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Botany

(70,476 posts)
Tue Mar 1, 2016, 10:35 AM Mar 2016

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 Mussolini’s quotes sound plausibly like lines from Trump’s 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 account’s creation, Gawker Media Executive Editor John Cook expressed some concern that the joke behind the account was far too obvious, and wouldn’t trick anyone but a complete idiot.

http://gawker.com/how-we-fooled-donald-trump-into-retweeting-benito-musso-1761795039


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Gawker: How We Fooled Donald Trump Into Retweeting Benito Mussolini (Original Post) Botany Mar 2016 OP
Highly Larry Us! ghostsinthemachine Mar 2016 #1
Gawker is laughing at how stupid Trump is Gothmog Mar 2016 #2
@ilduce2016 Botany Mar 2016 #3
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