Here is an excellent example of a Twitter reply bot
This Twitter account has only 3 replies that it tweets randomly to Twitter conversations.
This is a bad example of a Twitter reply bot. Some are a lot more sophisticated.
Author Archive: graham
Memes and slogans – again
I saw two examples of argument by meme so far today on Facebook, one from each end of the political spectrum.
Folks, don’t do this. You have your own voice. Your voice is uniquely yours. A meme is somebody else’s voice. And quite often, memes are flat out wrong, fallacious and often childish.
Use your own voice.
Outside Harrods – October 25th 2017
This Twitter image shows George Papadopoulos, one of the three people indicted by the Special Prosecutor, standing outside Harrods in London on 25th October 2017. This was last week, when he, according to information released this week, had already agreed to co-operate with the Special Prosecutor.
The Embassy of Ecuador, where Julian Assange is living in hiding, is 2 minutes walk around the corner and down the road.
#business pic.twitter.com/NvlHAeUKdV
— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) October 25, 2017
If Papadopoulos was wearing a recording device, we might yet find out exactly who he met with in London.
The Mark Geragos 10 day claim over Kaepernick
When I wrote the essay on the Mark Geragos claim that Colin Kaepernick would be signed within 10 days, I was discounting (for now) the possibility that the weight of circumstantial evidence would become too great for the arbitrator to dismiss it.
I may be about to revise that viewpoint. The NFL is constantly adding to the pile of circumstantial evidence.
Two attempted quarterback trades occurred at the trade deadline. The 49ers succeeded in acquiring Jimmy Garroppolo from the Patriots. Then an apparent fiasco unfolded right at the trading deadline, with the Cleveland Browns attempting to acquire A.J. McCarron from the Bengals for draft picks, only to have the trade fail to complete, seemingly due to internal SNAFUs in the Browns organization.
From the viewpoint of Kaepernick’s legal team, here are two more clear examples of teams with a quarterback performance issue desperately trying to find another starting quarterback without even asking Colin Kaepernick if he was interested.
The situation will now only get worse for the NFL. With the trade deadline now having passed, if an NFL team loses its starting quarterback to injury, or suddenly becomes desperate for a new option at quarterback, they cannot now trade for a quarterback from another team. They have to sign a free agent, or (far less likely) win a waiver claim contest for a quarterback suddenly released from a team. (That latter scenario is extremely unlikely, since most NFL teams only have 2 quarterbacks on their rosters, and they would not release a quarterback in the season since it would leave them with no backup quarterback in a game).
Colin Kaepernick is a free agent.
So…from this point onwards in the season, any team that signs a free agent quarterback not named Colin Kaepernick is simply adding to the pile of circumstantial evidence that Kaepernick’s legal team will point to as evidence of collusion.
Another underlying challenge in all of this is that Roger Goodell is relatively powerless to influence NFL team behavior. He works for the teams, not the other way around, and since NFL teams are officially forbidden from colluding on any issue other than broadcasting rights, Goodell is now unable to say anything of substance on the Colin Kaepernick issue, especially now it is the subject of a lawsuit, since anything that he does say can be parsed though a viewpoint that asks the question “so were the teams colluding?”. This, by the way, is also why Goodell spoke very carefully about the anthem protests. He cannot be seen to be suggesting to the teams, collectively, what they can or cannot do, and in the case of the anthem issue, his hands are also tied by the CBA, which does not specify any requirements on player behavior for the National Anthem.
Colin Kaepernick vs. the NFL – lawyer makes a big claim
Mark Geragos, the lead lawyer for Colin Kaepernick in his collusion grievance against the NFL, made a bold claim today, during an appearance on the Adam Carolla Show:
“I think within the next 10 days somebody will sign him,” he said. “I think somebody’s gonna sign him. I think the NFL has to come to their senses, and realize every day that goes by just proves the collusion case even more.”
Now…that is a pretty bold and specific claim. Several possible motives for the claim spring to mind:
1. Geragos is trolling or bullshitting
2. Geragos believes that discovery will uncover evidence of collusion against Kaepernick
3. Geragos believes that discovery will likely uncover other evidence of collaboration or collusion between teams and owners that may put the NFL in a difficult legal position
(1) still seems likely. Absent a clear communication between two teams along the lines of “remember don’t sign Kaepernick”, it is still likely that insufficient direct evidence of collusion exists. Whether Geragos thinks that the circumstantial evidence of collusive intent (via the intemperate public and leaked comments of the POTUS and several NFL team owners) is strong enough is open to debate. However, absent a “smoking gun”, the case may well become a trial in the court of public opinion. (there may well, of course, be other private comments from owners that will turn up in discovery that could be damaging. We just don’t know that those might be).
(2) and (3) would add up to multiple problems for the NFL. If (2) is proved, they would would be forced to pay Kaepernick a large pile of money for effectively running him out of the NFL – that sum could easily be more than $50m. They would end up with an enormous PR black eye.
However, (3) represents the more serious risk for the NFL owners. The NFL currently enjoys a limited exemption from anti-trust legislation via the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. This was passed specifically to allow the NFL teams to collaborate on negotiating broadcasting deals. That is the full scope of the exemption. The NFL teams are not allowed to collaborate on any other commercial matters, or they risk being found guilty of violations of anti-trust law.
This means that evidence of collusion on any matter other than broadcasting rights carries two risks for the NFL. Firstly, it may make it easy for the arbitrator to rule against the NFL in Colin Kaepernick’s grievance hearing. However, secondly, and potentially much more dangerously, it may open the NFL to being charged with broader violations of anti-trust law. The TV broadcasting rights exemption has already come under fire on multiple occasions in the past, with threats being made to repeal the 1961 Act. A clear-cut finding of collusion on any subject could result in the entire act being nuked, leaving the NFL unable to operate as a group in negotiating distribution rights for broadasts of games.
Now…this is where it could get interesting…if the Sports Broadcasting Act was repealed, then theoretically any NFL team could do its own deal for broadcasting rights. They could sign a deal with a network or they could set up their own broadcasting operation with live streaming of games and other exclusive or non-exclusive content. For teams in big media markets (like Dallas, Washington, Seattle, New York etc.) this could actually be more lucrative than the current mechanism where all broadcasting revenues are pooled then distributed equally to all 32 teams. In other words, some of the new-wave aggressive owners like Jerry Jones and Daniel Snyder might not care about the loss of the anti-trust exemption, since they may have done the math and concluded that they can make more money selling their broadcast rights direct to the public.
However, any evidence of any sort of collusion will be embarrassing to the NFL, and will increase the chances of a ruling against them on the Kaepernick issue. More seriously, it opens the entire NFL up to complaints of anti-trust violations, which could be very expensive, not for fines, but for other remedies that a court might order. Courts have a LOT of power when punishing violations of anti-trust law.
The convoluted history of Digital Rights Management
Digital Rights Management (DRM) was a concept that evolved in the mid to late 1980s as a means of securing artifact copyright in the digital era.
I was exposed to early attempts at DRM earlier than this, as PC software vendors struggled to prevent unlicensed copying of software programs. The attempts, involving the spending of increasingly larger amounts of money on increasingly complex copy-protection schemes, were largely unsuccessful. Nerds and hackers love nothing better than a large business stating confidently “our copy protection scheme is unbreakable”. That’s like waving a red flag in front of an angry bull, or red meat in front of a pride of lions. Once the hackers had done their jobs, the copy protection schemes were mostly circumvented, and the end of the attempts came when PC software prices fell to a point where the RoI for illegal copying became unfavorable.
This article explains the history of what is now known as DRM. It’s a long story.
Anatomy of an attempted coup in a US city
The city of Muscatine has seen churn all year as the city council attempted, via devious and illegal means, to depose the elected mayor. The court system has slapped down the Council, and an election is due in November where the mayor is running for office once more.
Anatomy of a bot conversion on Twitter
The Twitter account RightWingAngel was seemingly inactive for 3 years after 2013. Then, suddenly, on November 8th 2016, RightWingAngel came back online at a warp rate of tweeting. I wonder what happened then?
Also noteworthy: @RightWingAngel has no tweets between October 3, 2013 and November 8, 2016. I seem to recall an election that day. pic.twitter.com/FSnvmxGH3l
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) October 31, 2017
However, the really interesting information is the before and after for the tweet patterns from the account. here is the time-based analysis for 2013:
Note the patterns are what one would expect from a person living in the Continental USA.
Now here is the tweet timeline pattern from October 2017:
This is completely different, more widely and randomly distributed across the day. This is unlikely to be Tweet activity generated by a real person hammering on a keyboard.
The most likely explanation is that RightWingAngel has been converted to a Twitter account which is largely controlled as a bot. There may be human intervention occurring, but the overall pattern is that of a bot-controlled account.
The other interesting aspect of this account is pointed out here:
For a presumably American Trump supporter, @RightWingAngel sure likes UK spellings. Note "speciality", "centre", "defence", and "humour". pic.twitter.com/DumVVWmdI3
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) October 31, 2017
It is likely that the human feeding this bot account is not in fact a US resident or US citizen. The work looks like a person whose first or primary language is British English.
One final thing; the Profile picture for this account just screams “stock photo”.
Beware – Whataboutism
Whataboutism as a defense for bad behavior has become endemic on social media in the last few months. My own phrase for this is “but they did it too!”.
As a defense, it has no merit. You wouldn’t accept it from your own misbehaving child.
However, if you are a partisan supporter and Your Side is in trouble, oh yes, it is a great defense.
Right now, the deployment of whataboutism is being orchestrated on social media by a bot network supporting the Trump administration. Twitter user Conspirador Norteño, who is a data scientist, has been analyzing the conflation of the names “Manafort” and “Podesta” in tweetstorms that have appeared since the announcement that Paul Manafort has been indicted. The conflation is a campaign to point the finger of guilt back at the Democratic Party, for whom Tony Podesta operated as a lobbyist.
Volume since midnight for tweets containing both "Manafort" and "Podesta". I'm guessing we haven't seen the end of this one yet. pic.twitter.com/Py52xFfCUj
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) October 30, 2017
It’s Whataboutism, Twitter-style. Don’t get played.