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Links for 2020-01-24

  • “Cyber Rambo”: How a US Army vet aided the right-wing coup in Bolivia

    Twitter’s turning out to be a shitfest of a platform:

    Julián Macías Tovar, a social media coordinator for the Spanish left-wing party Podemos, analyzed the data from the hashtags and found that thousands of accounts were created in the days before the election and spiked after Bolivian military leaders called on Morales to resign. According to his data, 48,000 accounts were created in a matter of just four days to amplify the hashtags. Tovar also discovered that a single account contributed more than 13,000 retweets to the hashtags. The account belonged to US Army veteran Luis Suarez, who automated his account to retweet posts with the hashtags using a custom app. Data scientist Rubén Rodríguez Casañ similarly found that Suarez’s account was able to retweet as many as 69 posts in a single second.

    (tags: twitter hashtags bolivia propaganda botnets bots coups)

  • Steve Bannon on shitposting

    Steve Bannon to Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” This is actually a remarkable comment, as it puts on paper what has been the Tory/Republican tactic — snowing the media under with bullshit, so they lose track of the important stuff and start rattling on about trivial shitposts like Big Ben bonging or whatever.

    (tags: shitposting distraction tactics steve-bannon trump tories politics misinformation disinformation)

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