A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool | Hacker News Reader

A U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

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65 pointsjoeyespo39 comments

Can anyone familiar with Twitter explain how people like Jeff Tiedrich, Eugene Gu, ToddlerTrump, TrumpOwO, etc, manage to be the first few responders to everything @realDonaldTrump tweets?

(Edit) To expand on this, some of these accounts are clearly bots that just modify the text of the tweet. I can see how easy it would be to make these bots - but not how they manage to be the first responses so consistently. Surely there are other competing bots trying to do the same thing?

Others are direct responses to the content the president tweeted about. Dr.Gu frequently writes paragraph length rebuttals but I assume such responses take time to craft - so there's no way he could have been the first to respond with so much content, right?

Do those accounts really manage to get "frost pist" status? Their replies often appear first when you open a tweet from president Trump, but I assume replies are listed in order by some popularity measure and not chronologically.

This is very easy to verify, go under any big tweet and you can see that the replies are not chronological. It is indeed trying to use some sort of popularity metric. Having many followers that see and like your tweets would definitely help you get positions higher than random bots.

I didn't have any luck with search so I'd be curious to know what "frost pist" status is or refers to?

A (presumably intended, as in satirical) misspelling of "first post".

first post, but with some letters moved around, a popular form of discourse in general and as internet memes in particular

a google search does return some examples if you force it to

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="frost+pist"

Funnily enough, "forcing" that search prompts Google to suggest "frost post" instead. I might have done that originally and not noticed that Google pulled the rug from under me. Forcing "frost pist" showed some dictionary links for terms like "frost over" among some forum posts, that on closer inspection give away what you mentioned. That's what I get for skimming too quickly

Probably a few people working to be the first to reply for each account

Spam bots as a form of attack is OK when you are desperate to prevent someone from being elected. At least that's Twitter's official policy.

Is it hard to understand why people are disgusted by him? If you can't acknowledge that, it's hard to have a conversation at all.

His type of behavior and language brings out hate and revulsion in even the kindest people. If you don't get it, I don't know what to say. It has nothing to do with his politics or policy stances, it has to do with his behavior.

His type of behavior and language brings out hate and revulsion in even the kindest people.

From what I see, the hate and revulsion is brought out primarily by confirmation bias due to (a) subjective reporting on his behavior and language and (b) gaps in factual knowledge.

I assume there are people who are legitimately repulsed by his behavior, but I never see people actually explain themselves clearly. They always engage in question-begging and other fallacies and misdirection, as you are now. You state that Trump's behavior is reprehensible, but do not allow that position to be challenged and provide no argument at all in support of your statement.

If you don't know how to apply discipline and empirical methods to have a discussion in a detached and productive manner, then yes you are going to have a very hard time with conversations with people who don't share your biases. And if you can just downvote, censor, and otherwise dismiss/marginalize/deplatform the person challenging your bias, you will never learn the truth.

When he said "grab 'em by the p....", that should have been the end of it.

And when Biden said that if you vote for Trump you ain't Black, that should have been the end of it eh? What about the "racial jungle" comment?

If anyone is honestly questioning why people hate Trump (even a large portion of his own party hates him for his crass and dangerous behavior), there's been plenty of coverage over the years and it's easy to find. Claiming that people only have such opinions because of subjective journalism is simply wrong, because you don't need investigative reporting to find out about his bad behaviors - plenty of it has been recorded. You can determine a lot about the man's character just by watching some of his public appearances.

Anyone who has paid attention and isn't disgusted by Trump's behavior is either an immature, racist, or sexist person themselves, and sees it as normal and preferred, or they ignore it and it's ramifications because of some political goal.

Here's a list of some of his transgressions : https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-so-...

Trotsky used 'isms as a political weapon to rile up the useful idiots. Some people have learned from history while others have not.

When he mocked the disabled reporter, that should have been the end of it.

That's been disproven.

I tried looking up how this has been disproven but couldn't find anything. Can you link?

Here's the clip of the mocking with no commentary: https://youtu.be/biTLe4qNykY?t=31

Make of it what you will - I have nothing to say about it - but it's more than the still image comparing the two people when you google it.

He did that before to non-disabled people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsaB3ynIZH4. It's obvious media manipulation by the left.

It's quite telling how you're being downvoted when proper evidence is presented that destroys the leftist narrative. They accuse their opponents of putting their heads in the sand, where they are doing exactly the same. Quite ironic really.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsaB3ynIZH4

You know, I didn't really expect a compelling response to my question, but that does the trick. That's clearly a mannerism he just uses some time.

Disgusted? No, I really don't see it. He's a bit of (ok a lot of) a hot-head, and definitely not politically correct, but otherwise he's not that much different than past presidents besides actually saying what he's thinking.

Let's set politics aside and look at how Trump's behavior can be considered, as lenitabinol said, disgusting. I'm surprised this isn't apparent. You even note how he isn't politically correct. You don't understand how people don't like that? Or do you not understand that people don't think leaders should be tweeting out their random thoughts like an average person? You aren't being downvoted because echo chamber, you're being downvoted for either trolling or being dense.

But if that doesn't do it we can see things like:

- Making fun of a disabled person

- Saying Mexico is "not sending their best, but their worst" i.e. rapists and drug dealers.

- "Grab 'em by the pussy"

- Calling people dumb, ugly, or other demeaning terms on national television. Including world leaders.

- Hanging out with Epstein.

- Having difficult times answering softball questions like "Do you denounce White Nationalism?" Just say yes. Not "I don't know who you're talking about" not "Who?" Just say "I don't support White Nationalists." Full stop. Could even say "I don't support Nazis." or "I don't support the KKK." But just blabbing on makes people think he's dodging the question and not honest. He does this on many things, even when it is clear he isn't lying which makes people uncomfortable with him.

I can provide sources for all these things and many more, but it is pretty easy to find and all these things have made the national coverage many times over the last year so it is assumed that you're aware. What I don't understand is how you don't understand how someone might be offended by any single one of these events.

I’m voting for politics not his personality. The bottom line is that he does the things he says he’s gonna do. Look at his policy. He doesn’t sell out yo foreign governments like the Biden’s and Clinton’s.

I hear this personality excuse fairly often, but I think it is just deflection. These issues are not a matter of personality, they are a matter of character. Character traits like integrity, kindness, and honesty are incredibly important in a national leader, because they define the way that leader will act.

Contempt for women is not a personality trait. Pathological lying is not a personality trait. Willingness to amplify divisive and racist rhetoric is not a personality trait. Waffling for days before condemning white nationalism, weeks on accepting the results of the democratic process -- rooted in rotten character.

I think these issues extend to his policy positions. The US has not honored international commitments, abandoned allies, and failed to stand up to human rights injustices because of a lack of integrity in our highest elected official. This is not the only presidency where this has been an issue, but it's certainly the most shameless one.

> He doesn’t sell out yo foreign governments like the Biden’s and Clinton’s.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/02/donald-tru...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/trump-taxes-china.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/24/trump-biden-china-d...

This sure sounds like selling out to me.

Edit: Remove sarcastic sounding text.

Edit 2: Remove more sarcastic sounding text and add more sources.

> Having difficult times answering softball questions like "Do you denounce White Nationalism?" Just say yes.

He already explicitly did. But the left doesn't seem to comprehend and they keep asking it over and over. It's unbelievable really.

At least they consistently allow the same spamming behavior on other candidates' posts.

Pretty remarkable how easy it is to click your way to an insane spammer. For example the #1 inbound to Kamala Harris is some account with no followers or mentions, recently joined, posted the same reply to 600 different threads all on October 16th, liked all of its own posts, and has been dormant since.

Not exactly a great contribution to the discourse.

Meanwhile I have a Twitter bot which only replies to direct @ mentions, with 3000+ followers, and it gets shadowbanned on a monthly basis, hiding the bot's reply not only from random viewers, but even from the very person who is tweeting @ my bot and also follows my bot...

And they somehow claim that they don't "shadowban" [0]. What a joke. Worst part is that since you're not actually banned, there's literally no recourse or support you can get either.

But then these new accounts with no followers can spam thousands of tweets to big accounts and get away with it? Very strange.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...

It's been almost a decade from when I remember first clicking through an account exactly like this.

Twitter has shown they absolutely care not for the discourse.

Long term, platforms that do well on this front will overtake FB/Tw, because real users don't want this garbage.

How is that not automatically detected?

Is there any evidence of any sort that any attempt to thwart things like this has even been attempted?

It is easily detected. Neither Twitter nor FB have any (edit: typo) desire to remedy this. These bots are what keep the discourse going.

If they can omit explicit porn results from searches in real time for people who aren't logged in, they absolutely can automatically detect and shadowban obvious malfeasance like this. The question you have to ask yourself is why they don't.

It is obvious from these graphs than an overwhelming percentage of political discourse on Twitter is from bots. Just eyeballing it, it seems to be at least 70-90% of inbound mentions are from bots.

These bots are obvious enough that we should wonder what is motivating Twitter.

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