Pro-Gun Russian Bots Flood Twitter After Parkland Shooting (wired.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: In the wake of Wednesday's Parkland, Florida school shooting, which resulted in 17 deaths, troll and bot-tracking sites reported an immediate uptick in related tweets from political propaganda bots and Russia-linked Twitter accounts. Hamilton 68, a website created by Alliance for Securing Democracy, tracks Twitter activity from accounts it has identified as linked to Russian influence campaigns. On RoBhat Labs' Botcheck.me, a website created by two Berkeley students to track 1500 political propaganda bots, all of the top two-word phrases used in the last 24 hours -- excluding President Trump's name -- are related to the tragedy: School shooting, gun control, high school, Florida school. The top hashtags from the last 24 hours include Parkland, guncontrol, and guncontrolnow.

While RoBhat Labs tracks general political bots, Hamilton 68 focuses specifically on those linked to the Russian government. According to the group's data, the top link shared by Russia-linked accounts in the last 48 hours is a 2014 Politifact article that looks critically at a statistic cited by pro-gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. Twitter accounts tracked by the group have used the old link to try to debunk today's stats about the frequency of school shootings. Another top link shared by the network covers the "deranged" Instagram account of the shooter, showing images of him holding guns and knives, wearing army hats, and a screenshot of a Google search of the phrase "Allahu Akbar." Characterizing shooters as deranged lone wolves with potential terrorist connections is a popular strategy of pro-gun groups because of the implication that new gun laws could not have prevented their actions. Meanwhile, some accounts with large bot followings are already spreading misinformation about the shooter's ties to far-left group Antifa, even though the Associated Press reported that he was a member of a local white nationalist group. The Twitter account Education4Libs, which RoBhat Labs shows is one among the top accounts tweeted at by bots, is among the prominent disseminators of that idea.

Comments

Re:#NotABot

[ScentCone]

The right to bear arms for anyone in a state-sanctioned militia must not be infringed.

It seems unlikely that you're actually as ignorant as you're pretending to be. But you seem to think it's rhetorically important to pretend you're unfamiliar with the constitution, so, sure, let's play.

The phrasing of the 2nd Amendment means the OPPOSITE of what you're transparently pretending it means. The people who wrote the Bill of Rights had just freed themselves from living under a regime that disarmed individuals, arguing that the crown's soldiers were all the law enforcement anyone in the colonies would need. Which was nonsense, of course. But the founders were absolutely dead set against allowing their new government to, for example, take a farmer's personal weapons away, or allow a local governor or other figure to have a monopoly on the ownership of weapons. The founders were very uncomfortable about there even being a standing army of any kind, even at the local militia level. But the realized it was going to be necessary, and - knowing there would be people like you - used some of that precious space in the Bill of Rights to explicitly pre-empt exactly the sort of thing you'd like to do.

If they were to write the amendment in today's conversational language, it would go like this: "Because a standing professional military, even if just local in scope, looks like an inevitable necessity, nobody with government power should use that as an excuse to infringe on a citizen's right to personally keep and bear their own arms."

You know, just like the 1st Amendment says that nobody in government can prevent you from speaking, assembling, etc. The Bill of Rights doesn't establish some standard for your right to speak, or your right to defend yourself. It anticipates people like you with a totalitarian mindset looking to use government power to control others, and they identified some potential hot spots (speech, self defense, privacy, etc) that merited specific language in the country's charter.

Of course you know all of this, because you've also read the many letters, transcripts, and papers authored by the people who wrote the Bill of Rights, who come right out and explain to you that you have it exactly wrong, and they tell you why they said what they said. So quit with the theatrics, and just admit that you're hoping nobody will notice when you're trying to mislead on the subject because you don't have the energy to try to amend the constitution in your effort to return the monopoly on the keeping and bearing of arms back to the way the British crown liked it.

Liberals don't care about what guns you own

Ah, that explains why we keep hearing so many liberals shouting,"Who needs an AR-15? They should be banned!" Please, now you're just embarrassing yourself. The country is littered with laws - written and passed by liberal legislators and governors - that explicitly DO care. States like California and Maryland prohibit, for example, any handgun that they haven't expressly listed (by make and model) as being acceptable. They consider things like 11 rounds to be illegal, but 10 or 8 to be less so, and so bits of sheet metal bent into different sizes to hold the ammo are very much what liberals care about. Which, again, you know, and are trying to pretend you don't.

So what is your plan for reducing the violent deaths?

Enforce existing laws. It's too politically incorrect in liberal circles to call crazy people crazy, so liberals would rather allow crazy people to buy guns than be forced to act all judgey and hurt a crazy person's feelings. Because people who are documented as being crazy are immediately stopped during their federal background checks from buying guns. While on that subject: the NICS system blocks tens of thousands of people from making gun purchases every year. The very act of submitting their federal paperwork to attempt such a purchase IS A FELONY. And yet

Re:One question,

[markdavis]

>"For most of our history, reasonable gun regulations were enacted by states and municipalities across the United States. Only with the rise of radicalized NRA in the 1980s did this change..."

That statement is not really correct at all. The first sentence is mostly correct, depending on your view of what is "reasonable." The second sentence isn't- the NRA started to become more powerful BECAUSE more and more *unreasonable* gun regulations were being put forward, and more citizens joined, seeking protection of their Constitutional rights from further erosion. The NRA as a non-lobby is interested in ACTUAL gun safety (like training, handling, information), information and sports.

>"...in the 1980s did this change, and with it came the rash of school shootings and mass gun slaughter."

How ridiculously inaccurate and inflammatory. Gun violence has been DECREASING for decades. What has changed mostly is the emotional, hyper media coverage of such shootings, making it SEEM like it is the end of the world. When in reality, while unreasonable gun control laws have been taken down more and more, things have been getting better. And although overall gun violence is down, I believe that same hyper-sensationalist and slanted media coverage has absolutely encouraged more nut-cases to perform copy-cat mass shootings to get their day of "fame." So the cycle feeds on itself.

Re:Regulation.

[AmiMoJo]

It's clear that these school shootings are driven by crazies wanting to "copy-cat" other school shooting they're heard about

It's already been reported that this guy was trained by supremacists and appears to have been radicalized by them. The chief supremacist confirmed it.

Maybe he was more vulnerable to their brainwashing because of existing mental illness, but he's just the latest in a long line of radicalized young men to go on murder sprees.

Just like the young men that are radicalized by Islamists.