Should Trump have been allowed to keep his account all these years? He spent years using it for racist attacks alleging Obama was a secret Muslim and not a citizen. How is that not deceptive information or harassment? He doesn’t have a constitutional right to be an ass on a private companies network.
A thought experiment:
Trump announces his candidacy as he did before, in the speech where he calls Mexicans rapists and criminals. Twitter & Facebook respond to this by immediately and permanently suspending his accounts, not wishing themselves to be party to hate speech. Would the man now be president?
I don’t think he’dve gotten past the R primaries without Twitter as a megaphone.
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Plus radicalized algorithms for news, YouTube, etc, that will swing and lock to fixated crazed recommendations.
My phone’s Google news feed just puked up something called trumptrainnews.com What kind of broken system would do that?
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Not bad for a Saudi bot.
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At least they wouldn’t be able to tweet their complaints.
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I’m eagerly awaiting the IRA/Concord trial so we can see how this is proved in court. I wonder if they will put Twitter/FB algorithms on the witness stand?
(BTW, I read “Twister” in the title.)
If all your political positions and talking points happen to coincide with trollies and bots from Russia and Saudi Propagandists then you might want to ask yourself
- Am I one of the people who has been successfully manipulated by this propaganda?
- Am I someone who didn’t even NEED to be manipulated to find myself supporting the same things as murderous tyrants like Putin and MBS?
- Am I actually a bot?
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I kinda liked that we were all ignoring this one, since it was such a clear example of information warfare that it didn’t need calling out.
(On the other hand, maybe I’m jealous others got to the job first.)
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There’s an even more apt ‘Mad Sweeney’ gif for that comment, but I’ll refrain from posting it.
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But… Mad Sweeney!!! 
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Honestly I just don’t know what the post means to say. I get why someone would take the implication of some of the words one way. But the headline is about taking down a network of bots on Twitter, which leaves me with some parsing problems:
| Question | Answer Implied by Headline | |
|---|---|---|
| Because it is a hoax | What does “it” refer to? | The takedown of the botnet? |
| Meet these people on policy | Which people? | The people making bots? |
| Conspiracy theories aren’t going to happen | They are going to happen, but I guess the implication is they won’t accomplish something in particular, what is it that they won’t accomplish? | Taking down botnets? Keeping up botnets? |
| This was meant to be wake-up call #2 | What was meant to be wake up call #2? | The takedown of the botnet? The existence of the botnet? |
Like, I think I know what is meant, but I really don’t know I know
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Are you all caught up to current?
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Nooooooo… no spoilers please. You can tell me if they have a good bit of Mad Sweeney in the second season, cause I love that big galoot!
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They do.
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First sentence of article:
First claim in post:
Not seeing a lot of reasonable ways to interpret that other than the way most of us are interpreting it. But it’s very generous of you to try giving this user the benefit of the doubt.
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It wasn’t so much the benefit of the doubt as that I found it genuinely incomprehensible. I support your reading as the best one. Your point about it being a response to the first sentence of the post seems obviously right now that you point it out. But when I first read the post, I wasn’t twisting myself in knots to find a nice way to read it, I was actually just a little stunned by the large number of referring words (it, these) and the complete absence of referent words to go with them.
It called to mind Diamonds on the Souls of My Shoes by Paul Simon:
And I could say oo oo oo
As if everybody knows
What I’m talking about
As if everybody would know
Exactly what I was talking about
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And this is one of the things which makes it effective IW.
Doubt is the point, to the end of disrupting/derailing conversation. If this were twiddah, I’d report it as a fake account and block it so it wouldn’t have access to any of my followers.
Not that I’ve been active much over there.
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