Guns and Butter Twitter

The front page of the NYT is getting a lot of attention— but the terrifying thing is there is much more after the jump. pic.twitter.com/Qh6Pywp7cC

— Annie Linskey (@AnnieLinskey) May 24, 2020

In the largest protest in American history, somewhere between 6 and 11 million people turned out in 2003 to protest the Iraq war.

Why didn't anybody really notice?

In the '60's, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. struggled to get attention for his protests in Birmingham and Selma.  Old news footage will show Dr. King on Sunday news shows like "Meet the Press" being treated, not as the plaster saint he is today, but as a troublesome black man who is out of order.  When the Black Panthers arose as a social justice group, they got more attention and stirred more concern, although though they were a numerical minority confined mostly to California, as opposed to Dr. King's efforts across several states in the South, culminating in a March on Washington in 1963.  The Black Panther party was formed 3 years later.  Why did it gain so much notoriety?  Guns.  They read the laws of California and realized they could legally openly carry guns.  Armed black men was a frightening image, even if what they did was mostly help people and promote social justice.  It's the guns everyone remembers.  Dr. King protested the Vietnam War; he was vilifed for it.  To this day more people remember his speech in 1963 more than his sermon at Riverside Church in 1967.

And the Black Panthers are remembered for their guns.

We wouldn't remember the protests at Kent State if it wasn't for the guns.  And today, we notice the "liberate" and "open up" protestors, because they carry guns.

Look at that page from the New York times.  In newsprint, it lists perhaps 1000 names.  Can you imagine the people at any "open up" protest anywhere in the country, taking up that much newsprint just to list the names of attendees?  How many people stormed the Michigan State House, and stood in the public areas and yelled for hours?  100?  200?  It couldn't possibly have been 1000.  Why did we notice?  Guns.

Every protest at a state capitol demanding governors re-open states has gotten TV coverage because of guns.  Guns we are afraid of.  Guns we notice.  People?  Eh; people are cranks.  The handfuls of people at these protests:  who cares?  We ignored 11 million people in the streets across the country.  Somehow the anti-war protestors stopped the Vietnam War (Narrator:  They didn't.).  But 11 million, at once, had no affect at all.  Even the media barely noticed.  But they notice now.  Why?  Guns; guns and Twitter:

There's been a surge in bot activity in the past month in online discussions about reopening America from COVID-19 shutdowns, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said this week.

The researchers analyzed over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 and found that roughly half the accounts were likely bots.

They identified the bots by looking for accounts that tweeted more frequently than humanly possible or whose location appeared to rapidly switch among different countries.

It's unclear who's behind the surge in bot activity or whether they're originating from the US or abroad.

As parts of the US have lifted shutdown orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, there's been a fierce argument online about the risks and benefits of reopening. New research suggests that bots have been dominating that debate.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers analyzed over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 and related issues since January and found that roughly half the accounts — including 62% of the 1,000 most influential retweeters — appeared to be bots, they said in a report published this week.
That's a far higher level of bot activity than usual, even when it comes to contentious events — the level of bot involvement in discussions about things like US elections or natural disasters is typically 10% to 20%.

The researchers identified bots using artificial-intelligence systems that analyze accounts' frequency of tweets, number of followers, and apparent location.

"Tweeting more frequently than is humanly possible or appearing to be in one country and then another a few hours later is indicative of a bot," Kathleen Carley, a computer-science professor who led the research, said in a release.

"When we see a whole bunch of tweets at the same time or back to back, it's like they're timed," Carley added. "We also look for use of the same exact hashtag, or messaging that appears to be copied and pasted from one bot to the next."

The researchers said they found that among tweets about "reopening America," 66% came from accounts that were possibly humans using bot assistants to spread their tweets more widely, while 34% came from bots.

We like guns; or we're scared of guns.  We're scared of war, but we like war more than people who speak against war.  We really should consider why speech with guns is more important than speech without guns.  And why speech on "social media" or speech with guns is more the vox populi than any other method, especially when it clearly isn't.  We've got to get a lot better at this.