There was a flurry of attention to claims, a few days back, that Trump had gained over 5 million new Twitter followers in three days, and that most of them were bots:
Snopes looked into it and found that the 'five million in three days" claim was an exaggeration, but that the percentage of bot accounts following Trump has been rising:
The determination that new accounts are probably bots is made by looking at elements such as:
[ul]
[li]Twitter handles that are merely dictionary words with a number added at the end[/li][li]No name posted[/li][li]Lack of profile photo[/li][li]No followers [/li][li]Follows no one else except the target (in this case, Trump)[/li][/ul]
Timing of the making of accounts is another element (sites such as Twitter Audit don’t make all their methodology known).
Trump has been known for having a larger percentage of fake followers than other political figures:
So, is a campaign underway to flood Twitter with pro-Trump disinformation that is also possibly anti-James Comey or anti-Special Counsel Robert Mueller? Why this build-up of fake accounts?
(j/k. Most of the articles about Trump’s bots do concede that many celebrities purchase fake followers–making it nothing to do with politics. What makes the Trump bots political is hinted at in the quote from Clint Watts in the OP–about making bots look like Midwesterners so that genuine Midwesterners would react along the lines of ‘hey, that guy is just like me, and he likes Trump! So maybe I should like Trump, too!’)
I’m going to have trouble watching the Sunday night interview (on Megyn Kelly’s new show) without throwing a shoe at the tv, I can tell you. That guy is one smug, self-satisfied mischief-maker.
That’s the implication I’ve seen, though there might be commercial aspects involved. For example, a celeb with a new song or album to promote might want to bots to get involved with saying how glad they were they bought it on iTunes or the like.
With the alleged Russian social-media ops in the 2016 election (and beyond), there would be reliance on the psychological “bandwagon effect”—to get people to say ‘hey, if THIS many voters think he’s wonderful, maybe I want to be one of his supporters, too.’
The Bandwagon Effect is certainly a real thing, even if difficult to measure. It’s seen in action in the stock market, particularly, besides its influence in politics and consumer behavior.
They were used to spread fake news, pro-Trump news and anti-hillary conspiracy theories too. One of the most important thing they do is, not unlike many real life right wingers, turn any negative Trump news back on Hillary, Obama or liberals. So if a recording came out tomorrow where Trump said he hated gays, the bots would start pushing a fake news story where an Obama quote was taken out of context and sort of sounded like he said something bad about gays or something.
Shit, he might actually believe it. And that these stories about “bots” are all a bunch of lies. Just like he seems to genuinely believe that he would have won three to five million more popular votes but the Deep State cheated him.
Who knows what squamous creatures slither in that mind? The rest of us, we get reality checks, we are surrounded by people who are not depending on us for their livelihood. People who don’t always smile when they see us, don’t always laugh at our jokes, and throw us reality checks.
See, you read that and see an abnormally high number of bot followers. I read it and see roughly the right number of bot followers for a high profile account and an abnormally low number of actual people who give a shit about what he has to say on Twitter.
If he had more bots than other high profile accounts like Obama’s, I’d say that might be relevant in some context–but the number itself is lower, and the only reason it’s a higher percentage is because the number of real people is (naturally) lower still.
Any high profile Twitter account will attract a decent number of bots/fake profiles. (Heck, I’m far from that and I’ve attracted a small handful of them.) There’s no higher profile Twitter account right now than President Trump.
You find it meaningless that Trump’s percentage of fake followers is high (49%!) but others see it differently.
In his March 30 (2017) testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Clint Watts, a fellow on national security and the Middle East at the Foreign Policy Research Institute since 2011, and a senior fellow at the Center For Cyber and Homeland Security at The George Washington University, said of such accounts:
He goes on to describe the differing types of pro-Russia accounts: honeypot, passionate political partisan, hecklers and trolls, etc. Russia has used the “active measures” strategy to promote its interests for decades, but it’s only since the advent of Twitter and Facebook that it has really taken off:
Watts goes into detail about a bot attack he and his colleagues observed on one night in July of last year, related to an actually routine security detail outside the Incirlik NATO Air Base in Turkey–which was whipped up into a fake story of a mass terrorist attack. A bit of the account: