Fighting Trump Fans On Twitter? There's A Bot For That

The 2016 presidential election for the United States has already been weird, dirty, and unsettling, as any form of major or minor media will be happy to inform you of. Now, a chatbot posing as a Donald Trump fan (or foe?) has only added fuel to the fanatical fire…

Yell all you want at the AI Trump supporter...
like the hair of the Don, it is ultimately unflappable.
(Image courtesy play.google.com.)

Perhaps we were too quick to remember the debacle of “Tay”, Microsoft’s ill-fated teenage-girl AI who, when fed advice, verbiage, and general knowledge from the internet, became a racist, conspiratorial bigot within 24 hours. This bot operates on a similar principle, but under the assumption that people would simply think its exhortations were those of a supporter of (or possibly just agent provocateur affiliated with) the presidential candidate Donald Trump.

According to The Daily Beast, the Twitter handle @Assbott is actually not a human being at all, no matter how hard you’ve tried to argue with it. In fact, it is a bot that is comprised of randomly-combined elements from creator @Nasboat‘s previous tweets.

You get the idea.
(Image courtesy dankmeme.net.)

“The bot is just a mishmash of my tweets. @AwfulJack is the one who started the account. I’m clueless on the technical side,” @Nasboat explained. “There had been a few other bots made from other users we know and follow, and I thought it was a funny concept and wanted one of my own. I sent him my archive, and he got it up and running.”

Using the coding technique of Markov chains, @Nasboat’s tweets are chopped up and reassembled as responses to Trump tweets in one weird, wonderful new “thought”, like, “He likes to lick em, he likes to ride hogs, bro, you seem v nice.” That was the automatic reply to one fellow Trump supporter’s staunch declaration that Trump should not delete his Twitter account, as @Assbott had demanded.

@Assbott actually just always demands that Trump delete his account, a tweet triggered to automatically post itself each time Trump makes any statement on Twitter, at all.

That "Mr. President" zinger is solid...but painful to ponder in real-life.
(Image courtesy thedailybeast.com.)

Does @Assbott or his human father @Nasboat worry that this social experiment is promoting a wrongfully random reality, and that it's surprising to find so many humans banging their heads against what is essentially a computer terminal?

“Not really, because I’ve learned never to underestimate the gullibility or lack of awareness of people online, especially on Twitter,” @Nasboat said. “Plus, the bot tends to get pretty inflammatory and makes no sense, which I think clearly speaks to the kind of person who supports Trump.”

Well, @Nasboat might be right about that.
It takes a special kind of mindlessness...
(Image courtesy cloudpro.co.uk.)