In an already unconventional presidential election in which at least one candidate was accused of being the Zodiac Killer and in which a mere sniffle from Clinton can spawn a week’s worth of conspiracy theories, the platform has played a major role in shaping the 24-hour news cycle.Įnergized by Trump’s crude Twitter persona, the most reactionary members of his base have banded together to form loosely coordinated networks of automated bots, aggressive trolls, and “cyborgs” like Neil, whose accounts post a combination of automated content and human contributions. That Bernard found himself lured into Twitter’s vast community of anonymous Trump supporters is understandable. “So I started looking into Neil and trying to figure out who he was,” he said. Even though Bernard thought that the content Turner and his friends tweeted was often “racist, anti-Semitic, or misogynistic,” he was impressed by their craft. (Twitter’s mobile app organizes reply tweets chronologically, while the desktop version often reorders replies based on a number of factors, including user verification.) In other words, whoever was behind Turner’s account had enough technological wherewithal to game the platform so that his pro-Trump or anti-Hillary messages would be first. “And I was like, ‘What the hell, there’s no way that this person is getting multimedia content as a first reply, day in and day out.’”īernard, a sardonic 26-year-old self-taught coder and app maker, began to examine the metadata of Turner’s tweets (and the metadata of tweets from others in Turner’s cohort, including Jason Bergkamp and the recently suspended He discovered that they ran a script typically used by Twitter bots that allowed them to reply within seconds to beat out millions of other users and be the prized first reply to both presidential candidates’ tweets on the platform’s mobile app. “I kept seeing him pop up continuously,” Bernard told me when I recently spoke to him at his apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. But most notably, he was often the first to reply to tweets from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton - a historically coveted, high-exposure spot in online social networks and comments sections. The self-proclaimed warrior against #PoliticalCorrectness and #WhiteGenocide claimed to be from Mississippi, maintained a healthy 20-something-thousand followers and had been mentioned in publications like Fortune for his hateful, white supremacist commentary on Twitter. Bernard fell into an alt-right rabbit hole on Twitter, and ended up on the page for Twitter user Neil’s profile picture was a pouty mirror selfie of a skinny white kid, wearing what was clearly a Photoshopped “Make America Great Again” hat. It started with a kid named Neil who was always first.Ībout eight months ago, Nathan T.
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