As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work
This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by DonViejo (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).
Source: Washington Post
CHICAGO — Daniel John Sobieski, 68, climbed the stairs in his modest brick home and settled into a worn leather chair for another busy day of tweeting. But he needn’t have bothered. As one of the nation’s most prolific conservative voices on Twitter, he already had posted hundreds of times this morning — as he ate breakfast, as he chatted with his wife, even as he slept — and would post hundreds of times more before night fell.
The key to this frenetic pace was technology allowing Twitter users to post automatically from queues of pre-written tweets that can be delivered at a nearly constant, round-the-clock pace that no human alone could match. In this way, Sobieski — a balding retiree with eyes so weak that he uses a magnifying glass to see his two computer screens — has dramatically amplified his online reach despite lacking the celebrity or the institutional affiliations that long have helped elevate some voices over the crowd.
Much of that research has focused on “bots,” accounts programmed to follow instructions, such as automatically replying to tweets from other accounts. But Sobieski exemplifies the growing popularity of a variation, called “cyborgs,” that mix human creativity and initiative with a computer’s relentless speed, allowing their views to gain audience while sidestepping the traditional gatekeepers of news and commentary.
Sobieski’s two accounts, for example, tweet more than 1,000 times a day using “schedulers” that work through stacks of his own pre-written posts in repetitive loops. With retweets and other forms of sharing, these posts reach the feeds of millions of other accounts, including those of such conservative luminaries as Fox News’s Sean Hannity, GOP strategist Karl Rove and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), according to researcher Jonathan Albright. One research team found that “highly automated accounts” supporting President Trump — a category that includes both bots and cyborgs — out-tweeted those supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton by a ratio of 5 to 1 in the final days before the vote.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-a-conservative-twitter-user-sleeps-his-account-is-hard-at-work/2017/02/05/18d5a532-df31-11e6-918c-99ede3c8cafa_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpbot-820pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.b0c9012eba70
= new reply since forum marked as read
