And it's also hilarious!
You know that incredible frustration you feel when you are engaged in an online exchange with a Trump supporter who doesn't seem to understand facts? You know the ones — the Trump stenographers that spit out lines like “Crooked Hillary wants to take our guns” and “They are pouring across our borders and we don’t know who they are!”? How about that exasperation of a massive timewaste when engaged in a back-and-forth with a poster who uses insults and non-sequitors in response to your arguments?
Well, here’s a tool that was designed to engage Trumpeters in the same useless snipe hunts — and it operates on its own. It’s a Twitter Bot that has been trolling Trump supporters, and the results are schadenfreuderific!
The Daily Beast reports that scores of Trump supporters spent Tuesday afternoon fighting with an automated Twitter robot that spouts nonsense.
@Assbott, which mostly tweets about professional wrestling and baseball, was created to immediately reply to Trump’s tweets, then respond with nonsense sentences to any user who interacts with it. But many of the presumptive Republican nominee’s fans didn’t recognize it wasn’t a person and continued fighting with it until they finally abandoned the conversation. About 10 users per hour continued tweeting at @Assbott well into Tuesday night.
For instance, in response to a Trump user who tweeted, “Why when he has way more likes and retweets than @HillaryClinton? Huge amount of likes in comparison! Ha!” @Assbott responded “He likes to lick em, he likes to ride hogs, bro, you seem v nice.”
The beauty part is that @Assbott is automated, so the entire world sees its reply first, before anyone else’s. So when Trump tweeted his “thanks” to the LGBT community yesterday, @Assbot responded instantly. Trump’s fans became engaged in a war of tweets that they could not win.
When Daily Beast asked his inventor, Forrest (who does not give his last name) whether he was surprised that his virtual son could fool so many people, his reply was perfect:
“Not really, because I’ve learned never to underestimate the gullibility or lack of awareness of people online, especially on Twitter,” he said. “Plus, the bot tends to get pretty inflammatory and makes no sense, which I think clearly speaks to the kind of person who supports Trump.”
Hopefully, Forrest’s success will inspire the creation of even more Trumpian-baiting Twitter Bots. May a thousand @Assbotts bloom!