Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/15/russia-used-150000-twitter-ac.html
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Those ruskie spambots on twitter can be something else. A few years ago, well over a thousand of them followed me on twitter. It took me several sessions over a few weeks to block them all
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In before the “nothing to see here, it has nothing to do with Russia, let me see how I can derail this thread” crowd.
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I am not aware of the existence of this crowd, outside of the actual White House. What have you been reading?
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Then again, the core Brexit voter doesn’t even know what Twitter is.
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The commenters here who try to derail every single thread on the topic of Putin’s attempts to undermine confidence in Western liberal democracy – various “useful idiots” and the occasional drive-by from a St Petersburg troll farm gigger.
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“We couldn’t have been so dumb to vote for Brexit - must have been the Russians!”
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Putin and his advisors are the real progenitors of the post-truth era, and anyone who thought they weren’t leveraging any of the social media platforms that allow unchecked posting of political speech is a naive fool. Even when he gets caught, it’s far too late to do anything about it - hats off to Putin, boy knows what he’s doing. Western politicians look like idiots in comparison. Which is a singularly depressing thought.
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Putin is a busy little bee.
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150,000 is a whole lot of bots. So, how many did they increase to for the US election?
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Should we be calling Putin “Mister Brexit”? Someone else was claiming to be in charge of UK politics back then…
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“Tovarish Brexit” seems more appropriate.
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“Mr Brexit” is a composite character, a collaborative effort by a team of like-minded (and very manly) artistes who’ve been using the industrialised West as their canvas.
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Russians really figured out how to do mass propaganda and psych-ops via social media before anyone else. Sneaky bastards.
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I find that oddly comforting since, without a nudge from Putin, it would be more startling than it is that German voters could award one seat in parliament, let alone 13% of them, to members of a far-right party that panders to bigots and nationalists (“what could go wrong?”). The Germans couldn’t be dumb enough to do that without “help.”
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I think it’s pretty clear at this point that Twitter is now overwhelmingly a force for evil and any redeeming qualities it may have are no longer enough to justify its continued existence.
So is there, like, a plug we can pull somewhere or…
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