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As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

washingtonpost.com

11–20 of 34 posts

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#11
>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?

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#12

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.

I wish Twitter had better stats for that, I mean "this user's tweets are 5% of your timeline on average day" or something similar.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#13

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.

There are limits already:

>Tweets: 2,400 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as Tweets.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#14
post #11

>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 th…

>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.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#15

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.

"If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator"

The one time I found twitter to be far superior is when I heard gunshots outside my apartment and found the location and a pretty good understanding of what happened within a few minutes.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#16
post #11

>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 th…

>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.

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

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#17
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not a Twitter user but: if you wanted to disrupt or derail ongoing conversations, couldn't that be done programmatically too? Or harass people?

Yes, but that's a different subject entirely. This article is just describing someone queueing up general political tweets.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#18
post #13

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.

There are limits already: >Tweets: 2,400 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as Tweets. https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364

One tweet per 30 seconds is a 'limit'?

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#19

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.

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".

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#20
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).
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