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If some of Donald Trump’s supporters seem to follow him like unthinking robots, it might be because some are.
Patrick Ruffini is co-founder of Echelon Insights, a digital-analytics company, and founder and chairman of Engage, a digital agency. When tracking the activity of hundreds of pro-Trump Twitter accounts, he noticed something fishy.
For a while, Ruffini says, he’s had “this notion that not all of Trump’s Twitter support is organic.” When he looked into it, he discovered that at least 465 pro-Trump tweeters seem likely to be fake. Ruffini compiled a list of these accounts in a spreadsheet.
Sometimes these accounts independently tweet the exact same tweet around the same time — a clear indication of inauthenticity.
Recently, these apparent bots began to instruct Twitter users to call the FCC to complain if they were still receiving Ted Cruz robocalls after opting out.
The Daily Caller noted, “A search for ‘@tedcruz opted out robocalls’ turns up dozens of accounts sending out the exact same message. A search for ‘@tedcruz opted out emails’ returns the same, with many of the same accounts and the exact same wording.”
When he called out these accounts on Twitter, Ruffini began to be bombarded with angry responses from them, which to him seemed like a startling overreaction. Some threatened to take action against him. Their anti-Cruz tweets began to be deleted; Ruffini had been collecting them on the spreadsheet in cells beside their account links, but now the tweet links lead to error pages.Read the rest of the story HERE.
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