TWITTER

===

seeDorsey TWIT2

primary caps for age of trump

capt 1220

escalator effect

i should probably be paying more attn to this;

promoted to 2ndary on trump (donny ferguson),primary on trump twitter bot fake news, ~MOD

short thus favors superficialty, obsessed with mico/personal/taste/consumption?

but good for viral? (links, video) //FB?

capt 12/17

===

aha tweets are more infotainment than info?

walter benjamin on nazi art. Hess on twt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trumpism

===

lucky just bitcoin grift

https://theconversation.com/twitter-hack-exposes-broader-threat-to-democracy-and-society-142948

Last month, after Twitter’s controversial decision to allow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to remain on its platform, Mr. Dorsey told one person that he had overruled a decision by his staff to kick Mr. Jones off, according to a person familiar with the discussion," The Journal reports. The paper also says Dorsey intervened to allow white supremacist Richard Spencer to be reinstated on Twitter.

In August, Twitter came under fire from its users and even from some employees for not joining many of the top social media platforms in banning Alex Jones.

Jones peddles fake news, and is behind the promotion of horrific and damaging stories, including his repeated claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which 20 young children and six school officials were murdered, was a "false flag" operation – a hoax – and child actors were used.

Square, Inc.

Main article: Square, Inc.

Dorsey, along with co-founder Jim McKelvey, developed a small business platform to accept debit and credit card payments on a mobile device called Square, released in May 2010. The small, square-shaped device attaches to iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Android devices via the headphone jack, and as a mini card reader, allows a person to swipe their card, choose an amount to transfer to the recipient and then sign their name for confirmation. Square is also a system for sending paperless receipts via text message or email, and is available as a free app for iOS and Android OS.^[44][45] The company grew from 10 employees in December 2009^[46]to over a hundred employees by June 2011. Square's office is located on Market Street in San Francisco.^[47] In September 2012, Business Insider magazine valued Square Inc. at US$3.2 billion.^[48] Dorsey is CEO of Square, Inc.^[49] On October 14, 2015, Square filed for an IPO to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.^[50] As of that date, Dorsey owned 24.4% of the company.^[51]

Other projects

Producer Tom Anderson and correspondent Lara Logan interviewed Dorsey for a segment of CBS 60 Minutes called "The Innovator: Jack Dorsey" which aired during March 2013.^[52] In 2013, talking to CNN, Dorsey expressed admiration for Michael Bloomberg and his reinvention through design and simple interfaces of what it means to be mayor.^[53] Dorsey thinks becoming mayor of New York City is an aspiration that would raise the bar for him.^[53] He served as a judge for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC BigApps competition in 2011.^[54] Dorsey is an on-record donor to Democratic Party candidates.^[55]

Dorsey was announced as a new member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company on December 24, 2013. The press release referred to Dorsey as a "talented entrepreneur" and explained that his experience is aligned with the corporation's "strategic priorities."^[56] In January 2018, it was reported that Dorsey would not seek re-election at Disney's March annual meeting, due to increased difficulty at avoiding conflicts of interest.^[57]

He is also a board member of the Berggruen Institute's Governance Center.^[58][59]

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo described Dorsey as a calm, thoughtful leader. Charles Whitehead, a business law professor at Cornell Law School who lectures on the dual CEO said "Half of Jack Dorsey is worth 100% of anyone else. He appeals to investors, whom he attracts, and employees, whom he retains." ^[60]

Personal life

In 2012, Dorsey moved to the Sea Cliff neighorhood of San Francisco with sweeping views of the Golden Gate, Marin Headlands and Pacific Ocean.^[61] He walks 5 miles to work each morning and calls it a "very clearing time".^[62] He is knowledgeable about the Art Deco architecture of Twitter's headquarters that was built in 1937, the same year as the Golden Gate Bridge. He is a fan of Kendrick Lamar's music.^[60]

Recognition

At the 5th Annual Crunchies Awards in 2012, hosted by TechCrunch, Dorsey was named Founder of the Year.^[66]In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.^[63] For 2012, The Wall Street Journal gave him the "Innovator of the Year Award" for technology.^[64][65]

Dorsey was ranked by Fox Business as the #4 Worst CEO of 2016.^[67]

In 2017, 24/7 Wall St. listed Dorsey among the 2017 Worst CEOs in America.^[68][69]

In 2013, he was considered by Forbes the world's most eligible bachelor.^[70]

In May 2018, Dorsey spoke at Consensus 2018, a digital currency and blockchain technology conference.^[71]

...

## Hannity claims he has a direct line to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey; promises to pass along conspiracy theory from radio caller

VideoAugust 13, 2018 6:42 PM EDT

## Fox Business reports Twitter is launching a "charm offensive with conservatives"

Jones and Infowars were removed from Spotify, Stitcher, Apple's iTunes, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and MailChimp. As of now, they are still available via Google and Apple apps, and on Twitter as well. Jones reacted to this by having a meltdown, begging Donald Trump to help him, and calling for Republicans to make Infowars a top issue in the midterms. Republican Arizona Senate candidate Joe Arpaio, who previously credited Jones with him getting a pardon for Trump, leapt to Jones defense.

Twitter app Periscope is still hosting the video where Jones pantomimed shooting special counsel Robert Mueller, seemingly in violation of Periscope's rules. A CNN investigation found multiple examples of Jones and Infowars breaking Twitter's rules; Twitter has since admitted as such, but said that Jones will remain on the platform for now. Meanwhile, even Infowars' own terms of service would allow removing Infowars' content.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended the decision in an interview with Sean Hannity. Hannity praised Twitter for sticking up for Alex Jones, and said that banning Jones is just a "slippery slope." Dorsey said that off-platform behavior does factor into the decisions that the platform makes.

Seeking retribution for Jones, far-right trolls are unleashing a harassment campaign called "Verified Hate" on Twitter targeting journalists and activists. Rather than entertaining questions from a Seth Rich truther like Sean Hannity, Dorsey would behoove himself to clean his platform of this neo-Nazi trash harassment.

mma

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mathematical-analysis-trumps-tweets-reveals-his-true-agenda

network visualizations represent keywords from Trump’s Twitter account taken in 2015 and 2016, leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Links and nodes were resized based on their relative frequency.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3dy7vb/why-the-right-is-dominating-youtube

no lnx

Why the Right Is Dominating YouTube

And why the left needs to own the future of online video.

Tom Whyman

Mar 18 2017, 3:16pm

"Twitter is a tiny echo chamber. I'm not sure the left understand the monumental ass-whupping being dished out to them on YouTube."

Thus reads a tweet posted this Tuesday by InfoWars editor Paul Joseph Watson, who you may remember best as the right-wing vlogger who inadvertently promised every journalist in the world a free holiday to Sweden.

As with most things PJW does nowadays, the tweet was immediately and widely mocked. But however fun mocking Watson might be, there was a curious hollowness to the whole affair. Because on this issue – breaking the habit of a lifetime – Paul Joseph Watson is right.

PJW's tweet offers a sketch of the social media terrain that seems spot-on. Twitter isn't wholly dominated by the left, but – Donald Trump and anyone with an egg avatar aside – left-wing views are certainly better-represented there than on any other major social network. However, left-wing Twitter has failed to translate into real-world influence. Twitter conversations aren't very accessible to outsiders. The "echo chamber" trope is lazy and inaccurate – I've personally learnt a huge amount from people on Twitter, and often this has led to my political views changing as well. Nevertheless, Twitter lends itself best to the refinement of people's views in conversation with people they already share some sympathy with. It's an effective tool for dragging young Labour voters further left, perhaps, but not turning Trump voters into Black Lives Matter activists.

On YouTube, by contrast, left-wing voices are seemingly non-existent – apart from that communist child – while right-wing voices dominate. PJW himself is one, standing in front of his little world map shouting at the internet from his room; his mentor Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who likes to whip himself up into a frenzy by thinking about secret documents, is another. But it's not just InfoWars – there is a whole ecosystem of right-wing YouTubers out there at least as sophisticated as the society of woodlice you might find scurrying under a loose paving slab, a vast horde of unloved grown-up boys droning on and on about why we need to halt immigration; why we need to ban toilets; why we need to kill all girl-children at birth.

The videos these people produce are a lot of things – "amateurish" and "mind-numblingly tedious" are among the main descriptors I'd use. But somehow, they're incredibly effective. Let's face it: anyone who can get hundreds of thousands of views for a one-hour rant about Owen Jones is worthy of at least our anthropological interest, if not quite our respect.

The most famous instance of far-right views being disseminated on YouTube is PewDiePie – the site's biggest star, commanding an audience of literally millions of impressionable teenage boys, who for some reason want to watch him play computer games. He was dropped by Disney after it emerged that his videos included antisemitic jokes and Nazi imagery. PewDiePie wrote a blog post declaring: "I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes... Though this was not my intention, I understand that these jokes were ultimately offensive."

What PewDiePie does is very different from the likes of PJW, but this ironic racism can offer us a good example of what happens when these views, prominent in YouTube's ecosystem as they are, become normalised. Such videos are – at least anecdotally – having a measurable effect on how these kids talk about Jews, or the Nazis.

Here's my hypothesis: Twitter is the natural home of the left because Twitter – participatory; open; capable of presenting multiple viewpoints to the reader simultaneously – is well-suited to the expression of left-wing views, which are (to draw however loose a family resemblance between often disparate warring factions) typically somehow egalitarian.

Contemporary right-wing politics, by contrast, is driven largely by the unexamined prejudices and anxieties of (primarily) white men. Any white man who wants to hold on to their prejudices and anxieties is going to have a tough time of it on Twitter – but they're going to have a grand old time standing in front of their wall, alone, ranting.

So the left have the tweet, and the right have the solo rant to camera. This would, in a way, be fine – except that it turns out the solo rant to camera is a vastly better way of converting people than the tweet is. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this. In contrast to the tweet, the video rant allows the speaker to set themselves up as an authority, never really having to deal with the questioning, sarcastic audience that any tweeter does (YouTube has below-the-line comments, of course, but that's a very odd ecosystem, and easy to ignore). Moreover, the fact that the vlog is an oral medium gives it a greater immediacy, so the audience can, for instance, feel the speaker's anger. On both counts, it's easy to see how the solo rant to camera might turn out to be more persuasive.

This is compounded by technological factors. The way in which YouTube is set up makes it very easy for newcomers to discover the world of right-wing rants to camera – all you need to do is find one rant, and then keep scrolling through the sidebar. It's also generally true that tech companies are increasingly prioritising video over words. Recently, a Professor of Technology speculated in the Guardian thatSnapchat might be ushering in a "post-literary" age, while Facebook has recently changed its algorithm to promote video in anticipation of a future which is "all video".

So what can the left do? Calls for, say, a "Paul Joseph Watson of the left" are bound to be misguided. The left can never appropriate the solo rant to camera – it's an inherently authoritarian method of communication. But if the future is video then the left desperately need to find a way to use it. The question is whether the medium can be used in an open, diverse, participatory w...

twitterbot new cat 3/18

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/fake-news-including-from-russian-sources-saturated-battleground-states-trump-barely-won/

AI bot

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/16/twitter-bot-detector-software/

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-supporters-are-single-biggest-purveyors-fake-news-study

Any number of factors helped tilt the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, from Hillary Clinton's fatally flawed campaign to the billions of dollars in free advertising our political press awarded her Republican opponent. Still, no candidate in modern American history has benefitted more from the proliferation of "fake news" on social media than the former host of "The Apprentice." For evidence, one need look no further than the latest findings of Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Research Project.

After studying the Twitter feeds of 13,000 users across the political spectrum, the Project determined that Trump supporters are among the most prolific purveyors of "misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting to be real news about politics, economics or culture.” (For the purposes of its research, the Oxford team compiled a "watch list" of approximately 100 websites with a history of publishing conspiracy theories or overt propaganda.)

The numbers are striking. Less than 16 percent of the sample group—2,000 accounts who have either shared explicitly pro-Trump links or contain the hashtag #MAGA in their bios—were responsible for 55 percent of the "junk news" tweeted out. Of the 47,000 Facebook accounts the Project examined, Trump supporters posted 60 percent of the content deemed spurious or inaccurate. Meanwhile, left-leaning accounts tended to circulate more stories from the mainstream media.

"The social networks mapped from public Twitter and Facebook data show that the junk political news and information was concentrated among Trump’s supporters," the report concludes. "The two main political parties, Democrats and Republicans, prefer different sources of political news, with limited overlap."

Lisa-Maria Neudert, one of the study's lead researchers, believes these findings may contain a "silver lining." As she tells Denise Clifton of Mother Jones, the fact that Trump dead-enders have distributed a disproportionate amount of this dreck "could suggest that most other groups are less susceptible to extremist or conspiratorial content."

One thing is certain: When it comes to promulgating misinformation and outright lies, the president couldn't ask for a more pliant base.

H/T Mother Jones

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/far-right-trolls-are-manipulating-twitter

InOctober, a notorious right-wing troll quietly launched an "operation" aimed at suspending progressive voices from Twitter.The plan was to use the platform’s mechanisms for reporting abuse in order to silence those he perceived as attempting to censor right-wing voices. With Twitter’s cooperation, and by taking out-of-context tweets that could have been made in sarcasm, the project has now become another successful entry in the playbook online trolls are using to silence progressives.

On December 6, a user on Gab -- a social media platform resembling Twitter which has been dubbed a “haven for white nationalists” -- commented in a “live topic” dedicated to Roy Moore (a tool similar to Twitter’s trending topics) and reminded fellow Gabbers of “project Titty Twister:”

A notorious right-wing, pro-Trump troll, known online as “Microchip,” launched Operation “Titty Twister” in late October, and called on his followers to report a list of progressive accounts to Twitter, which they claimed were “responsible for all bans and lockouts of Right wingers on Twitter.” Microchip planned to use Twitter’s blanket enforcement of anti-harassment policies to get those accounts suspended or banned:

Around the same time as Microchip’s call to arms, Gab founder Andrew Torba also encouraged his followers to engage in fraudulently mass-reporting accounts on Twitter to “cause chaos:”

The strategy seems to have intensified after Twitter announced major policy changes in late November and moved to suspend or remove verified badges from the profiles of users who had posted white supremacist rhetoric and other hateful speech. Though it is unclear how many accounts have been banned or suspended as a result of this far-right troll operation, Twitter did lock the account of Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos for 10 days over a six-year-old sarcastic tweet. Other far-right trolls, like Mike Cernovich and Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, are now targeting comedian Michael Ian Black for tasteless jokes he made years ago.

The fact that far-right trolls have succeeded in manipulating Twitter has undoubtedly emboldened them, as it signifies to them that their disinformation strategies work. And the problem will continue for Twitter especially because the social media platform has applied the same one-size-fits-all metricin the application of its anti-harassment policies. As Notopoulos noted while recounting her locked account saga:

Twitter is getting played. They’re trying to crack down on the worst of Twitter by applying the rules to everyone, seemingly without much context. But by doing that, they’re allowing those in bad faith to use Twitter’s reporting system and tools against those operating in good faith. Twitter’s current system relies on a level playing field. But as anyone who understands the internet knows all too well, the trolls are always one step ahead.

Alt-right troll, master of the self-own, practitioner of self-macing, and part-time holocaust joke maker, Baked Alaska (a/k/a Tim “Treadstone” Gionet) was banned from Twitter this week for being an all around vile nazi-sympathizer. After having a meltdown at an In-and-Out Burger parking lot and yelling at random strangers he attempted to created a “secret” account which was quickly banned as well.

Twitter has finally got around to sort of maybe trying to tame its runaway nazi problem. The rules are still arbitrary and opaque but at least they finally decided to decertifying celebrity white supremacist Richard Spencer–though they couldn’t bring themselves to actually ban him. This, one assumes, would just be too far.

guard uk

NO LINK

showdown is looming in Washington between Congress and the powerful social media companies that have helped define the current unsettled age in western democracies.

The immediate issue before the Senate and the House intelligence committees, which have summoned representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google to appear on 1 November, is to determine the extent the companies were used in a multi-pronged Russian operation to influence the 2016 presidential election.

All three companies have admitted that Russian entities bought ads on their sites in an effort to skew the vote. In Facebook’s case, ads pushing divisive messages were bought by fake American accounts and focused on swing states. On Twitter, vast armies of automated user accounts – “bots” – and fake users helped promote fake news stories, damaging to Hillary Clinton and favourable to Donald Trump. Russian-funded accounts spread bogus stories across the Google search engine and its subsidiary YouTube.

The wider question hovering over the committee hearings on 1 November is whether these organisations, which once seemed to encapsulate the spirit of free speech and communication in the 21st century, have become Trojan horses used by foreign autocracies and domestic extremists to subvert democracies from the inside, exploiting openness, blurring fact and fiction and fuelling civil conflict.

'Our pain for their gain': the American activists manipulated by Russian trolls

“What should alarm the American people is the brazen exploitation and distortion of popular opinion by a hostile foreign power amounting really to an attack on our democracy,” Richard Blumenthal, Democratic senator for Connecticut, told the Guardian.

“This attempt to disrupt our elections by surreptitiously targeting voters in certain places with certain backgrounds and views is a clear threat to our democratic process, so Americans should be as alarmed about it as they would by an act of war.”

What should alarm the American people is the brazen exploitation and distortion of popular opinion by a foreign power

Senator Richard Blumenthal

Facebook, Twitter and Google will send their general counsels to testify before the congressional panels. They will face unprecedented questions about how the companies plan to police themselves.

With those hearings looming, Trump sought on Saturday to downplay the importance of Russian ads and fake news during the election. “Keep hearing about “tiny” amount of money spent on Facebook ads,” the president tweeted. “What about the billions of dollars of Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC & CBS?”

“Crooked Hillary Clinton spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on Presidential Election than I did,” the president wrote in another tweet. “Facebook was on her side, not mine!”

Nonetheless, momentum is building in Congress to start regulating and patrolling the open plains of social media. On Thursday, a bipartisan bid was launched in the Senate to exercise some control over online political advertising. “The Honest Ads Act”, sponsored by Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner and Republican John McCain, is aimed at preventing foreign influence on elections by subjecting political ads sold online to the same rules and transparency that applies to TV and radio.

“Unfortunately, US laws requiring transparency in political campaigns have not kept pace with rapid advances in technology, allowing our adversaries to take advantage of these loopholes to deceive millions of American voters with impunity,” McCain said on the bill’s launch.

Donald Trump in the Oval Office. ‘The Honest Ads Act’ is aimed at preventing foreign influence on elections by subjecting online political ads to the same transparency that applies to TV and radio.

Social media companies have fought off such attempts at regulation for years, but a tech company employee who requested anonymity to speak about candidly about internal industry discussions suggested Silicon Valley might now be open to narrowly tailored regulation on political ads.

“In 2011, when political advertising on social media were more of a fledgling industry, companies were more concerned that a disclaimer would be problematic and hurt the industry,” the employee said. “The social and political ad space is so established now that it’s hard to see campaigns pulling out of the market based on that.”

However, it is not clear how much support the bill will attract from the Republican leadership, which has resisted efforts to restrict anything it sees as related to campaign finance.

‘Totally divisive material’

The climate in which the legislation is debated will be determined to a great extent by the outcome of the 1 November hearings. Social media executives are going to be asked what they knew about Russian subversion of their platforms and when they knew it.

How Russia used social media to divide Americans

There will be also be sharp questioning over whether the precise targeting of divisive ads and fake news in areas that proved critical to Trump’s victory showed any evidence of collusion.

CNN has reported that Russian-purchased ads were targeted in sophisticated ways on key demographic groups in Wisconsin and Michigan. In central Pennsylvania, another state won narrowly by Trump, there is evidence of outside tampering designed to depress the Clinton vote.

John Mattes, a former Senate investigator who helped run the online campaign in San Diego for Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s challenger for the Democratic nomination, has found Sanders supporters sites riddled with eastern Europeans posting fake news under false names.

More recently he has come across the same phenomenon in a Facebook supporters group in central Pennsylvania. One troll, calling himself Stephen Woods, shared a series of fake news stories targeting Clinton, Muslim refugees and African Americans.

I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That’s not what we stand for

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

Woods’s profile claimed he was from Los Angeles, but his details were thin and he had not bothered to delete posts before February 2015 that were all in Macedonian. Mattes suspects, as do US intelligence agencies, that many Macedonian trolls, who were responsible for a substantial amount of the fake news circulated during the election, are funded by and fed material from Moscow.

“Obviously he was not doing this for economic reasons,” Mattes said. “This was totally divisive material intended to depress turnout for Hillary among Sanders supporters in a critical swing area.”

As the evidence of social media manipulation has grown, Facebook has mounted a campaign to address its vulnerabilities and repair the damage to its reputation.

“I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That’s not what we stand for,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 21 September post, on returning from parental leave.

He listed nine remedial actions the company was going to take, including measures that would disclose who paid for a political ad and allow their Facebook page to be visited to see what ads they were posting to other audiences.

Sheryl Sandberg at the US Capitol. She has said of the thousands of political ads paid for by a Russian entity: ‘We’re going to be fully transparent.”

Facebook has handed to the special counsel and congressional investigators looking into the Kremlin’s interference the content of 3,000 political ads paid for by a shadowy Russian entity called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said Facebook owed the nation “not just an apology but determination” to defeat attempts to subvert US democracy.

In an interview with the Axios media site, Sandberg did not address whether Russian trolls were targeting the same users as the Trump campaign, which would point towards collusion. But she did promise: “When the ads get released we will also be releasing the targeting for those ads. We’re going to be fully transparent.”

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

However, she was vague on the question of when Facebook’s management became aware of large-scale Russian manipulation, saying only: “We started to hear the rumours around the election itself of a different kind of attack.”

Facebook will be asked to be more specific regarding questions about when red flags were raised inside the company and when an internal examination was launched. It will also be asked for a better sense of the true scale of its Russian infiltration, of which the IRA ads may only the tip of the iceberg.

Facebook has said it has taken down 470 accounts linked to the IRA but Senator Warner has pointed out that it took down 50,000 accounts in France.

“It just still seems scale-wise, I think there’s more to do,” he said.

‘The perfect disinformation platform’

Twitter has taken a less forthcoming approach,not revealing numbers regarding the proportion of suspected bots among its users. Some analysts believe fake activity could account for more than half Twitter’s traffic

Buzzfeed reported that the company took 11 months to take down a Russian troll account impersonating the Tennessee Republican party which had more than 130,000 followers, despite the complaints of the real GOP in the state.

Furthermore, in the course of the election Twitter changed its privacy policy in a way that has made it harder to investigate the Russian influence campaign, according to Thomas Rid, a strategic studies professor and cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. Before the change in policy, tweets deleted by users would remain in archives maintained by the handful of data companies who subscribe to full “firehose” access to the complete Twitter feed.

The fact that we are in a democracy and we don’t know the answers to these questions is unacceptable

Thomas Rid, cybersecurity expert

After the policy change, which some evidence suggests was made in September 2016, tweets deleted by their authors also have to be deleted in the archives, making it impossible to carry out a forensic analysis of campaigns to promote certain links, stories and hashtags by anyone seeking to cover their tracks.

Rid, who has been analysing the Twitter privacy policy change, said this “made it easier to destroy a lot of forensic evidence that would have been useful for an investigation”.

“The fact that we are in a democracy and we don’t know the answers to these questions is unacceptable,” he said. “Were the KGB to hire a contractor to build the perfect disinformation platform, they could not have done a better job than Twitter.”

Senator Warner has called Twitter’s response ‘inadequate on every level’.

In a statement on 28 September, Twitter said it was implementing policies aimed at weeding out bots and had found a total of 201 accounts that appeared to be linked to the Russian propaganda campaign. The company is reported by the Daily Beast to have handed over details of tweets promoted by the Kremlin’s English-language TV network, RT.

That was a tiny figure compared with the scale of intrusion suggested by outside researchers. Warner called Twitter’s response on the issue “inadequate on every level”.

Google said last month it had found no evidence of a Russian propaganda campaign. But the Washington Post reported on 9 October that an internal investigation had in fact found Russian operatives spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search and Gmail.

Franklin Foer: 'Big tech has been rattled. The conversation has changed'

The congressional hearings will represent an opening skirmish in a struggle over the limits of internet freedom. The Silicon Valley giants will be protecting a worldview as well as their profit margin.

“There is a Californian libertarian mentalitythat assumes everyone is good at heart and that if you create an open platform, great things happen,” said one investigator looking into Russian manipulation of social media platforms. “But there are bad people out there who want to do bad things.

“The question about all this freedom is – what is a cost worth paying?”

http://www.alternet.org/trump-trauma/trump-obsessed-his-twitter-following-too-bad-most-those-followers-are-fake

Donald Trump loves to brag about his Twitter following. As more revelations brewed around the Trump campaign’s possible involvement with Russia, Trump tweeted on June 17 about his overall social media following: 100 million strong, or so he claims, and Twitter of course being his favorite method of communication

A quick glance at Trump’s actual number of Twitter followers tells a different story, however; while president brags of about 34 million followers, the truth is far different. According to an analysis by Socialbakers in June for CNN Tech, one analytics tool estimates that 11.6 million of Trump's 32 million Twitter followers are either dormant or accounts run by bots.

"The analysis run by Twitter Audit, which estimates how many of an account’s following is made up of real people, gave Trump a 40 percent audit score and found that about 20 million of his followers are fake. Status People, another site that rates the authenticity of Twitter followers, found that 5 percent of Trump’s followers are fake and another 91 percent are inactive.

That Trump seemingly has more fake followers than real ones can be attributed to the existence of bots, an umbrella term referring to accounts with no profile picture and no tweets. A quick scroll through the most recent followers on the @realDonaldTrump account shows a number of accounts with Twitter’s default profile picture and no tweets, that seemed to have joined Twitter very recently.

Amassing bot followers is fairly easy. One only has to pay a certain amount of money, and voila, one has an instant bump in following count. A New York Times article by Nick Bilton describes the social media bot industry as a “giant pyramid scheme” often used by big-name brands, A-list celebrities and regular people seeking a “social media ego boost.”

Of course, Trump is not the only famous figure to have fake followers or bots. Politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also have bots following their verified Twitter accounts. The rub is that Trump’s account seems to have a larger number of bots and presumably fake accounts than any other politicians on Twitter— in comparison, Barack Obama received a 90 percent audit score from Twitter Audit, Hillary Clinton was given a 52 percent audit score and Sen. Bernie Sanders garnered an 89 percent score.

According to the Washington Post, academic research in 2016 found that bots supporting Trump “massively outperformed the bots supporting Clinton” by a 5 to 1 margin days before Election Day. The research paper found that 81.9 percent of “highly automated” accounts carried some form of pro-Trump messaging.

The fact that so many of Trump’s followers are ghost accounts made solely to amplify the president’s message should undermine his own unabashed boastfulness that he’s speaking to 100 million people each time he goes on one of his uncensored and often deleterious tweetstorms. But if the president has one quality that is painfully obvious, it is his penchant for attention and his constant hunger for validation; it’s his whole brand. Those millions of Twitter followers and hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets serve as Trump’s affirmation, a co-sign from the public that he is indeed popular and powerful. After all, Trump has built his entire career, including his rise to the presidency, on popularity and a brazen wielding of power whenever it suits him.

If Trump is aware of the bots and fake accounts he has spawned, he’s done a fairly good job at hiding it. Of course, even if Trump were aware of his pooling of bots, he would decry these reports with his favorite phrase: "fake news." For a man whose ego is so fragile that he would even fabricate his own inauguration audience numbers, Trump needs those tens of millions of followers so much that he’ll even throw out a number like 100 million just to assert his dominance without even a simple fact check.

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/06/12/qatari-crisis-shows-grave-implications-trump-s-twitter-account/216873

President Donald Trump’s staffers have excoriated the media for covering the president’s tweets and for questioning his use of the platform, claiming that "it's social media," not official government policy. However, the Qatari government’s bewildered reaction to Trump’s tweets criticizing the Persian Gulf state over terrorism financing, followed by the president contradicting his secretary of state’s call to ease a recent blockade against Qatar by other Arab nations, demonstrates that journalists should ignore White House staffers’ admonishments and treat Trump's social media comments as presidential statements.

On June 5, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka made television appearances where they lectured journalists about their coverage of the president’s tweets. When hosts on NBC’s Today and CNN’s New Day asked Trump’s staffers about tweets he had sent earlier that morning, they derided the hosts for their, as Conway put it, “obsession with covering everything [Trump] says on Twitter.” Gorka also repeatedly told his interviewer that the interviewer was “obsessed” with Trump’s tweets and tried arguing that “a hundred characters is not policy. … It’s not policy. It’s social media.”

Enter the sudden diplomatic crisis between Qatar, which hosts America’s largest military base in the region, and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Several Arab nations cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and cut off access routes to its territory because of the nation’s supposed support for radical Islamist groups. Trump reacted to the volatile situation by posting a series of tweets taking credit for the move to isolate Qatar -- while also explaining why he uses social media to communicate:...

Fact checking as a countermeasure to disinformation is practiced by both mainstream and alternative media outlets. Hundreds of fact-checks were published during the Brexit referendum and in the US elections this year. However, none of those checks seemed to matter significantly. As discussed broadly, one reason might be that our polarized social networks increasingly constrain us to live in our own constructed realities, which are reinforced by recommender systems and news feeds curated by black-box algorithms. Filter bubbles on social media are more real than ever, as demonstrated by Gilad Lotan’s meticulous analysis of how bubbles are being developed on Twitter, and MIT Media Lab’s Lab for Social Machines’ mapping of how Trump and Clinton supporters live in their own Twitter worlds. Moreover, even if the facts are aroused enough to leave an echo chamber, moving from one isolated social cluster to another, they evaporate rapidly as a result of organized trolling.

escalator fake news

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/susan-rice-and-pro-trump-propaganda-machine

...

The Alt-Right Assault on Susan Rice: A Perfect Case Study of the Pro-Trump Propaganda Machine

By Alex Kaplan [1] / Media Matters [2]

April 6, 2017

For most of the last decade, the flow of misinformation was often easy to track in media, with right-wing media often forcing mainstream outlets to follow the stories and tone they favored. Now, a couple of months into President Donald Trump’s administration, this pattern has changed and new players have entered the ecosystem. Groups that used to be contained to their own bubble have been able to insert themselves into the food chain and been able to spread not just misleading, but patently false information to right-wing outlets and sometimes even in turn to mainstream media. A new dubious allegation regarding Susan Rice, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, illustrates how this new pattern can spread pro-Trump misinformation and propaganda from fringe sources into mainstream media outlets.

Recently, fake news and the white nationalist “alt-right” movement [3] have become two of the country’s biggest problems in terms of fighting misinformation. Both government officials [4] and websites like Facebook [5] and Google [6] are trying to lessen the harmful impact as websites that share fake news continue to mislead [7] news consumers. And the “alt-right” is growing in prominence thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s choice of Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of “alt-right” website [8] Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Fringe “alt-right” forums, on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, exercise influence by pushing conspiracy theories [9] and leading [10] harassment campaigns [11].

These different groups do not operate in a vacuum. Repeatedly, they have come together to spread and amplify their misinformation and claims. Often, a claim will start on a fringe outlet or forum, and other such sites will amplify the misinformation, then fake news purveyors will push it, and then the claim will jump into more traditional right-wing media before sometimes spreading into mainstream media. Trump aides and other people connected to Trump have even promoted some of those stories, crucially helping them break through at times.

And that brings us to Rice.

On April 2, Mike Cernovich, a self-described [12] member of the “alt-right,” claimed in a post on Medium [13] that the “White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking” of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials “after examining Rice’s document log requests.” The claim then spread among fringe outlets such as The Gateway Pundit [14] -- which said the unmasking “was purely for political purposes” -- and Infowars [15], and spread via posts on 4chan [16] and Reddit [17].

img

As the claim started getting pickup on Twitter [18], Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, promoted [12]Cernovich with a tweet linking to the main page of his Medium blog (the next day, Donald Trump. Jr praised Cernovich [19] for “breaking the #SusanRice story”).

...

The claim was then echoed by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake [20], who added a layer of credibility to the attempted smear, writing that Rice “requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” Meanwhile, multiple fake news purveyors [21] hyped [22]the [23] allegations [24], dubiously claiming that Rice “could be headed to jail” for “absolute treason.”

[imgs]

Lake conceded in his piece, however, that Rice’s requests “were likely within the law.” Legal and national security experts echoed that conclusion [25], saying Rice’s actions weren’t “odd or wrong,” did not indicate “anything improper whatsoever,” and were “within the scope of the job of a national security advisor like Rice.” Lake's caveats did not prevent him from going on both Sean Hannity's radio [26] and Fox News show [27], where the right-wing host described the story as "worse than Watergate."

As the claim spread into the mainstream, some in right-wing media criticized mainstream outlets for not giving the story enough attention [28] or for not presenting it [29] the way they would. Although some [30] mainstream figures have echoed the consensus of experts, others [31] have also suggested [32] that Rice [33] could be guilty of some kind of wrongdoing. Fox News in particular insisted that something must be improper if not illegal about Rice's actions, and in their scramble to claim they may have had the story before Cernovich, likely outed themselves [34]as another outlet that the White House used as a puppet for the Rice leak.

Right-wing criticism of mainstream media’s coverage will likely ramp up, spurring some mainstream outlets to defend their coverage or possibly tweak some of their framing under pressure.

This is the new media ecosystem in the Trump era. No longer are these false claims all originating in traditional right-wing media before mainstream outlets give in to pressure to cover them [35]. Now they can start from these fringe pro-Trump propaganda outlets, with right-wing media picking them up. Meanwhile, members of the “alt-right” continue to gain more prominence [36] and acceptance [37] in traditional conservative and conservative media circles. Indeed, radio host Rush Limbaugh, while hyping [38] the Rice story, bragged that mainstream media outlets are “not the arbiters anymore”; whitewashed the original source of the story, Cernovich, as simply a “pro-Trump blogger,” and said CBS’ 60 Minutes “tried to destroy him”; and criticized mainstream outlets for dismissing the story because it was pushed by right-wing media.

This is not the first example of misinformation following such a trajectory. In March, after a federal judge in Hawaii placed a hold on Trump’s revised Muslim ban, fringe “alt-right” outlets such as Infowars and Gateway Pundit pushed a conspiracy theory [9] that appeared to have started on Reddit alleging that Obama conspired with the judge. The claim then spread among [9] fake news [39] purveyors [40] and was pushed by [9] Donald Trump Jr. before breaking through to more traditional conservative media figures and outlets like Hannity [41] and the Independent Journal Review [42]. Later that month, in order to back up Trump’s false claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, Infowars dubiously claimed[43] it had National Security Agency documents that provided proof. The claim made its way around other “alt-right” outlets and fake news purveyors and wound up being pushed at the top of the Drudge Report [44].

This is the danger that the new media environment presents. The fringe is no longer being siloed; it has actively been raised into the mainstream by pro-Trump forces both known and unknown, and has been repeatedly validated by both mainstream reporters and especially an administration that has no hesitation about lying to the world. It’s crucial that mainstream media outlets understand [45] this new environment and the kind of claims and conspiracy theories it puts forth. It is one thing to share the mainstream with extremist cranks, propagandists, and liars. It's another thing to succumb and do their pro-Trump misinforming for them.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/searching-proof-amy/

There’s a powerhouse advocate of President Donald Trump on Twitter. She doesn’t hold back.

She has 144,000 Twitter followers and tweets about 26 times a day.

Her name is “Amy,” according to her Twitter bio, and she is solidly pro-Trump. She tweets a lot of negative comments about Muslims. And Democrats. She also tweets in support of the NRA and other politically conservative causes. And last year,The New York Times quoted “Amy” in a piece about Trump’s female supporters.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/opinion/campaign-stops/the-women-who-like-donald-trump.html?_r=0

...

e only problem is, I’m not convinced Amy exists.

As a longtime political strategist, my bullshit detector is on high alert for “astroturfing” or fake grassroots support. I discovered Amy while looking into people with especially loud voices online, mostly on Twitter. I was trying to wrap my head around people like Amy: Are they real? What are their real stories? And why are they ceaselessly tweeting all of this shit?

Amy’s current Twitter bio says she’s a psychotherapist, a relationship counselor and fixer, and she fights for the wrongfully incarcerated — oh, and animals. She is also a vegan. It’s an ideological theme park map of sorts.

I’m sure some vegans like to shoot, but if I imagine a Venn diagram of NRA members and vegans, I feel like the intersection is maybe a sliver.

I searched online for Amy. I burned the midnight oil scouring for proof, but just about all I could find were tweets or links referring to her in Twitter. Roads leading back to tweets. Little else.

I uploaded her profile picture into a Google image search. Maybe it will match a therapist profile on some review site, I thought. You know, every professional has a public presence these days. I only found one match: a Pinterest profile photo that looked similarly blurry.

Then, I searched every state psychology licensing board, from Alabama to Wyoming, and no one with her name turned up. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation, maybe the databases aren’t perfect, maybe she uses her married name, perhaps I am missing something. But I don’t think so. Because I also ran her profile into an algorithm created by data scientists, and the program suspects “Amy” is a bot account, too.

In my recent columns, I’ve addressed the proliferation of fake news and trolling operations, including Russian state-sponsored “troll farms,” where people are paid to impersonate Americans, spread misinformation and sow dissent, both to advance Trump’s agenda and to chip away at the foundation of our democracy. There are people who manage multiple fake accounts, and some accounts programmed to tweet as if they are actual people. Many of them promote alt-right “news” and the latest propaganda aligned with whatever Trump is pushing on any given day (or hour). And they retweet and like each other’s posts so that as much as half of what is out there in the presidential political Twitterverse at any given time could actually be pretend people holding up mirrors to each other.

The results of a study detailed via First Monday in November 2016, USC researchers Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara concluded that software bots were responsible for 3.8 million tweets about the candidates between Sept. 16, 2016, and Oct. 21, 2016. It’s pretty clear that a lot of these “people” are not real. And it’s not like they all went away after the election.

So why does this matter? Astroturfing is a tactic groups use to create the impression of a groundswell of support. There are a lot of Twitter accounts spreading hate and sowing dissent. No doubt, many are real, but so many are fake. And the fake ones amplify each other’s voices, appearing to look bigger than they are. They cow people who might otherwise speak up against hatred into being bystanders by drowning them out and, sometimes, resorting to harassment and threats.

We don’t live in a land of civil, civic discourse — or even real discourse anymore. What are we going to do about it? If social media networks like Twitter are the equivalent of roads on which hybrid warfare is conducted, then what is their responsibility? How does it balance protecting the targets of this warfare with making a profit? And since Twitter is a business — not a government entity — it can make and enforce restrictions around what types of speech it will allow on their premises. Twitter needs to do more.

Amy, if you are out there, how about tweeting out a selfie with today’s newspaper? I’ll apologize for doubting your existence. I’m just trying to figure out what’s real, but I’m not holding my breath.

Maureen Erwin is a Bay Area political consultant. Most recently she led Sonoma County’s Measure M, which will create the largest GMO-free growing zone in the U.S.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-million-twitter-accounts-bots-university-of-southern-california-study/

no link img

A study released by the University of Southern California reports that roughly nine to 15 percent of Twitter accounts on the microblogging website are so-called bots controlled by software instead of humans.

Twitter boasts 319 monthly active users meaning that this recent revelation equates to nearly 48 million bot accounts, according to the university’s high-end figure. Those bots are capable of interactions such as “likes,” “retweets” and “following.”

Snapchat’s International Women’s Day filters spark Twitter debate

The study states that researchers used the following features on Twitter to determine its analysis of bot accounts:

Friends

Tweet content and sentiment

Network patterns

Activity time series

Twitter stock soars as social media giant looks for buyer

Play VIDEO

Twitter stock soars as social media giant looks for buyer

A spokesperson from Twitter told CNBC that while bots may have negative connotations, “many bot accounts are extremely beneficial, like those that automatically alert people of natural disasters ... or from customer service points of view.”

Researchers point out that the bots also “perform useful social functions such as dissemination of news and publications and coordination of volunteer activities” -- but there’s a dark side, too, as they can support “malicious applications” like promoting terrorist propaganda and recruitment.

An earlier University of Southern California study from November 2016 mentions that many political tweets come from fake accounts.

Researchers reported in the science journal First Monday that Twitter bot accounts produced 3.8 million tweets, or 19 percent of all election tweets for the study’s period between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21, 2016.

Recently, Twitter has made service enhancements to mute notifications from abusive users that may flood your personal account, CNET reports.

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Twitter Safety ? @TwitterSafety

We're giving you more control over the types of accounts you receive notifications from. Now on Web and Android. https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169398#advanced-filters …

12:05 PM - 9 Mar 2017

295 295 Retweets 463 463 likes

In the battle to fight online harassment, Twitter says users can silence notifications from accounts that have unconfirmed email address, phone number or profile picture that uses the the default “egg” icon.

As more resources are devoted to studying this social media phenomenon, you can protect yourself with these Twitter tips that help keep you following authentic accounts.

see Fake news also escalator

http://www.alternet.org/media/how-misinformed-tweet-was-manufactured-major-right-wing-news

Buzzfeed News analysis found that the top 20 fake political news stories in circulation during the election got more clicks, views, shares and reactions on Facebook than the top 20 real news stories. The vast majority of those fake stories—all but three—were “overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton,” meaning they pinged around the conservative webosphere, where they were accepted without question by millions and then passed to the next gullible consumer.

Paul Horner, among the most prolific and successful fake news writers, recently told the Washington Post that Trump voters and other “right-wing Republicans” were almost single-handedly responsible for the $10,000 he pulls in every month, because they “post everything, believe anything,” and continue to share fake news even when they find out it isn't true. That might explain why so many fake news stories seem specially tailored for the conservative news reader.

One of Horner’s most popular stories was a fabricated interview with a made-up person who said he’d been paid to protest Trump ahead of the election. During the campaign, multiple members of Trump’s team retweeted the story, even though many sources pointed out it wasn't true. The ludicrous idea that anti-Trump demonstrators are each paid thousands of dollars by billionaire George Soros—who plays a starring role in pretty much every right-wing conspiracy—has now become conservative gospel.

Eric Tucker, a marketer in Austin, Texas, was probably very familiar with this rumor when he recently sent an erroneous tweet that launched a viral right-wing story. The New York Times decided to examine how Tucker's tweet became a major topic of conservative discussion, following its online travels step by step. On the evening of November 9, just as protests against President-elect Trump were erupting all over the country, Tucker tweeted the photo and message below to his tiny group of 40 followers.

[img]

According to the Times, Tucker heard about anti-Trump demonstrations in Austin hours after he saw the buses in the photo, and for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (except that if you look for boogeymen everywhere you will find them), assumed a connection between the two. The Times confirmed that Tucker’s photo actually features buses booked for employees of Tableau Software, which was having a conference in the city. (Tucker told the Times he did a search for nearby conferences but didn’t find anything.) Roughly four hours after the original tweet went out, it ended up :{on :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Reddit:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:. “BREAKING: They found the buses!” the header reads. “Dozens lined up just blocks away from the Austin protests.” The thread of comments that follow indicate subreddits full of Trump supporters who, riding high on an election victory, are ecstatic to have a new conspiracy they can hang on the left.

“Alex Jones is based in Austin,” one commenter declares. “Let him know, and his crew can check it out.”

That’s followed by a lot of wishing the worst on Soros, complaints about “cucks,” suggestions thatJames O’Keefe get involved, and a lot of assumptions rooted in racism and paranoia. “Busing in violent mobs? Please tell me how this isn't inciting treason,” one person demands. This inexplicably devolves into a conversation about Obamaphones.

By the morning of November 10, the story appeared on right-wing message board Free Republic, where a user linked back to the original tweet. Here’s the point at which things quickly build momentum, picking up the pace across right-wing echo chambers. According to the Times, that same day, “Facebook pages like Robertson Family Values, which is named for but not affiliated with the stars of ‘Duck Dynasty,’ and Donald Trump Commander in Chief 2020, linked to the Free Republic discussion.” A Times screengrab of aFree Republican Facebook post repeating the Reddit message shows 307,616 shares. The paper also cites 5,000 shares of each of the aforementioned blog posts.

By now, the story had trickled upward to local news outlets. When the Austin-based affiliate for Fox called Coach USA North America bus companyto get more information, they were told by spokesperson Sean Hughes that the company wasn’t involved in any protests. Hughes even sent the station a statement clarifying that buses were in town "for a conference” and that “at no point were Coach USA buses involved in the Austin protests." The television station’s website, now empty of most of the content that appeared there, still features photos of the buses taken by Tucker, with a caption that poses thisleading question: “Were tens of thousands of protesters across the U.S. paid to walk the streets, hold signs, and chant anti-Trump sayings?”

That evening, Gateway Pundit, a major conservative blog, posted a story with the headline, “Figures. Anti-Trump Protesters Were Bussed in to Austin #FakeProtests.” They used Tucker’s original pictures, and according to the Times, linked the nonexistent busloads of fake protesters to “Soros money.” Three hours later, President-elect Trump or someone on his team took to social media to tweet about the fake story to his 16 million followers.

“Just had a very open and successful presidential election,” the message reads. “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

As of this writing, the tweet has more than 71,000 retweets and 240,000 likes.

On November 11, a spokesperson for Tableau, the tech company that rented the buses for its conference attendees, sent a statement to the Austin American-Statesman. The newspaper, in turn, published an article debunking Tucker’s original tweet and all of the stories that followed. Included was an interview withEric Tucker, who praised Alex Jones and stated, “I think that it is necessary for us to risk sometimes being wrong to help develop moving the dialogue forward.”

Later in the day, according to the Times, Tucker sent a tweet that acknowledged the possibility his first suggestion may have been “flat wrong.” There was also a Snopes article declaring the rumor false. Instead of stopping the fake news dead in its tracks, the case essentially turned into proof that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes," as the old saying goes. Also, the internet loves a lie that supports its political agenda. According to the Times, “Mr. Tucker’s initial tweet continued to generate thousands of shares on Facebook through Free Republic and pages like Right Wing News and Joe the Plumber.”

On the night of November 11, Tucker put up the tweet below, which shows his original message updated to carry a bright red “FALSE” across it. The corrected tweet, as of this writing, has a paltry 60 retweets and 66 likes. He told the Times that moving forward, "I can assure you I’m going to try my best to be balanced with the facts and be very clear about what is opinion and what is not." He also said that knowing what he knows now, he “might have still tweeted it but very differently. I think it goes without saying I would have tried to make a more objective statement.”

The same night, Tucker finally trashed the tweet that started it all. While that’s been scrubbed from social media, its impact isn’t going anywhere. Neither, coincidentally, is President-elect Donald Trump.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/cracking-stealth-political-influence-bots/

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12226070/milo-yiannopoulus-twitter-ban-explained

...

As a part of the general harassment campaign, Yiannopoulos’s followers created a series of fake tweets, some of which appear to have been made using browser developer tools, others at the fake Twitter creation site Let Me Tweet That for You; a look at the site shows a number of similar fake tweets made recently and also attributed to Jones.

Yiannopoulos "screencapped" and reacted with fake shock to the tweets, leading many Twitter users to believe that the tweets came from Jones’s real account. The tenor of the fake tweets portrayed Jones as speaking in an exaggerated "street" slang and depicted her as dropping anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs. When Jones tweeted that she had blocked @Nero, she was inundated with racist replies in response — an (extremely offensive) representative sample comes from a self-described Gamergater, "shitposter."

Within the alt-right’s fortified castle on Reddit, users were positively gleeful over Jones’s upset reaction, particularly at r/KotakuinAction and the notoriously offensive r/OpieandAnthony. (Warning: Link may contain racial slurs and hate speech.)

"We finally made one of them fully implode," reads one typical response at the Trump forum r/The_Donald. It’s unclear who "We" and "them" are, but it’s a safe bet that "we" encompasses the general alt-right movement and "them" is a mix of anything including feminists, progressive internet communities (so-called "social justice warriors" in alt-right speak), and the four new Ghostbusters themselves.

The tone on Twitter was likewise oddly triumphant:

foghorn leghorn @foghornl33

@Nero @Lesdoggg Alright. She's melted down enough, probably to the point of no return

7:33 AM - 19 Jul 2016

Retweets 1 1 like

Twitter is especially prone to these kinds of meltdowns

It’s notable that Twitter seems more vulnerable to brigading from the internet’s alt-right corners— Reddit, 4chan and 8chan, various men’s rights forums, and other niche right-wing, libertarian-leaning, heavily male-dominated communities — than other social media platforms.

This is most likely due to its public and easily accessible nature. The ease with which anyone can make an account and begin directly tweeting at verified users may be a selling point for Twitter, but it also makes it extremely easy to populate "sock puppets" (that is, to create unconnected internet accounts all posing as different people) and proliferate harassment across the site.

And while other sites make it relatively easy to report and take action against harassment — just look at how quickly Instagram reportedly jumped to protect Taylor Swift from snake emoji following the massive blowup between her and the Kardashian clan over the weekend — Twitter is notoriously slow to act in any way.

To date, though Twitter has banned a handful of extremely abusive internet trolls like Chuck C. Johnson, others, like notorious pick-up artist Roosh V (who once bragged about date-raping a woman), are still effectively active on Twitter despite long patterns of harassment and many attempts by victims of their trolling, most of whom are women, to get them banned.

When Twitter does act to remove harassment and abuse, the action almost always comes only after sustained public outcry. In essence, increasingly it seems as though the only way to get Twitter to take action against abuse is to be famous.

More than a day after Jones had begun retweeting her harassment and over five hours after the war between Nero’s followers and Jones had begun, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey stepped in:

....

FEB 18, 2016 06:33 AM PST

The Twitter candidate: Donald Trump’s mastery of social media is his real ground game

Donald Trump has embodied what it means to be a social savvy politician

ANTOANETA ROUSSI

Donald Trump keeps proving political analysts wrong by consistently staying ahead in the polls, and some social media gurus are beginning to think that his online campaign presence may be the real reason for his staying power.

Since entering the race last June, the real estate magnate’s social media presence has grown exponentially and today he boasts 6.2 million followers on Twitter. The political novice who has remained top of the polls in the majority of the Republican race has spent just a fraction of what his opponents have on advertising, yet has gained the most publicity.

Indeed, every time the public would have dispelled Trump from the race, particularly after his outlandish comments about immigrants, Muslims and well, the general population, (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”), he has inadvertently proven time and time again, that the Trump brand is a force to be reckoned with. He has embodied what it means to be a social savvy politician and cashed into Twitter’s dynamic, real-time messaging tool for his complete and utter enjoyment.

The secret behind Trump’s successful online presence: Justin McConney. The 29-year-old digital strategist of the Trump campaign has reportedly encouraged the presidential candidate to give fans and supporters what they want. “In Trump’s case, that means controversy — the more outrageous the content, the better.”

Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump

Jeb Bush just got contact lenses and got rid of the glasses. He wants to look cool, but it's far too late. 1% in Nevada!

8:11 AM - 17 Feb 2016

9,507 9,507 Retweets 18,342 18,342 likes

Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump

Even though every poll, Time, Drudge etc., has me winning the debate by a lot, @FoxNews only puts negative people on. Biased - a total joke!

4:56 AM - 14 Feb 2016

3,077 3,077 Retweets 9,202 9,202 likes

If he does win the election this November, the real estate magnate could possibly be the first “social media” president in the White House. At the very least, he has proven himself as the first major U.S. politician to use social media in a way that truly amplifies his message beyond traditional campaigning.

According to digital political analyst Alan Rosenblatt, there is a conversion factor between social media touches and real-life votes. “Just as campaign consultants have their conversion numbers for the number of door knocks, yard signs, handshakes and baby kisses to secure one vote, there is a number for social media touches to one vote,” Rosenblatt said in an article on SocialMediaToday.

Since caucus voting began in Iowa, indisputably Trump has received a lot of hostility from traditional analysts who have criticized his lack of ground game. But the work he lacks on the ground, he makes up for online, which may be more intent than previously assumed. In a Washington Post article, Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson, allude to Trump’s methodical and disciplined campaign strategy despite the appearance of chaos.

Currently Trump tweets roughly 10 times a day, nearly every day. And on some days he posts compulsively, like on Oct. 31 when he tweeted 59 times.

Trump’s Twitter feed has a strong sense of community and most of his followers are ardent supporters of his policies, again reflecting on the social media to ground support conversion. His social followers often create memes and witty hashtags for their chosen candidate, perhaps more so than any other presidential aspirant, in part because Trump so frequently retweets their support.

Yes, critics can argue Trump’s campaigning may have been amateurish, inconsistent, disconnected, but in the same respect, whether you love him, or love to hate him, you have to admit that his social media game has been unlike anything ever seen. And he’s set in motion an evolution of social politics.

Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump

The RNC, which is probably not on my side, just illegally put out a fundraising notice saying Trump wants you to contribute to the RNC.

8:37 AM - 13 Feb 2016

3,917 3,917 Retweets 6,669 6,669 likes

Perhaps the reason traditional analysts keep getting constantly stunned by his success in the polls is that they are operating out of an antiquated rulebook, for this is no traditional campaign and Trump is no traditional candidate.

Social networks, of which Trump has several — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and his most notorious, Twitter — have replaced or at least provided a complement to the classic campaign template. As stated by Rosenblatt, in 2008, Obama had an intentional social media program from the start, “but it was still inventing its way as the campaign unfolded,” Trump, on the other hand, has set a high standard for his Twitter followers from the very beginning, “winning” Twitter multiple times, by live-tweeting one of the Democratic debates and other campaign events.

"Trump’s personal participation in his own social media creates a connection to the voter that feels closer than the arms-length sense they get from politicians, generally. And his social media presence dwarfs his competitors," said Rosenblatt.

FDR was the first "radio" president. JFK emerged as the first "television" president, and now perhaps Trump will be an innovator in his own right. FDR was a president who used the most cutting-edge technology of his day, "the fireside chats" to speak directly to an audience of millions. Trump is using mentions and hashtags to convey his personal message. The rules of the game have undeniably changed, and it can be said that the spoils will go to the person who figured it out first

Twitter and the Temperament of Donald Trump - Social Media Today

www.socialmediatoday.com/.../social-advocacy-and-politics-twitter-and-temperament-...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{2 days ago - :{Social:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Advocacy and :{Politics:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:: :{Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and the Temperament of Donald ... have to ask how that will :{affect:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: the ability of the government to function.:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

guard UK link

› Opinion › Donald Trump

The Guardian

Apr 3, 2016 - Mainstream news is not to blame for Donald Trump's ascendancy. ... Illustration by Matt Murphy of Donald Trump holding up a giant Twitter logo. .... the long-term impact of the traditional news media on democratic politics. .... I will agree there's little the M$M can do any more to influencevoter preferences ...

Here's How Social Media Will Impact the 2016 Presidential Election ...

www.adweek.com/socialtimes/heres-how-social-media-will-impact.../634434

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

Adweek:{:(style="border-width:4px 4px 0px;border-style:solid;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Feb 17, 2016 - Here's How :{Social Media:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Will :{Impact:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: the 2016 Presidential Election ... Hillary chillin', the world wouldn't be same without those odd :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-isms on :{Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, ... if ever a :{social network:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:pandered to :{political:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: advantage, this was it.:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

2016 Presidential Election Circus: Is Social Media the Cause?

www.govtech.com/social/2016-Presidential-Election-Circus-Is-Social-Media-the-Caus...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Apr 5, 2016 - Donald :{Trump Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: page. :{Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:/@:{realDonaldTrump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... :{Social media's influence:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: in this presidential election is stronger than it has ever been, experts ... "Four years ago," Ruffini said, ":{social media politics:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: was really boring.:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

The Twitter candidate: Donald Trump's mastery of social media is his ...

www.salon.com/.../the_twitter_candidate_donald_trumps_mastery_of_social_m...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

Salon:{:(style="border-width:4px 4px 0px;border-style:solid;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Feb 18, 2016 - Donald :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: keeps proving :{political:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: analysts wrong by consistently staying ahead in the polls, and some :{social media:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: gurus are beginning to ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

Trump: The social media president? - CNN.com

www.cnn.com/2015/10/26/opinions/jones-trump-social-media/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

CNN:{:(style="border-width:4px 4px 0px;border-style:solid;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Oct 26, 2015 - Prepare to meet Donald :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, possibly the first ":{social media:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:" and "reality ... The:{political:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: elite needs to face the facts: a :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: presidency is possible. .... But on :{Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, insulting people and throwing rhetorical bombs doesn't ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

The Data Behind Trump's Twitter Takeover - POLITICO Magazine

www.politico.com/magazine/.../donald-trump-2016-twitter-takeover-213861

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

Politico:{:(style="border-width:4px 4px 0px;border-style:solid;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Apr 29, 2016 - Donald :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: might have claimed recently that he won't tweet ... grown predictably, his:{social:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-:{media influence:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has absolutely exploded. .... :{Trump's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: use of :{Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is likely to be studied in future years by :{political:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: strategists, but ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

The Game Changer: Social Media and the 2016 Presidential Election

www.huffingtonpost.com/.../the-game-changer-social-m_b_8568...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

The Huffington Post:{:(style="border-width:4px 4px 0px;border-style:solid;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Nov 16, 2015 - :{Political:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ad spending is expected to reach an astounding $11.4 billion, ... it's hardly surprising to see most of the presidential candidates active on Facebook and :{Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. ... Using the:{influence:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of :{social media:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has and will continue to improve each ... Ben Carson Thinks The Khans Should Apologize to :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

Can 140 characters affect the 2016 presidential election? - CNBC.com

www.cnbc.com/.../can-140-characters-affect-the-2016-presidential-election.htm...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

CNBC:{:(style="border-width:4px 4px 0px;border-style:solid;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Nov 5, 2015 - All of the front-running candidates have a :{social media:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: presence, ... In an effort to tap the millennial market, these :{politicians:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: have ... Of the candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:have the strongest presence on :{Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

Everyone Knows Trump Is the Best on Social Media. Here's Why. - Slate

www.slate.com/.../02/donald_trump_is_the_best_at_twitter_here_s_why.html

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

Slate:{:(style="border-width:4px 4px 0px;border-style:solid;width:0px;height:0px;top:8.5px;position:absolute;margin-left:6px;margin-top:-3px;border-color:#aaaaaa;"):}:

:{Feb 18, 2016 - Now, pundits gaze upon his :{social media:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: strategy with grudging respect. The Washington Post has called his :{Twitter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: account prolific, populist, and ... One :{political:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: operative called it “a continuous :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: rally that .... than many media outlets, no tweeted reply can match the :{impact:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:of his initial statement.:(style="word-wrap:break-word;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

**==**

:{:{

}:}::{:{:{

}:}::{Reminder:

Our July MOVI Organizing Meeting will be July 9th at The Peace Center in Culver City, 3916 Sepulveda Blvd, 90230 from 1pm to 3pm}:}::{:{

Among our agenda items will be a twitter training where Trent Lange of The California Clean Money Campaign will teach of how to tweet to win. }:}:

**==**

But conservative groups such as the Young Conservatives laid into Nye for blaming climate change for the floods. The conservative Twitter-tracking group Twitchy seethed over Nye’s comment, calling it “so predictable:”

Although just last year it was drought in Texas that was caused by global warming … What’s even funnier is that Nye thinks his alarmism that blames every, single weather event on manmade global warming is just what’s needed to convince more people that the alarmist camp knows what it is talking about.

Other users got just downright nasty:

bastardi

Conservative Media You’ve Never Heard Of

A new generation of conservative news sites are mixing clickbait with Obama bashing to rake in huge audiences.

Not many political reporters have scored exclusives with both Sens. Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid. Scottie Nell Hughes, of the Tea Party News Network, has. She’s part of an emerging class of conservative news sites that mesh clickbait headlines and social media–friendly content with stories that bash President Obama, laud Sen. Ted Cruz, and rack up remarkable traffic.

Betsy Woodruff is a Slate staff writer.

The dirty secret of new conservative news sites is that the ones that get the most readers are practically ignored by their fellow media outlets. Sites like the Washington Free Beacon and the Federalist have quickly won fans among conservative D.C. insiders, and their work has drawn friendly coverage—and deservedly so—from outlets like Bloomberg and Politico Magazine. (Disclosure: I wrote a freelance piece for the Federalist last year, and I think it’s a smart, important publication.) But a bunch of sites you’ve probably never heard of outpace those sites when it comes to actual readership. These new-media operations generally have tiny staffs, low national profiles, and #TCOT-friendly sensibilities. What they lack in plaudits from their peers, they compensate for in eyeballs.

What this means for the future of conservative media is an open question. What it means for conservative media at the moment, though, is that there’s a voracious demand for viral-friendly, often-trashy news stories that reify right-wing ideas. Expect to see more of those stories in the future.

If there’s one conservative news site that’s been sorely overlooked by media reporters, it’s Twitchy. Twitchy is an enigma: sometimes baffling, sometimes amusing, and—and this is really saying a lot—unlike anything else on the Internet.

The site, which political commentator Michelle Malkin founded in 2012, aggregates tweets, basically Storifying them into short posts. Its tagline is “Who said what,” and it has verticals for U.S. Politics, Entertainment, Media, and (as of now) Ferguson. You might think this is a bad concept for a website. You would be wrong.

The dirty secret of new conservative news sites is that the ones that get the most readers are ignored by their fellow media outlets.

According to analytics website Alexa.com, Twitchy has more readers than the Weekly Standard, the Federalist, and the Free Beacon. It also trounces Roll Call, Reason, Commentary, and the left-wing feminist site Feministing in these rankings. Quantcast, an imperfect measure but one of the better publicly available traffic counters, estimates that Twitchy gets more than 2 million unique visitors a month. Free Beacon’s Quantcast audience is less than half that size.

And Twitchy generates that traffic with a teensy staff. Lori Ziganto, the site’s managing editor, said it has seven full-time employees and two part-time writers. The staff lives across the country, and they don’t have their own office. Ziganto, who lives in South Carolina, ran a blog called Snark & Boobs before Malkin tapped her to run the site, and still tweets from the same handle @snarkandboobs.

“I keep that name because feminists hate it and it makes me laugh,” she said.

According to Ziganto, the site can produce 40 to 45 stories on a busy day. The first writers get started at 6 a.m., and members of the team are hunting for news on Twitter until late into the night. Celebrity meltdown stories always do well, she said, as well as stories based on tweets from Fox News hosts and conservative stars like Adam Baldwin.

“Also Jake Tapper,” she added. “Everybody seems to love Jake Tapper. He’s excellent at Twitter.”

Twitchy stories come in a host of iterations. A number of their headlines use the term gigglesnort, which Ziganto says she coined (i.e. “Gigglesnort: Gov. Jerry Brown says fart”). Highbrow it is not. But the site boasts a few scoops, including chronicling Twitter death threats against Gov. Scott Walker that earned it a Drudge link and led to a police investigation.

The site has also brought a new word into reporters’ lexicons: Twitchied, which refers to the often days-long onslaught of Twitter attention (and, sometimes, abuse) that journalists get after being featured on the site. One D.C.-based politics reporter, who didn’t want to go on the record, said one uncharitable Twitchy story about him came up on a date. His date had Googled him before they went out, and the Twitchy story bashing him was close to the top of his results.

Igor Bobic, Huffington Post’s associate politics editor, has also faced Twitchy’s wrath. “It's become somewhat of an inside joke among reporters, and even prompts a round of congratulations,” he emailed. “What’s not fun is the avalanche of hate it immediately brings to your Twitter page, often forcing you to sign off for the next 24-48 hours.”

For some left-leaning reporters, getting Twitchied is a rite of passage. “It’s one of my great professional failures that I’ve never been Twitchied,” emailed Salon’s Jim Newell. “I mean I’ve tried, I talk a lot of shit!”

Newell’s Salon colleague Simon Maloy also rues that he’s never been Twitchied. “There’s nothing substantive to it; it’s rage just for the sake of it, fueled by ideological tribalism,” he emailed. “Were I to be Twitchy’d at some point, it would make me happy knowing that something I tweeted helped so many people fulfill that raw emotional need.”

So Twitchy is the rare site that has both broad-based and cult appeal (though “appeal” may be a strong word in the latter sense). Regardless, it’s quickly carved out its own odd niche in the D.C. media world.

Tea Party News Network doesn’t get that kind of inside-the-Beltway attention, but its traffic is higher. TPNN gets more traffic than the Washington Examiner, Hot Air, and Town Hall, according to TopConservativeSites, which aggregates Alexa data. Most of the site’s content is clickbait-y news aggregation (“What This MSNBC Host Said About Ferguson Rioting and Looting Will Cause You to Shout, ‘Shame on You!’,” “No Wonder People Think He’s A Weakling: Wait Until You See Why Obama Was Hospitalized”) that’s free of original reporting.

It’s also one of the few news-oriented sites willing to give a platform to birther conspiracy theories; one October headline asked, “Could Barack Obama Be Deported Over Using a Fraudulent Birth Certificate? Yes, Says Former DOJ Attorney.” And on Dec. 8, it ran a story arguing that the president “benefits from ‘black skin privilege.’ ”

More surprising, the site also has remarkable access to Republican lawmakers and activists, which sometimes garners buzzy tidbits (for instance, Wayne Allyn Root told TPNN he was thinking about running against Sen. Harry Reid in 2016). Talking with TPNN gives Republican politicians and candidates a chance to talk to the base; one assumes the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s overlap in readership with TPNN is not particularly large. Scottie Nell Hughes, the site’s news director, conducts most of the interviews. She said the site has a good working relationship with soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office. But Kentucky’s other senator hasn’t spoken to her yet.

“I have yet to sit down with Sen. Rand Paul, and it’s not for the lack of trying,” she said. “And you’d think that would be very odd, that Mitch McConnell would have his doors open to us and Rand Paul wouldn’t.”

House Speaker John Boehner won’t talk to them either, she added, but Sen. Marco Rubio talks to them “all the time.” Sen. Ted Cruz, not surprisingly, is another favorite.

Then there’s Independent Journal Review. It doesn’t seem to have TPNN’s access or Twitchy’s cult following, but it still tops all of them in traffic. (According to Quantcast, the IJReview brought in more than 25 million readers last month.) It also wins out over Breitbart News, Real Clear Politics, the Daily Caller, and the Washington Times. Per one of its founders, Alex Skatell, its aims are lofty.

“We’re presenting stories for every American to see in a way they’re more likely to click and share,” Skatell told BuzzFeed last year. “This helps because people who don’t care as much about politics can still stay informed through engaged friends.”

Readers also stay up to speed on stories that, um, have little discernible connection to conservative politics, like “Bikini-Clad Model Annoys ‘Tough Guy’ on Live TV & Finds Out in Russia You Can Get You Walloped for That” and “A Trashy Mom Runs Her Mouth a Little Too Much. Then a Security Guard Shows Her How a Taser Works” and “UK Man Thinks Guys Should Rule Barbershop Roost, No ‘Hens’ Allowed.”

Those stories intermingle with stories about how much it cost for the president to attend the G-20 summit and the latest from the Louisiana Senate race. The site doesn’t seem to have any anti-establishment animus, instead highlighting the president’s perceived foibles and missteps while touting the Republican lawmakers who needle him.

The site’s owners use a huge email list and the Conservative Daily Facebook page (more than 6 million likes) to promote their stories. Bubba Atkinson, the site’s editor-in-chief, is a Facebook savant. He always keeps an eye on the site’s analytics—“I never let that leave my sight for very long,” he says—and sometimes tweaks stories if he thinks they’re underperforming.

The most interesting thing about these sites might be their ability to rake in traffic without relying on links from the Drudge Report. They’ve scored a few links, but not nearly enough to explain their collective traffic bonanza. The best explanation for their success might be that there’s a huge, underserved population of would-be news consumers who care about national politics but aren’t interested in the inside-baseball coverage that dominates many conservative sites.

But will these new entrants reshape the conservative media landscape? I’m not so sure. I don’t have any empirical evidence for this claim, but it seems likely that the speediness of a site’s ascent could be inversely proportionate to its staying power. In other words, my suspicion would be that in the case of many viral news sites, clicks are easy come, easy go. And, in the case of sites like the Federalist and the Washington Free Beacon, slower growth could spell greater longevity. It may take a few years to see whether this hypothesis bears out, but I’d bet on it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/12/conservative_media_s_new_online_generation_twitchy_tea_party_news_network.html

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/askchevron-the-hashtag-that-roared-and-paid/

TWEETS FOLLOWING FOLLOWERS

1,578

663

1,568

@JonEntine

Founder @GeneticLiteracy Project, Fellow Center for Health & Risk Communication & STATS/George Mason Univ, columnist: Ethical Corporation/Forbes

===

tax break SF? buses?

===

key in sam adams thus TP formation:

Samuel Adams was the brewer and patriot who, in 1773, ginned up a mob of Bostonians dressed as Native Americans which conducted history's original Tea Party. The president of Sam Adams Alliance is John Tsarpalas, former executive director of the Illinois State Republican party. Eric O'Keefe, SAA's chairman and CEO, is a former executive director of the National Libertarian Party. He once worked for Citizens for Congressional Reform (pdf), a project of David Koch's Citizens for a Sound Economy. Along with noted Libertarian financier Howard Rich, O'Keefe sits on the board of directors of Americans for Limited Government.

Shortly before online activist Eric Odom helped kick-start the Tea Party movement, he was new media director for Sam Adams Alliance. This put him in charge of (among other things) setting up websites, coordinating Facebook groups, managing Twitter accounts and other social networking tasks. Odom's first known acts as a Tea Partier were to set up the OfficialChicagoTeaParty.com site and Facebook pages within hours of Rick Santelli's February rant, then spreading word throughTwitter, initially utilizing #TCOT, a Twitter list and hashtag for Top Conservatives on Twitter.

Both Odom and another former Sam Adams Alliance staffer, Ken Marrero, are now leaders of American Liberty Alliance. Odom is executive director and Marrero is director of grassroots outreach and coalitions. Marrero was a regional new media specialist with Sam Adams Alliance. In July 2008 he described Sam Adams Alliance as "an outgrowth of, I think, visions and dreams from some people who started at Americans for Limited Government."

John Tillman served as president and director of Americans for Limited Government during its start-up phase as well. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, Tillman grew Americans for Limited Government "from a single, part-time employee in May of 2004 to a staff of approximately 25 that had a significant impact on political activity in 13 states in 2006."

Tillman is also president and CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute. Within hours of Rick Santelli's rant, Kristina Rasmussen, who had just been hired as the Executive Vice President by the Illinois Policy Institute that morning, helped kick start the Chicago Tea Party by participating in a February 19 conference call to plan the event. Rasmussen, who was then the Director of Government Affairs at National Taxpayers Union, was the second speaker on the call. Tillman also serves on Sam Adams Alliance's board of directors and was president and COO of Sam Adams Alliance during its start up phase.

Odom formed American Liberty Alliance in March of this year through a combination of the gift of Sam Adams Alliance's blogivists.com, a conservative blog hosting hub, and the #DontGo movement, founded by Odom in 2008 to support offshore drilling.

American Liberty Alliance is not the only Sam Adams Alliance affiliate in this fight, however. American Majority, a self-described "political training institute", is a "concept" of Sam Adams Alliance, which in turn describes itself as AM's "sponsor". American Majority staff includes former George W Bush speechwriter Ned Ryun, regional field director for Bush/Cheney '04 Lonny Leitner, former Republican state legislator Shari Weber, and former director of operations at the Oklahoma Republican Party, Matt Pinnell.

American Majority also got involved this summer on Sam Adams Alliance's American Liberty Tour, offering organizer trainings prior to each tour event. The Tour itself was billed as a project of American Liberty Alliance, Sam Adams Alliance and Americans for Limited Government.

Long before Sam Adams Alliance's recent website redesign, they altered an internship recruitment page that connected Sam Adams Alliance to Koch Industries: "Interested parties can apply for a Sam Adams Alliance internship through the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program administered by the Institute for Humane Studies and the State Policy Network." The internship is still listed on the IHS website. Charles Koch founded the IHS. The internship page existed up until the site's ongoing redesign, but recently the Koch reference was absent from the Sam Adams Alliance website. An article in Playboy Magazine, taken down almost as soon as it was posted, claimed the Koch reference was scrubbed on Feb. 16. Three days later, Santelli's rant kick-started the Tea Party movement, enabled by Odom's on-line assistance.

Read full coverage detailing the various parts of the Anatomy of the Tea Party Movement:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-brantzawadzki/anatomy-of-the-tea-party_b_380662.html