A couple of days ago some of the people that I follow on Twitter were tweeting about this website that claimed to identify Russian bots and trolls. Most of them were getting a perfect score. i.e 100% likelihood that they are Russian.
All of them are what I'd call thinkers. Some are politically left of centre. Some are right of centre. All of them have several things in common - they intensely dislike Bill and Hillary Clinton, they all follow Julian Assange and Wikileaks and they all view the MSM with deep distrust.
None of them come from Russia. Most are as American as apple pie and baseball. But the website flagged them all.
Naturally, I had to try my luck.
Imagine my devastation when I found that I was rated as 8/10. Obviously, I need to try harder.
I'm struggling to see how my account was flagged as a problem.
Of the last 10 tweets I've made, 7 were retweets. I retweet a lot - because there's a lot of interesting information coming through and I like to share it.
Of the subjects discussed in those tweets 3 were in relation to a new book on JFK, 2 were in relation to the mystery disappearance of the Beaumont children n 1966, one was in relation to the fake news/false flags that have occurred in America's past , one was in relation to a security breach by the Australian government and the rest were in one way or another, Hilary Clinton related (Judicial watch, Clinton Foundation in Australia, and a story about tokenism)
None of those tweets were overly inflammatory - all reported facts and I'd expect that if you sampled all of my tweets you'd find similar samples. Occasionally I get a bee in my bonnet about something - Seth Rich comes to mind, but generally, I just share what I find interesting and relevant.
So the inference to be drawn is obvious. Any computer program is only as good as the information that it receives. In this case, the program is being fed data that is skewed against people who don't follow the MSM narrative. While it's a piddly site built by a wannabee social justice warrior it raises some interesting concerns.
The Project Veritas investigation has already exposed Twitter to be actively shadow banning conservatives and Trump supporters. Somehow, the powers that shouldn't be equate Trump, God and guns with Russian bots because they can't envisage how on earth anybody could possibly support those concepts.
This attitude underscores the entire problem with what is rapidly becoming known as Trump Derangement Syndrome. Those people that the politically tone-deaf Neo-Liberal queen identified as deplorables have been hurting for decades. They have paid the price for the largesse and self absorption that the trendy left and the neo-con money grabbing fraudsters from Wall Street have thoughtlessly demanded. They've had enough and they want their country back. The world they inhabit and the mindset they have is utterly alien to the gatekeepers of this new digital world.
The real bots are those that seek to control the narrative through censorship. They want a safe space. They cannot comprehend the anger and discontent that is festering beneath the surface.
When an idea takes hold, no government, no level of censorship or no level of military aggression can supress it. The gatekeepers had better engage or they will be swept away.
PS: You can get your own bot score here https://makeadverbsgreatagain.us/mlp/ let me know what you get in the comments below - anything less than 6 and you need to lift your game.