Gawker: How We Fooled Donald Trump Into Retweeting Benito Mussolini
Last year, we set a trap for Trump. We came up with the idea for that Mussolini bot under the assumption that Trump would retweet just about anything, no matter how dubious or vile the source, as long as it sounded like praise for himself. (It helps that that a number of Mussolinis quotes sound plausibly like lines from Trumps myriad books.) The account, @ilduce2016, was created by Gawker senior writer Ashley Feinberg and Gawker Media Editorial Labs director Adam Pash. It has tweeted solely at Donald Trump, multiple times a day, since December 2015.
Our Fascist bot was anything but subtle. It was, after all, directly named after Mussolini. The New York Times today swiftly recognized that it was a parody account. At the time of the accounts creation, Gawker Media Executive Editor John Cook expressed some concern that the joke behind the account was far too obvious, and wouldnt trick anyone but a complete idiot.
http://gawker.com/how-we-fooled-donald-trump-into-retweeting-benito-musso-1761795039