So. Many. Fucking. Bots. (And they’re good)

Ugh. This can be considered a follow-up to my post yesterday on the same issue.

On Facebook today, I saw the following link in my “trending” section.

The story is essentially just this one picture that’s been circulating around Twitter:

https://twitter.com/LazyyMillennial/status/977267940796936192

Well, isn’t this some great liberal content! Red meat for the base. Well — knowing what I know about deception on Twitter, my first instinct these days is to be skeptical about the integrity of the information I’m getting. And, sure enough, if you go to @LazyyMillennial’s twitter timeline, it’s been made very recently and devoid of any real personal content.

Very much not surprisingly, if you run this account through the same botrnot model I used yesterday, you get a very high likelihood (~92%) that this account is a bot.

“The Hill” is a pretty well-known outlet, and as of the time I checked out the page 2,937 shares. And, of course, they are not the only ones that picked up on it.

HuffPo is carrying the story, as well as the Houston Chronicle. All of these outlets are credulously referring to this Twitter account as “Rebecca” even though they have not gotten any kind of quote from her (they only quote what’s posted on her profile). Some are even featuring a screenshot of her photo in a kind of Ken Burns moving image with narration video.

Now, perhaps the picture is real (Huffpo’s story had the image tweeted out by someone else), but “Rebecca” is certainly helping to amplify the message:

Is this a bot in the sense of a purely automated account? I don’t think so. It seems to me like a human writing these quotes. But is this person the person they claim to be? Seems very, very unlikely.

Once you start looking for bots — or impersonated accounts, which may be a better term, they are everywhere. That last piece of content you chuckled at while wondering why {conservatives, liberals} were so dumb? (“Yeaaahh we gottem good!”) Or that made you really angry, and made you wonder how “the other side” could think that way? That may well have been manufactured. That may not be real. There seem to be a lot of “Rebeccas” out there.