Hey, Nice Try With the #DemandAVote Spambots #p2! Jacked and Busted! #tcot

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Why does the Left hate us so much? Mainly because we’re red-blooded, patriotic, God-fearing Americans, but also because we keep messing up their narratives. The Left (#p2) can’t stand the fact that conservatives (#tcot) are more active on Twitter, so that when they roll out a pre-fabricated Obama-approved #hashtag, it immediately (and hilariously) gets hijacked by us. Just for fun.

OK, so to push their gun-control agenda in Congress, Team Obama started the #DemandAVote hashtag, encouraging the Left to re-Tweet Obama’s message (i.e., demanding that Congress vote on the Democrats’ unconstitutional gun-control legislation).

That hashtag was instantly jacked by #tcot, but then @DefendWallSt discovered that many of the messages in favor of the Obama agenda were from spambots — phony sockpuppet accounts, usually with a blank “egg” avatar, evidently created by some Democrat P.R. operation to give the illusion that this message was more popular than it actually is. In a phrase, Twitter “Astroturf.”

 

So, not only did #tcot jack the hashtag, they busted the bots, and exposed the phoniness of the #p2 “grassroots” effort.

 

40 comments

  3. conservatives are more active on twitter?

    hardly. OfA — and legions acting at its direction — kicked the behinds of the entire right of center in 2012.

    we can’t be complacent about this.

  8. They’re not tech-savvy so much as able to steal key precincts through voter fraud. If we could shut that down the way we shut down their faux grassroots activism on Twiiter, then they might not get away with it. But, as it is, the GOP isn’t interested in proving rampant voter fraud.

    As proof of my assertion, look at Cuyahoga county Ohio’s returns in 2008 and 2012. It’s pretty apparent which precincts are the problem…

  11. I had that immediate reaction too. Then I re-read the post and decided he meant “more active than in the past.” Not more active than the Left.

    How could we be? We have jobs. (Not government jobs.)

  12. Their use of bots is not really spamming … it’s practice for the method of voting they intend to utilize (and prefer) once they’ve forced the country to switch over to electronic voting mechanisms.

  13. That’s a meme which is not well supported by the overall outcome. It only gets support when discussions of the GOTV software Romney’s team used are under way. However, those GOTV discussions rely overmuch on the notion of “precinct captains” who supposedly exist in all precincts (which they patently do not), and who have this mystical power of making sure all eligible voters in their precincts get off their duffs and come to the polling place to vote (which again, they do not). Wherever these masterminds of the polling place may be, they certainly don’t exist in high enough numbers to throw a national election one way or the other.

    This mythos surrounding “social media” is largely the sort of cloud-minded thinking that goes on among reporters and non-tech-savvy volunteers. No one ever seems to stop and ask how anyone seems to know that social media really is different from good, old-fashioned “communication.” Or if it really is changing anyone’s minds.

    About the only “new” aspect of social media that was not there in the days of email, or letter-writing campaigns, or word-of-mouth, is that one can garner statistics about trends much faster. But there was no magic “tweet” from team Obama that got another hundred-thousand voters to show up, nor was there a FaceBook/Twitter connection that caused long-lines to occur.

    The tried and true notion of running a great campaign, by the right man (or woman) for the job, coupled with using all the tools one can, just to cover all the bases, and in the process avoiding any disastrous gaffes, is still the way to win an election. If reporters want to stay bamboozled by buzzwords like “social media,” I say let them.

  15. It was just a small number of tech geniuses who ran the successful Obama re-election machine. The intellectual “leaders” are mostly idiots, as evidenced by their inability to advance a coherent argument for any of their positions, instead resorting to ad hominem, snark, and bogus grass roots campaigns.

  16. Your interpretation is interesting. But I think it’s not factually correct either; conservative activism online seems way down since November.

    Conservatives entered a deep post-election funk, and sat on the sidelines as Boehner and McConnell gave away the candy store, so to speak.

    On the 2nd Amendment, I see real passion. But so far, nothing has shocked the patient back to sinus rhythm.

  28. Some GOP are interested, but if they dare to do anything, the Holder justice hits them with a discrimination suit for “voter suppression”, with the full resources of the fed gov behind them. It takes a lot of committment and resources to buck that. I also expect thye county you cite is dem controlled, so they will get no help at al from local officials.

  29. You have a point that the role of social media was exagerated. But Obama was hardly the right man for the job, and he didn’t have that great of a message either. He won because:
    1. A partisan MSM hid Obamas gaffes and magnified Romneys.
    2. Obama had a huge turnout machine, with lots of local volunteers, combined with some vote fraud, essentially similar to old time big city mayors. They turned out otherwise apathetic and uninformed voters in large numbers.
    3. Many of the libertarian Paulist voters decided to sit it out rather than voting for Romney.

  30. Correct on all three points. I’m sick of party types downplaying all of those reasons. Especially when they claim, absent any data, that Conservatives stayed home. They didn’t.

    And I have no problem with Libertarians who voted for a Libertarian candidate. But lower-case ‘l’ libertarians who are registered Republican should be ashamed if they stayed home. A) They helped cement Obamacare in place by not voting for the useless Romney, and B) They didn’t support a Libertarian candidate, which means they missed a huge opportunity.

  31. I am a libertarian conservative myself and agree with you. As a libertarian, either voting for Gary Johnson, or voting for Romney, is reasonable, but either staying home, or voting for Obama is not.

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