Posted on 09/23/2016 8:14:13 AM PDT by pabianice
Just before 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 13, the first Twitter post appeared, directing users to an obscure article about a remark Donald J. Trump had made last year that 50 percent of the country did not want to work.
Over the next 48 hours, 1,819 people, seemingly furious that the news media had paid more attention to Hillary Clinton’s assertion that half of Trump supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables,” lashed out at reporters and news outlets.
“Dear Media: If you don’t cover this, you’re covering for him, #Trump50percent,” wrote one Twitter user.
“@CNN @CNNPolitics have been in bed with #Trump for a year! They refuse to report #TrumpScandals #Trump50percent” wrote another.
By the end of the week, the hashtag #Trump50percent had appeared in Twitter timelines more than 30,000 times.
Other liberal Twitter users, some of them with more than a million followers, linked to the article and spread the same complaint the Clinton campaign had made: that a shameful false equivalence was causing the media to soft-pedal Mr. Trump’s many transgressions and overplay the few it could find on Mrs. Clinton.
At first glance, the Clintonian grass roots seemed to have organically sprouted in anger. But closer inspection yielded traces of Miracle-Gro that led to the sixth floor of a building in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan.
There, surrounded by start-up tech companies, “Star Wars” posters and flat-screen televisions fixed on cable news, Peter Daou sat with his team at a long wooden table last week, pushing the buttons that activate Mrs. Clinton’s outrage machine. Mr. Daou’s operation, called Shareblue, had published the article on Mr. Trump’s comment on its website and created the accompanying hashtag.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
NYTimes ? wow.
It's an arm of the Hillary campaign that is nothing but paid "astroturf" posters (that have been tracked down by their IP addresses to a large web company in India.) Correct the Record PAC has paid tens of millions to this outfit to flood message boards and comments sites with pro-Hillary, Anti-Trump propaganda. They are very active on twitter and facebook as well as the major news sites like politico and thehill.com. They are easy to pick out once you know what to look for, they all parrot the same daily talking points and have the same canned responses.
Anyone that thinks Hillary’s Twitter-bots are “grassroots” is seriously deluded.
Even thought this article finishes pretty much defending Hillary, I am surprised to see this from the NYT. It does show deep coordination between ‘journalists’ and the Clinton campaign. And of course, the manipulative words each uses to pretend that Hillary is being treated more roughly than Trump. Worth taking a look at, thanks. (although, I couldn’t find a way to read any NYT reader comments on the article, which I really wanted to see)
Of course Twitter hashtags start from liberal groups. It would be impossible for those hashtags to just start.
The political campaigns are finally catching up.
Russia has run an operation like this for years.
And, Microsoft and SCO ran one back when they were trying to slow the adoption of Linux with FUD. We had a couple of them on FreeRepublic, who were amazingly lame.
This mirrors my experience online that there’s a vast, organized, and likely paid army of astroturf trolls posting Hillary crap all over the Internet and a bunch of actual Trump supporters posting without direction or pay. On many sites, the overwhelming number of Hillary trolls are pretty much just posting to each other now, because the legitimate posters just gave up and left. I saw the same phenomenon when Hillary was running against Sanders in the primary.
I don’t think the Hillary trolls are really convincing anyone because much of what they post is obviously obtained from some alternate reality in which false equivalences are made of issues such as Trump’s private taxes vs. releases of Hillary’s government emails kept on an illegal private server.
It’s nice to see my theory confirmed. Interesting to see that the NY Slimes published this.
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