Taking the Bot Bait

Donald Trump has used Twitter more aggressively than any other political figure in the short history of the service. He has built a large and pugnacious fanbase that will do his bidding and shout down anyone or anything that challenges him. Even if it’s a bot.


“A Twitter Bot Is Beating Trump Fans”
by Ben Collins
The Daily Beast
June 14, 2016

Many Donald Trump supporters on Twitter spent Tuesday afternoon unknowingly arguing with a robot.

@Assbott, which mostly tweets about professional wrestling and baseball, was created to immediately reply to Trump”s tweets, then respond with nonsense sentences to any user who interacts with it. But many of the presumptive Republican nominee”s fans didn”t recognize it wasn”t a person and continued fighting with it until they finally abandoned the conversation. About 10 users per hour continued tweeting at @Assbott well into Tuesday night.

@Assbott is the brainchild of a Kentucky man named Forrest, who identifies himself as @Nasboat on Twitter and declined to give his last name.

48865581.cached“The bot is just a mishmash of my tweets. @AwfulJack is the one who started the account. I”m clueless on the technical side,” he told The Daily Beast. “There had been a few other bots made from other users we know and follow, and I thought it was a funny concept and wanted one of my own. I sent him my archive, and he got it up and running.” Read more.


CNN Weighs In on Online Hoaxes

From Joe King:


2013: The Web’s year of the hoax
by Doug Gross
CNN
December 4, 2013

News alert: Some things you read on the Internet are not true.

As obvious as that may seem, and as savvy as you’d think we’d be a decade after deposed Nigerian princes began e-mailing us with the promise of vast riches, 2013 has turned out to be the Year of the Online Hoax.

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And, guess what? Most of us seemed to love every minute of it.

In just the past week or so, the Web has been duped by the viral rise of a snarky Thanksgiving Day airplane spat, a not-so-poor poverty blogger and a Twitter feud between a comedian and a salsa company.

And it’s no accident. Media experts say there are multiple factors at work when these sweet little lies rocket across the Web in what feels like mere minutes.

Continue reading “CNN Weighs In on Online Hoaxes”