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Comment by proximitysauce | Hacker News Reader

That's a lot of narrative overlaid on the data. The author even says this about Democratic politician accounts:

> All of them had bot activity of some kind. Given enough time to collect the data, bot networks would eventually appear for all of them.

I think the analysis could be very interesting but they're injecting too much personal spin on the motivations of everyone involved. Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too?

I think it would be interesting to study bots and how they intersect with media and politics in a less biased manner.

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I found it was a good intro to the world of Twitter bots. I don’t use Twitter but like to read about its influence and how others are using it.

But yeah I did get the same tinge of condescension about the “sad” and “lonely” teenager Mike because he works at Taco Bell, doesn’t want to go into $100k worth of debt going to college and is following bots from campaigns she doesn’t agree with.

> He seemed lonely. Eager to please. His last video blog he announced he wasn’t going to college after all…

Like you said, what if he followed Bloomberg bots, would he be described as “sad” too.

However at the same I would have to concede that writing an unbiased article about political bots in this day and age is probably not gonna happen, either.

> Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too?

Which party do you think Yang is running for?

Anyway, the article was clearly describing as "sad" that the teenager is trying to build an online following but his "following" is just bots using him to look less like bots.

One of Yang's pitches is that he is pulling from the MAGA group. Just scroll down the subreddit [0] and you'll see tons of posts about MAGA/Republicans switching sides for Yang. If anything I'd __expect__ a real person to be more likely to be connected to both MAGA and Yang (compared to the average democratic voter). But that also makes it difficult to tell real people from bots, which is what this story is really about.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/

Obviously a dark horse Democratic candidate would claim MAGA support, that's a tactic to present as "electable".

Sure but in this case it’s his adherents who are claiming to be right leaning and former MAGA supporters.

It doesn’t look good to Democrats to see memes for Yang or back to Trump so I cannot be cynical here.

edit: Because it's a bad look with Democrats to have a lot of right leaning support I take the MAGA supporters at their word. Particularly because I'm a Yang supporter and became politically disengaged after supporting Bush in my first election cycle.

Just an FYI, a lot of people that voted Trump in 2016 were big Bernie supporters. I personally know quite a few people that made this switch. Is it a surprise that the same thing is happening again?

A lot of people who voted for Trump are Bernie supporters now. It isn't surprising that people who are anti-establishment would be for Bernie. I am objecting to the casual dismissal by loneappde. It is meaningful that a large part of the population, left and right leaning, is so anti-establishment and flippant dismissal will become dangerous in another cycle or two.

Unfortunately I think I'm being mis-read and unfortunately I am blind to why. ...it happens

The teenager following the bots isn't sad because he intersects with MAGA, he's said because he's a kid working at Taco Bell who hopes to build up an online fanbase, and unbeknownst to him, all his interactions and affirmations appear to come from bot accounts.

Regardless of why the author thinks they're sad, it's a mistake to project the mental and emotional state of someone based on some facets gleaned from checking out their social media profiles. It's actually kind of creepy to focus on this individual especially since they're a teenager and aren't given a chance to rebut.

I don't see much psychoanalysis involved. I see a description of someone with dubious goals who is getting played by bots into believing they're making progress.

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