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Re: F6 post# 261662

Sunday, 11/20/2016 2:43:17 PM

Sunday, November 20, 2016 2:43:17 PM

Post# of 481180
Trump's Twitter Bots Turned Out on Election Day


Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Throughout the campaign, automated propaganda accounts on Twitter leaned [heavily] Republican, but that disparity increased in the race's final days.

by Joshua Brustein
November 17, 2016 - 10:00 AM EST

Donald Trump’s supporters made a surprisingly strong showing on Nov. 8, and not just at polling places in the rust belt. Twitter bots accounted for nearly a quarter of all postings that included hashtags related to the election, according to an analysis by researchers at Corvinus University, Oxford, and the University of Washington published on Thursday. They found that pro-Trump hashtags got five times as much traffic from automated accounts as hashtags that were pro-Hillary Clinton.

“The use of automated accounts was deliberate and strategic throughout the election, most clearly with pro-Trump campaigners and programmers who carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled automated activities after election day,” the researchers wrote [ http://politicalbots.org/?p=787 , complete study http://politicalbots.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Data-Memo-US-Election.pdf ].

Twitter dismissed the idea that automated propaganda influenced voters. But the discussion of coordinated bot campaigns fits into the broader post-election theme that social media companies need to re-examine their role in amplifying abusive or misleading political messages. In the days before the vote, messages designed to confuse pro-Clinton voters about the process circulated through the system, and Twitter was criticized for being slow to respond. This week, the company has cracked down [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-16/twitter-suspends-prominent-alt-right-accounts-in-abuse-crackdown ] on white nationalist accounts and introduced a new filtering tool [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/twitter-finally-answers-critics-adding-tools-to-curb-abuse-and-harassment ] that allows people to mute certain words in an attempt to clamp down on harassment. Facebook has also been forced into some soul-searching over its approach towards fake news [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/google-facebook-move-to-punish-fake-news-sites-with-ad-rules ] on its platform.

The study on Twitter bots, part of an effort called the Project on Computational Propaganda [ http://politicalbots.org/ , http://philhoward.org/projects/computational/ ], examined 19.4 million tweets posted between Nov. 1 and Nov. 9. All of the messages used some combination of hashtags related to the presidential campaign, with some being clearly supportive of one candidate (#MakeAmericaGreatAgain, #ImWithHer) and others having no explicit political leaning (#Election2016, #iVoted). The study then flagged accounts that tweeted too often to be credibly human as bots, defining any account that posted at least 50 messages a day using one of the election-related hashtags as "highly automated."

This didn’t mean there wasn’t a human involved. Philip Howard, one of the authors of the report, says that there are signs that people are actively managing fleets of automated accounts to make them seem more authentic. “They look good. They have good photos, they sometimes tweet about soccer scores, and they are rabidly pro-Trump,” he said. It’s hard to know for sure, but Howard says most automated accounts are probably controlled by independent supporters of the candidates.

In the study’s sample, highly automated accounts generated close to 18 percent of all Twitter traffic about the election, but that proportion grew at key times such as the televised debates and in the final few days before voting. The top 20 accounts tweeted over 1,300 times a day, about 2,600 times the rate of the average account.

The partisan disparity grew over time. During the first debate, there was about four times the amount of highly-automated pro-Trump activity, compared to similar traffic supporting Clinton. By election day, the split had grown to five to one. The day after the election, bot activity dropped off significantly.

Twitter says that the report uses flawed measurement tactics to come up with misleading claims. It says the study's threshold for determining whether an account is automated is low enough to capture some prolific human users of the service. Moreover, by measuring how much an account tweets rather than how many people see its messages, the study isn’t considering whether these accounts make an impact. Twitter also says it uses algorithmic methods to determine which hashtags show up in its trending topics section, which guard against attempts to spoof the system with high volumes of low-quality traffic.

“Anyone who claims that automated, spam accounts that tweeted about the U.S. election had an effect on voters’ opinions or influenced the national Twitter conversation clearly underestimates voters and fails to understand how Twitter works,” said Nick Pacilio, a spokesman for the company.

Twitter has always allowed automated posting, although it deactivates accounts that send spam. Howard says there's also no clear reason to think automated politicking is illegal. "Bot use is probably a form of protected speech," he said. Howard says he met with Twitter last year to discuss ways to work together, but the company declined to share its internal methods for identifying bot activity.

Researchers who study the use of bots in political propaganda say the tactics are still evolving. In Venezuela, radical opponents of the government have made accounts purporting to be political figures for the purposes of spreading misinformation, but mostly have been used to promote innocuous political events [ https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07109 ]. When opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began using hashtags on Twitter to organize and share evidence of abuses, bots began using the same hashtags to post a wave of recipes and other inane content, according to Douglas Guilbeault, a doctorate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

On Wednesday, the white nationalist website the Daily Stormer said it had created over 1,000 fake Twitter accounts that purported to be the personal accounts of black people, and urged its readers to do the same. It alluded to a future trolling campaign. "Twitter is about to learn what happens when you mess with Republicans," wrote Andrew Anglin on the site.

Bot tactics are often relatively unsophisticated, says Guilbeault, but bots are a cheap tool that seem to prove successful at muddying things up, spreading confusion, and making life unpleasant for political opponents. Guilbeault, who works with the Project on Computational Propaganda, says it’s not clear how big of an impact bots are having today. “If bots have even a minor influence, that’s scary,” he said.

©2016 Bloomberg L.P.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/trump-s-twitter-bots-turned-out-on-election-day


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Ferris Bueller's, err Alex Jones's, day off:


*


"ALEX GO F**K YOURSELF!!" Screamed The Tolerant Liberals


Published on Nov 19, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]

While literally discussing the rising bullying of the tolerant left two seething Liberals materialized and manifested the very hate they claim to combat. As if on cue they hurled a nasty epithet at Alex and gleefully fled the scene. Events like this are taking place across the nation and signal an ominous truth behind the rage. Alex breaks it down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xRrug9ARPw [with comments]


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White Nationalists Celebrate ‘an Awakening’ After Donald Trump’s Victory

Richard B. Spencer, a leader of the far right, addressing a conference on Saturday in Washington.
NOV. 19, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/us/politics/white-nationalists-celebrate-an-awakening-after-donald-trumps-victory.html [with comments]


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Alex Threatened With Brandished Gun In Heightened Liberal Hysteria


Published on Nov 19, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel

Alex Was Menaced by a man in a parking lot with a gun. This aggressive act underscores the rising hysteria of the left following Trump's vindication. Now that their worlds have been turned upside down they are lashing out in record numbers, turning to fear to enforce their message of slavery and fealty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9QwlxuSQSc [with comments]


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After Trump victory, attendance rises at annual white nationalist conference in D.C.

About 200 people protest outside the Reagan Building, where the National Policy Institute held its annual white nationalist conference.

Chairman of the National Policy Institute, Richard Spencer answers questions from the media at the annual conference put on by the National Policy Institute. Spencer coined the term “alt-right” and is a vocal proponent of what he refers to as “white identity.”
November 19, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/attendance-rises-at-annual-white-nationalist-conference-in-dc-after-trump-victory/2016/11/19/cbe66884-ae88-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html [with embedded video; comments closed]


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Proof: Wholesome Americana Thrives Despite Increasingly Vicious Left


Published on Nov 19, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel

Smalltown america is alive and well. The proud, friendly, honorable traditions that made our country great are still thriving underneath the veneer of sick leftist cultural distortion. Come with us as we show you a little slice of heaven where honest people live and quite a few are Infowarriors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VLM6UHfbao [with comments]


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Alt-right celebrates Trump’s election at D.C. meeting

The alt-right gathered over the weekend at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center downtown to regroup after the election and plot a path forward.
11/19/16 Updated 11/19/16
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/alt-right-washington-dc-meeting-231671 [with comments]


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Emergency Message To Leftists From Trump / Steve Bannon


Published on Nov 19, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel

Alex Jones covers the universal prosperity message encoded in the interview Trump's head council Steve Bannon gave to the Hollywood reporter.

Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect's Strategist Plots "An Entirely New Political Movement" (Exclusive)

"I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist," Bannon tells THR media columnist Michael Wolff as the controversial Breitbart News chief turned White House advisor unleashes on Hillary Clinton, Fox News and his critics.
11/18/2016
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-bannon-trump-tower-interview-trumps-strategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747 [with comments]


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQoh0ybEVc8 [with comments]


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Energized By Trump's Win, White Nationalists Gather To 'Change The World'

Richard Spencer addresses a room of press and conference attendees at a news conference held by the National Policy Institute during its "Become Who We Are" event in Washington, D.C. Prior to the news conference, which was held in the same room as the broader NPI event, Spencer told journalists they could not take photos of the room because attendees could be identified without their permission.

Speakers taking questions from the press included alt-right supporters (left to right) Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald, Jason Jorjani, and Jared Taylor.
November 20, 2016
http://www.npr.org/2016/11/20/502719871/energized-by-trumps-win-white-nationalists-gather-to-change-the-world [with embedded audio "'We're Not Going Away': Alt-Right Leader On Voice In Trump Administration"]


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MSM Caught Creating Fake News Against Trump


Published on Nov 19, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel

Alex Jones discusses a Bloomberg article that created a fake Donald Trump tweet and reported it as legitimate news.

Trump Takes On Broadway After Pence Gets ‘Hamilton’ Lecture

Police remove protesters from the streets after they shouted slogans at Vice President-elect Mike Pence whilst leaving the Richard Rodgers Theatre after a performance of 'Hamilton,' in New York on Nov. 18.
Cast read statement to VP-elect following Tony-winning musical
Twitter war erupts; critics urge boycott of blockbuster show
November 19, 2016 — 9:23 AM CST
Updated on November 19, 2016 — 5:08 PM CST
(An earlier version corrected garble in first Trump University quote.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-19/trump-takes-on-broadway-after-pence-s-hamilton-dressing-down


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij8FRUv0VDA [with comments]


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Alt-right leaders praise Sessions as attorney general pick

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, visits Trump Tower in New York on Thursday.
November 19, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/19/alt-right-leaders-praise-sessions-as-attorney-general-pick/ [with comments]


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Elites Panic As Trump Begins To Deliver


Published on Nov 19, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel

Alex Jones covers the latest news concerning the Trump presidency.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9_qxSOZiwk [with comments]


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White Nationalists Celebrate Trump's Victory and Early Appointments


Tila Tequila
@AngelTilaLove
Seig heil!
6:59 PM - 18 Nov 2016
[ https://twitter.com/AngelTilaLove/status/799809348755161088 (with comments)]

Alt-right leader Richard Spencer called Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions "wonderful."
Nov. 19, 2016
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/donald-trumps-white-nationalist-bannon-sessions-alt-right [with comments]


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Why Feds Are Banning Fireplaces And Wood Stoves


Published on Nov 19, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel

Alex Jones covers the latest news about the EPA trying to kill basic human activity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m25OsRVc7e0 [with comments]


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Stephen K. Bannon at The Liberty Restoration Foundation


Uploaded on Nov 20, 2011 by The Victory Sessions [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAFb-K_xwTzgdlxCCjmzQgQ / http://www.youtube.com/user/VictorySessions , http://www.youtube.com/user/VictorySessions/videos ]

The Undefeated Director Stephen K. Bannon at the inaugural Liberty Restoration Foundation in Orlando, FL on October 25, 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BSrJv0IpHY [with comments] [and see (again) in particular the Maddow segment "Bannon: Top Trump adviser, right-wing media mogul"
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY1SYuyOidg {with comments}, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/top-trump-adviser-right-wing-media-mogul-809747523964 ) included at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=126584714 and preceding and following (two posts back earlier this string)] [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nTd2ZAX_tc (with comments), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cprKr2aCHNU (with comments), and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNY230aBfVA (no comments yet)]


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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07

"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790


F6

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