
As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work - evo_9
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-a-conservative-twitter-user-sleeps-his-account-is-hard-at-work/2017/02/05/18d5a532-df31-11e6-918c-99ede3c8cafa_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpbot-820pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.2bcead7c88a2
======
matthewbauer
Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam.
Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them.

More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If
I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go
to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter
always just gives me a headache.

~~~
meowface
Why should this be banned? It's not the same as spam, since you have to
subscribe to someone to see their tweets.

~~~
greglindahl
These tweets leak into search results. Or, maybe you want to think of it as
"Twitter allows them to leak into search results."

------
JohnTHaller
The automation in the conservative botnets on Twitter is kind of astounding. I
had the misfortune of being replied to by one of the typical UltraMAGA2016
accounts on Twitter. A few replies, retweets, and favorites of that tweet
showed up in my notifications. Then nothing for 5 days. Then on Sunday at 1am,
a specific botnet picked it up and began retweeting and favoriting with a
vengeance. A few every 20 to 70 seconds. This continued for a few hours and
then stopped. Looking into the accounts, they all followed each other and
retweeted and favorited things the other accounts posted. The vast majority
were unused for any other purpose (no personal or work tweets of any kind, no
retweets of anything outside this network and one adjacent). And over half of
them were egg accounts with names similar to the account that initially
replied (style of UltraTRUMPMaga, MAGATrump4Eva, etc).

------
curt15
>To reach beyond his own 78,900 followers, Sobieski adds a few more
adornments, typing #MAGA to surface the tweet to the president’s supporters
online and “.@realDonaldTrump” in hopes of getting the attention of Trump or
those who track messages to him.

One of Trump's favorite tactics is to appropriate negative phrases like "fake
news" to dilute its bite. Why don't his opponents borrow from his notebook and
co-opt those hashtags to drown them out?

~~~
JellyYelly
>One of Trump's favorite tactics is to appropriate negative phrases like "fake
news" to dilute its bite When has he done that and it hasn't been fake news?

Do you think that fake news is just right wing news that is false or can false
left wing news also be fake news? Hypocrites.

~~~
rfw
The parent comment makes no reference to right wing news, or even any judgment
on the fakeness of left or right wing news.

------
iambateman
Twitter used to be amazing. I found real friends who shared common affinities
and got freelance work on a regular basis.

But now, twitter is full of political nonsense and bots. I had an
"ultramarathoner" tweet "lier" at me the other day.

Honestly, HN is the closest thing to early-twitter that I know about for
chatting about interesting stories.

------
manishsharan
To each his own ! I brutally prune the list of people I follow ; if I feel
someone is spamming or retweeting garbage, I get rid of them. However, some
people may not be so unforgiving and that is ok : they are probably the ones
clicking on links in sponsored tweets.

~~~
cperciva
Most of this guy's followers are probably bots and other spammers.

The problem arises if/when this noise is weighted equally with humans when it
comes to deciding what is "trending".

~~~
manishsharan
You raise an important point I had not considered. Bots could skew trending
metrics to favor spammers. That could get them more media coverage which could
lead to influencers trying to get in on the coverage by re-tweeting spam. And
the spammer succeeds.

Unlike Google which mercilessly penalizes content farms, Twitter probably does
not have the intellectual wherewithal to combat spammers.

------
guscost
Most modern media operations have been doing this for a long time. There are
dead simple tools that do everything for you, like Buffer:
[https://buffer.com](https://buffer.com)

------
novacole
Sounds like he's using tweetboss

