Bots in Politics: Pros and Cons

Political protest bots are pretty cool, in my opinion. They can raise awareness on certain issues, such as the NRA Tally, or tackle political views in a fun and humorous way, such as UnsureDonaldTrump. While seemingly making little to no impact on the political world, Andrew McGill noticed that Twitter Bots are actually affecting the 2016 presidential election.

One way politicians will voice their thoughts and opinions to the general public is through social media. Donald Trump, the republican candidate for the 2016 election, is known for his Twitter account. He tweets on a regular basis, and will use his maximum 140-character limit to voice anything that comes to mind. The number of likes and retweets Trump tends to receive per tweet is usually high- making it seem as though his comments are easily agreed upon by the general public. However, research has shown that many of those tweets are retweeted by Twitter bots; Trump and his campaign team hire bots to retweet and spread his messages across the social media platform. He constantly boasts about his "numbers being very high" in regards to his supporters, but how many of those supporters are actually human?

By using the BotOrNot computer program, Andrew McGill tested how many of both political candidates' retweets derived from Twitter Bots. McGill discovered that, according to BotOrNot, a quarter of Trump and Clinton's retweets and followers could be bots- that is a possible twenty-five percent of "fake" followers; followers that some politicians will hire for number's sake.

Looking at the numbers of followers and retweets each candidate gains and receives was once a way I judged the possible outcome of the election. How many people agree with Trump's opinion concerning Syrian refugees enough to retweet it? How many possible voters agree with Clinton's plan to continue to fund Planned Parenthood? It turns out that we cannot trust the numbers. Twitter bots are not only used to create awareness regarding politics in a fun and interactive way; they are used to promote politicians and their ideas.

Umm... Bots? Twitter? Trump?

Do you ever question every word that comes out of Donald J. Trump's mouth? If you like him, you probably don't. If you're like me, however, you do. All the time. The current election has created quite some political controversy in the United States, which has, in turn, created some pretty cool political protest bots, such as UnsureDonaldTrump.

UnsureDonaldTrump is a Twitter bot that questions everything that Donald Trump has ever tweeted. The bot takes Donald Trump's tweets, and where he places an exclamation point (and he uses exclamation points a lot), replaces it with a question mark. It makes Trump sound as though he is questioning his own ideas and values. Here is an example of one of the tweets:

 

UnsureDonaldTrump‏@UnsureTrump

Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest? Rigged system?

This bot doesn't change any of the text from Trump's original tweets, other than changing the exclamation marks to question marks. It is up to the audience to make meaning out of the tweets. To someone like me, who does not support Trump in any way, this bot is humorous, and makes Trump's tweets more honest (because I do not think he knows what he is talking about most of the time). However, a Trump supporter commented on this tweet, bashing the page. The meaning, in this instance, is decided by each individual reading the tweets.

By having the code change the exclamation points to question marks, the bot is taking a swing at Trump's understanding of society and politics, which is in turn attacking the thought of him possibly becoming the President of the United States. This is an example of a bot attempting to conduct a political protest. 

Twitter Bots: What and Why?

A Twitter Bot is a Twitter account that generates and/or retweets tweets without a human being controlling those actions. While some Twitter Bots act as spam (which can be very, very annoying), there are some fun, some political, and other interesting bots that exist on this social media platform.

In my Digital Humanities class, we discussed Twitter Bots, and how people create them to help conduct political protests. Bots such as NRA Tally are deemed by some to be conductors of political protests. The NRA Tally bot takes shots at the NRA by mixing one of their proud messages to the general public with a news headline regarding a shooting within the United States. By doing this, the bot is creating tweets that make the NRA seem desensitized and indifferent to the gun violence in America. And if you are a "crazy, liberal nut job" like me, this just may be one of the coolest things to ever exist.

However, is it possible for something nonhuman to create something as meaningful as a political protest? The idea of meaning is a controversial topic when related to computer-generated texts, such as NRA Tally. The coding used to direct the bot was created by humans, with the intention of bashing the NRA in such a way. The readers can also create meaning out of the bot's tweets. Due to the careful coding of the human code creators along with the interpretive nature of the tweets, I would argue that the NRA Tally is indeed a meaningful bot that can create meaningful tweets and aid in conducting a political protest.