The dreary post-election hangover and defeatist mentality of those sworn to emigrate far away from this great nation has spawned excuses, accusations and conspiracy theories, some of which exist as veritable entities complete with complex layers of bizarre, circuitous logic.
Dream teams captained by despondent faculty of waywardly brilliant post graduate candidates are willfully forced to embark on vast research projects with the goal of quantifying and validating the alleged immoral and unjust practices facilitated by the Trump camp in articulating a clear path to the Oval office. While F$%#book and CEO have implemented plausible deniability that the social network giant had any direct influence on election results, Twitter has taken an entirely different and proactive tact in addressing skeptics.
In the latest culmination of studying social network habits and software constructs on Twitter, “impartial” researchers are claiming that the existence of automated bots, or accounts designed to schedule and disseminate high volumes of information in the forms of daily Tweets, had a direct effect on the final shape of the election. According to the study headlined by Oxford University, in the days leading up to the election Trump content dominated Clinton content on Twitter by a ratio of 5 to 1, thanks to bot accounts spitting out in upwards of 1,400 tweets per day and proportion of the content “misleading”. The high volume bots that were researched, generated roughly 20% percent of total election coverage on Twitter, with a resounding majority of 16.6% percent dominated by Pro-Trump content. Researchers are theorizing that tactics orchestrated by the programmers of the Trump bots had a detrimental and adverse effect on the overall voting patterns of end-users. Like F$%#book, the ranking and visibility of content on Twitter is determined by unique algorithms.
While many in the academic world occupy democratic political views, it is not surprising that a concerted, passionate and strategic effort was facilitated in coordinating and quickly processing the results of a vast study on the possible effects of social network campaigning. Those heavily involved in the academic world lean towards the inception of projects and heavy workloads when dealing with dismay and hopelessness. One key point which the researchers have purposely omitted on an outreach front is that the creation of automated bots in sharing opinion, information or viewpoints is not illegal or immoral. The relevant metaphor in the real world, is the prevalence and high volume of yard signs pertaining the individual candidates or issues during the campaign cycle. A resident choosing to flood the front lawn adjacent to a busy street with thousands of political signs is well within the framework of his or her constitutional rights. While not necessarily sensible, the display of unbridled enthusiasm would surely generate conversation between neighbors or occupants of passing vehicles.
However, the most crucial aspect lost in the shuffle of the Twitter and F*&$book turf war, won handily by Trump supporters or more accurately those funded by Mr. Trump, is why did Hillary’s camp not engineer similar social networking tactics in propagating mass amounts of tweets and posts? On the monumental campuses of the software world dominated by a liberal mentality, how did a group of engineers not step-up and utilize an innovative and effective campaign in matching the efforts of Trump’s software architects?
Where was the constructive response to Trump’s guerilla-style Twitter warfare?
Access to bot source code is available to users on a global scale and does not require a high level of programming competency. Clearly, the researchers understood that by proclaiming that the election was influenced by bots and not facts, they are really damning the blatant incompetency and oversight of so-called liberal tech-gurus to effectively manipulate readily available and cost-effective software technology. The architects of the research project even go as far to indirectly praise the brilliance of the strategic play of the Trump bots in effectively mutating Pro-Clinton content with streamlined hashtags and thus reaching the core Twitter interactions and discussions of Clinton supporters . While the study’s administrators and authors are obviously intelligent, educated, talented people, the antithesis of bipartisan bot domination reality is just another example that ingenuity always defeats bureaucracy.
Read the full Daily Beast article here.