DESMOG
CLEARING THE PR POLLUTION THAT CLOUDS CLIMATE SCIENCE
Are Climate Deniers and Front Groups Polluting Online Conversation With Denier-Bots?
By TJ Scolnick • Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - 13:11
There appears to be an increasingly sophisticated and planned effort by conservatives and polluter front groups to use “persona management” software to pollute social media outlets and website comment forums with auto-generated sockpuppet swarms designed to mislead and misrepresent real people.
Leaked emails from Aaron Barr, CEO of a federal subsidiary for HB Gary, disclose the latest efforts and technology used underhandedly for “ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise ‘real’ people to smear enemies and distort the truth.”
This phenomenon was [ not quite ] first reported by Happy Rockefeller over at Daily Kos.
Leaked emails from Aaron Barr, CEO of a federal subsidiary for HB Gary, disclose the latest efforts and technology used underhandedly for “ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise ‘real’ people to smear enemies and distort the truth.”
This phenomenon was [ not quite ] first reported by Happy Rockefeller over at Daily Kos.
Programmer Develops Twitter Bot to Troll Climate Change Deniers
Preaching the climate change gospel can be tough work, especially on Twitter. Software developer Nigel Leck got tired rehashing the same 140-character arguments against climate change deniers, so he programmed a bot that does the work for him. With citations!
Leck's bot, @AI_AGW, doesn't just respond to arguments directed at Leck himself, it goes out and picks fights. Every five minutes it trawls Twitter for terms and phrases that commonly crop up in Tweets that refute human-caused climate change. It then searches its database of hundreds to find a counter-argument best suited for that tweet—usually a quick statement and a link to a scientific source.
As can be the case with these sorts of things, many of the deniers don't know they've been targeted by a robot and engage AI_AGW in debate. The bot will continue to fire back canned responses that best fit the interlocutor's line of debate—Leck says this goes on for days, in some cases—and the bot's been outfitted with a number of responses on the topic of religion, where the arguments unsurprisingly often end up.
