How alt-right Twitter tricks the media into panicking | The Outline: “Profiles that are tweeting in excess of 70 times a day present the potential to be what we might call cyborg-like, [or having] an element of human-meets-machine,” explained Mentionmapp co-founder, John Gray. “So I would definitely consider any profile that is tweeting more than 300 times a day programmatic — the Oxford Internet Institute use[s] the phraseology ‘computational propaganda.’”
That’s not to say that they’re bots, though. Not in the traditional, 100-percent-machine, wholly anonymous, copying-and-pasting-poorly-spelled-messages sense of the word, anyway. Instead, they’re human sockpuppets amplifying @thebradfordfile’s particular brand of divisive political messaging. (BuzzFeed News reported on an account that worked to trend certain topics or names in 2017.) Amplification at this scale can have profound effects on the experience of real people trying to get an idea of what’s actually happening online — what views are acceptable and what aren’t. These sorts of practices serve to normalize hate speech and dull the impact of divisive rhetoric by repeated exposure. They leave users with a warped understanding of what the general consensus on a particular topic actually is, which can quickly lead to radicalization.
That’s not to say that they’re bots, though. Not in the traditional, 100-percent-machine, wholly anonymous, copying-and-pasting-poorly-spelled-messages sense of the word, anyway. Instead, they’re human sockpuppets amplifying @thebradfordfile’s particular brand of divisive political messaging. (BuzzFeed News reported on an account that worked to trend certain topics or names in 2017.) Amplification at this scale can have profound effects on the experience of real people trying to get an idea of what’s actually happening online — what views are acceptable and what aren’t. These sorts of practices serve to normalize hate speech and dull the impact of divisive rhetoric by repeated exposure. They leave users with a warped understanding of what the general consensus on a particular topic actually is, which can quickly lead to radicalization.