Nina Tomasieski logs on to Twitter before the sun rises. Seated at
her dining room table with a nearby TV constantly tuned to Fox News, the
70-year-old grandmother spends up to 14 hours a day tweeting the
praises of President Trump and his political allies, particularly those
on the ballot this fall, and deriding their opponents.
She’s part of a dedicated band of Trump supporters who tweet and retweet Keep America Great messages thousands of times a day.
“Time to walk away Dems and vote RED in the primaries,” she declared
in one of her voluminous tweets, adding, “Say NO to socialism &
hate.”
While her goal is simply to advance the agenda of a president she
adores, she and her friends have been swept up in an expanded effort by
Twitter and other social media companies to crack down on nefarious
tactics used to meddle in the 2016 election.
And without meaning to, the tweeters have demonstrated the difficulty
such crackdowns face — particularly when it comes to telling a
political die-hard from a surreptitious computer robot.
Last week, Facebook said it had removed 32 fake accounts apparently
created to manipulate U.S. politics — efforts that may be linked to
Russia.
Twitter and other sites also have targeted automated or robot-like
accounts known as bots, which authorities say were used to cloak efforts
by foreign governments and political bad actors in the 2016 elections.
But the screening has repeatedly and erroneously flagged Tomasieski and users like her.
Their accounts have been suspended or frozen for “suspicious”
behavior — apparently because of the frequency and relentlessness of
their messages. When they started tweeting support for a conservative
lawmaker in the GOP primary for Illinois governor this spring, news
stories warned that right-wing “propaganda bots” were trying to
influence the election.
“Almost all of us are considered a bot,” says Tomasieski, who lives
in Tennessee but is tweeting for GOP candidates across the U.S.
Cynthia Smith has been locked out of her account and “shadow banned,”
meaning tweets aren’t as visible to others, because of suspected
“automated behavior.”
“I’m a gal in Southern California,” Smith said. “I am no bot.”
The actions have drawn criticism from conservatives, who have accused
Twitter, Facebook and other companies of having a liberal bias and
censorship. It also raises a question: Can the companies outsmart the
ever-evolving tactics of U.S. adversaries if they can’t be sure who’s a
robot and who’s Nina?
“It’s going to take a really long time, I think years, before Twitter
and Facebook and other platforms are able to deal with a lot of these
issues,” said Timothy Carone, who teaches technology at Notre Dame’s
Mendoza College of Business.
The core problem is that people are coming up with new ways to use
the platforms faster than the companies can manage them, he said.
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FILE - This Oct. 26, 2016 file photo shows a Twitter sign
outside of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. Some political
die-hards are getting caught up in an expanded effort by Twitter and
other social media companies to crack down on nefarious tactics
suspected of interfering in the 2016 election. They have been flagged as
“bots,” or robot-like automated accounts, because they tweet
prolifically. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
|
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. But the company has
said it identified and challenged close to 10 million suspected bot or
spam accounts in May, up from 3.2 million last September. It’s also
trying to weed out “trolls,” or accounts that harass other users, pick
fights or tweet material that’s considered inflammatory.
Twitter acknowledges that there will be some “false positives.”
“Our goal is to learn fast and make our processes and tools smarter,” Twitter executives said in a blog post earlier this year.
Tomasieski and her conservative friends use so-called Twitter “rooms”
— which operate using the group messaging function — to amplify their
voices.
She participates in about 10 rooms, each with 50 members who are
invited in once they hit a certain number of followers. That number
varies, but “newbies” might have around 3,000, Tomasieski says. Some
have far more.
Everyone in the room tweets their own material and also retweets
everyone else’s. So a tweet that Tomasieski sends may be seen by her
roughly 51,000 followers, but then be retweeted by dozens more people,
each of whom may have 50,000 or more followers.
She says she’s learned some tricks to avoid trouble with Twitter.
She’s careful not to exceed limits of roughly 100 tweets or retweets an
hour. She doesn’t use profanity and she tries to mix up her subjects to
appear more human and less bot-like.
During a recent afternoon, Tomasieski retweeted messages criticizing
immigrants in the U.S. illegally, Democratic socialists and the media.
One noted an Associated Press story about an increase in the number of
Muslims running for public office — news the user described as
“alarming.”
Tomasieski says she loves to write. But most important is helping “my guy.”
“There is as much enthusiasm today as there was when Trump was
elected. It’s very quiet, but it’s there. My job is to get them to the
polls,” she said. “That’s rewarding. I go to bed feeling like I have
accomplished something.”
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