Hi all, today I’d like to present a lesson called “how to spot
trolls and bots.” Let's look at today's encounter on Hillary's Twitter. This gentleman’s profile is mostly non-political. It’s all
about sports, very low key. Nothing to raise suspicion, really.
Notice his first comment on Hillary’s post. An occasional misspelling
on Twitter is inevitable, but this contains multiple linguistic oddities. That
attracts my notice immediately. When I challenge him, he claims allegiance to
a democratic identity. (Hey we’re on the same side here. It’s an attempt to create
a perception of unity AGAINST Hillary.) However, most folks who follow politicians
and politics on Twitter actually post about politics or have a political allegiance
noted in their profile.
To give the benefit of the doubt, I don't go down the "more liberal than thou" black hole. I just
point out that sexism crosses party lines. His next step is sealioning. “Cite
your sources” is a ludicrous response to what I said but 100% consistent with a
bot script. I call him on it. He doesn’t quite know how to handle that; again
his response is somewhat nonsensical. He’s trying to deflect my critique, but
he either doesn’t know what sealioning is or just doesn’t have a script for
that.
He resorts to emojis. I could play with him longer, but it's not really worth any more of my time, so I block him here.
Bots are not always obviously fake profiles with 5 followers
and no pictures. This guy COULD be real. His profile includes sportsy pictures.
His profile even links to a youth sports organization that has a couple hundred
followers. But reading through that profile, it seems to be mostly retweets of
other organizations and a few funny sports videos. It lacks presence,
personality, identity. On the surface, it all seems perfectly normal and real.
It makes you wonder, are the obvious bots out there just to
be laughably obvious in comparison to profiles like this? 48 million Twitter
profiles are likely fake, according to a USC 2017 study. I block A LOT.
