South Carolina’s most outspoken member of Congress is reportedly putting her techie background to good use.
Mace, a third-term House member with reported ambitions to run for governor, directs staffers to run countless bot accounts and fake social media profiles on her behalf — all with the aim of boosting Mace’s content and messaging, according to a new report from Wired Wednesday that cited several unnamed former staffers and a consultant who publicly ended his contract with the congresswoman.
Wired’s reporting echoed the claim made by Donehue, who told a court: “She programs her own bots. She sets up Twitter burner accounts. This is the kind of a thing she does. She sits all night on the couch and programs bots, because she’s very, very computer savvy. She controls her own voter database, she programs a lot of her own website, she programs Facebook bots and Instagram bots and Twitter bots. It’s what she does for fun.”
I always assumed a lot of them have been doing this for years.
Exactly. That’s the issue I keep trying to tell others about social media. It is insanely easy to run bot accounts with a very minimal amount of something like Python programming. And even if that’s not your cup of tea, you can just literally have a half dozen people very easily log in and out of six fold the number of actual humans accounts.
Like for six people, running 60 to 80 fake account manually is a piece of cake and if they’re really good and focused on task, that can easily be 150 to 200 accounts manually ran. Like running a bot army is incredibly easy for anyone.
This is why you have to take a lot of social media with a massive grain of salt. A lot of people are out there playing the algorithm, way more than I think people give credit for.
Yeah same. Right? I feel like at least people on here bailed because we noticed manipulation like this.
Still—it’s nice to get confirmation. It’s still worthwhile.
That’s true. It’s good to have it acknowledged.
I mean, I’m sure people are paying for this plenty. I think the story here is she is doing it herself (which is actually more fascinating).