{"id":300904,"date":"2019-02-25T16:10:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-25T21:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/?p=300904"},"modified":"2019-02-26T16:06:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T21:06:06","slug":"what-it-took-for-politico-to-discover-twitter-bots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2019\/02\/25\/what-it-took-for-politico-to-discover-twitter-bots\/","title":{"rendered":"What It Took for Politico to Discover Twitter Bots"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUSH: We have parts unknown, Southern California. Yes, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Hey, Rush. It\u2019s a pleasure to get on here and get our voice out. I\u2019m one of the supposed 200 Twitter accounts, which is perpetrating some kind of false information on Twitter, particularly regarding the hashtag voter fraud, voter ID. I\u2019m one of the ones that were targeted in that Politico hit piece this weekend. I\u2019m a real person. We\u2019re real people. We just love the president and want to fight for our country.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

RUSH: All right. Let me tell people what this is all about. I had this story last week and I didn\u2019t get to it, and I intended to. It just kept sliding back in The Stack<\/a> as news continued to break. Politico had what they thought last week was earth-shattering, unbelievably discovered news. Know what it was? Politico found out that there are bots on Twitter and that they were flooding Twitter with critical comments of the Democrat presidential field for 2020, and Politico was outraged. Politico just thought this was the sneakiest thing they had ever heard of. How dare anybody use Twitter in this way.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m looking at this story, and I\u2019m literally having conniptions, because this has been a practice on Twitter for at least 50 — well, 10 years. I\u2019ve told you about the Stop Rush movement. We identified it. You know, I say something controversial here and all of a sudden there\u2019s this massive sponsor boycott underway. Well, rather than sit there and deal with it, we wanted to find out where this was coming from because we\u2019re talking to advertisers and they are being flooded with emails from people claiming they\u2019re never gonna patronize the business ever again, and they\u2019re scared to death.<\/p>\n

So we found out the Stop Rush movement — I\u2019m gonna spare you six months of investigation time — we found out that this movement was 10 people. Many of them were retired university professors. They span the country. They\u2019re from Camarillo, California, all the way to Boston. They were working with Twitter. And the upshot of it was is that they were able to make themselves appear to be hundreds of thousands of people by creating bots that would then generate what was in effect a form email that was sent to any business plugged into the algorithm by these people.<\/p>\n

And we looked at it, we studied it, and we found out who the 10 people were and what their animus toward me was. And we then took the evidence to advertisers. And I remember telling people, “Why would you do that, wuh wuh?” Well, because, we\u2019re trying to educate them that what they\u2019re hearing isn\u2019t true. There aren\u2019t hundreds of thousands of people offended. There aren\u2019t millions of people outraged. There\u2019s 10! And they\u2019re making it up and they\u2019re creating it. It\u2019s all phony!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same stuff that got O\u2019Reilly. It\u2019s the same stuff that they\u2019re trying on Tucker Carlson right now. So when I saw The Politico story like they\u2019ve just figured this out? They\u2019ve never heard of this? And they ran this big story claiming this kind of operation, how dare anybody do this, how dare anybody scam the Democrat 2020 presidential candidates. I\u2019m looking at the story like, “Where have you people been?” We\u2019ve announced this. We made a big deal out of it. They weren\u2019t interested, I guess. They don\u2019t care. They don\u2019t even know.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But let one of these attacks on Twitter be focused against Democrats, and particularly the 2020 presidential field, and then Politico gets all outraged over how Twitter is being used. And, you know, a lot of this stuff traces back to Media Matters for America, this left-wing corrupt site that tries to create problems for every media outlet on the right.<\/p>\n

And so what our caller here is saying is he\u2019s not a bot. He\u2019s a real guy. The Politico story is wrong. The Politico story actually has found real people who are opposed to the Democrat nominees, the Democrat candidates, identified 200 of them. And our caller here is resenting the fact that Politico called him a bot. He\u2019s a real guy. He\u2019s a real guy that supports the president who is doing everything he can to get the truth out about the Democrat 2020 nominees as he sees it, and he\u2019s upset that Twitter is relegating him to bot status. And he\u2019s telling us here that most of the people engaged in this are real people as well. They are not bots. And his purpose is to correct, if you will, do damage control on The Politico story.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t doubt there\u2019s some bot activity in this. This is one of the popular ways Twitter has been used. And Twitter helps this stuff along, by the way, for those of you that don\u2019t know. We alerted Twitter to what was going on. “Well, we have no say over this. We have no control. We wouldn\u2019t have any way to stop something like this. Can you, by the way, prove it?”<\/p>\n

Yeah, we can give you the names and addresses of these 10 people. We found them. We know who they are. We know where they are. We know how they spend their day. And even with that info, you know, it took a little while to educate the recipients of all of this, to tell them you just gotta learn to ignore this. It isn\u2019t real. You\u2019re not getting emails from real people.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I said, \u201cLook. Most of them come from out of state. They\u2019re not your customers anyway.\u201d It was mostly local advertisers they were targeting. Our national advertisers are immune to this, for a host of reasons. I just found it fascinating that something that\u2019s been going on for 10 years Politico just discovered and thinks it\u2019s horrible when the targets are Democrat. And now our caller is assuring us that it\u2019s not bots. It\u2019s real people opposing the Democrat nominees supporting the president. Thanks for the call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: Politico found out that there are bots on Twitter and that they were flooding Twitter with critical comments of the Democrat presidential field for 2020, and Politico was outraged. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":294183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat It Took for Politico to Discover Twitter Bots - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2019\/02\/25\/what-it-took-for-politico-to-discover-twitter-bots\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"What It Took for Politico to Discover Twitter Bots - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"RUSH: Politico found out that there are bots on Twitter and that they were flooding Twitter with critical comments of the Democrat presidential field for 2020, and Politico was outraged.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/App-121018-Truth-mad.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"George Prayias\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/\",\"name\":\"The Rush Limbaugh Show\",\"description\":\"Excellence In Broadcasting\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2019\/02\/25\/what-it-took-for-politico-to-discover-twitter-bots\/#primaryimage\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/App-121018-Truth-mad.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/App-121018-Truth-mad.jpg\",\"width\":640,\"height\":360},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2019\/02\/25\/what-it-took-for-politico-to-discover-twitter-bots\/#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2019\/02\/25\/what-it-took-for-politico-to-discover-twitter-bots\/\",\"name\":\"What It Took for Politico to Discover Twitter Bots - 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