some people want say Twitter to be a 100% free place where anyone can say anything, but Twitter doesn’t so what those people want matters as much as what they want you to eat for supper.
