3/23/19 thread about flak-bots

Here is the link to my March 23, 2019, Twitter thread (very brief) about trolls and bots on Twitter.

Following Manufacturing Consent's model, I call the trolls and bots "flak-bots."

The trolling I noted in this case was due to bots -- but some of these bots were definitely linked to Twitter profiles for actual human beings, who made actual human tweets -- who were attacking anybody on Twitter who tweeted positively about the then-new Jordan Peele movie Us.

I was taking note of this, because a number of things were starting to occur to me. I don't know if I ever expressed them clearly enough.

First of all, it definitely seemed to me -- and still seems, by the way -- that people on Twitter were being paid or otherwise incented to retweet things. It almost seemed to me at times, given the way people's Twitter accounts seemed to be on autopilot, that people were being paid to give over some level of control of their Twitter profile to some kind of bots that would retweet things onto their profiles. It seemed to me that somehow these profiles actively became flak campaigns against various groups of people -- such as people who tweeted positively about the film Us.

Again, at this time, I had about 900 followers. And I was seeing the same patterns of retweeting occur. Also, given Twitter's algorithm, these retweets were the things that kept on drifting up to the top of my timeline. So this bot-like retweeting activity, even on profiles I knew to be for actual human beings, was really amplified.

I started calling these Twitter profiles "half-bots." I mean, I knew some of these people. But the way their accounts were prodigiously retweeting, and uniformly retweeting certain things, I felt like their profile had to have been turned over to some kind of "bot" program. So the profiles were "half bot" and half human.

I would also watch as this started to happen to various profiles on Twitter. One day a person would tweet normal, human tweets. And then suddenly, and from there forward, the profile would do nothing but these prodigious, uniform retweets. It was like they suddenly became "half-bots." I called this process "Mr. Smithing," after Mr. Smith in The Matrix.

Second -- one of the people being torn to pieces -- simply for stating nothing more than that they thought Jordan Peele's new movie Us was good -- was a person I was paying particular attention to at the time, because the guy needed a lot of support. His son was dying of brain cancer (the son passed away in 2020). And the guy was on Twitter, not a lot, but every now and then, for emotional support.

Nevertheless, I noticed a lot of people simply tearing into him on Twitter -- not just about the movie Us, but about other things -- random things you wouldn't even think could make people so mad.

The guy, got frustrated, seeing so many people tear him to shreds for liking the movie, asked, "Why are you all being so mean to me? Not just about this movie, but about everything?"

And someone replied, "It's not the things we're worried about. It's just the fact that none of us like you. We're never going to like anything you say."

It then occurred to me -- wow. I mean, people say Twitter is a hateful place. But I never expected anyone to say, just right out there in public, "We are tweeting mean things to you because we don't like you, and that's all."

And, keep in mind, this was a father, on Twitter every now and then to blow off some steam and try and find some emotional support, because his son was literally dying of brain cancer.

These were the things I was seeing on Twitter that made me finally realize, I do not need a ton of followers. And I don't need to work hard to impress human beings in real life or on social media. Because in real life they'll ignore me. And on social media they'll either ignore or bully me. Sometimes they might simply even get bots to bully me by using their profile. And even if I was, like the guy I mentioned, a father with a kid dying of brain cancer, they'd still bully me relentlessly, if that's what they wanted to do.

This is part of the thought process that led to my thread the next day, where I let folks know I was finally going to start soft-blocking people -- i.e. blocking Twitter profiles, then immediately unblocking them, so that the connection between us was broken, so they weren't following me anymore, but they could still see my profile if they wanted to.

Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.

1/20/19 discussion about Twitter and being half-Chicano

Here is the link to my January 20, 2019, Twitter thread discussion about being half Chicano and half Irish.

I would like to note -- this thread was partly inspired by a Twitter reaction I'd had following my threads about the 2019 Women's March.

Some people -- it seems to me nowadays that they were likely trolls who targeted anybody on Twitter who'd had anything positive to say about the Women's March -- started making fun of me for being white. I let myself get drawn into their trolling, and I let myself get really upset. To cool myself down a bit, I wrote this thread.

However -- this is possibly the first thread, as you'll see, where I started to indicate that I was going to make some changes to the way I operated on Twitter. I noted that very few people reacted positively to me on Twitter, while a lot of people reacted hatefully. What I was coming to the conclusion about here was that it really wasn't worthwhile for me to have a lot of followers, since the only thing I seemed to get, even with a lot of followers, was hatred on my timeline.

Twitter's platform has twisted each of my threads through 2018 and 2019 out of chronological order. This thread is affected, but is still mostly coherent.

Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.