'Democrats may not have been as divided as we were led to believe during the 2016 election season.
When it was revealed during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that Russian bots (computer algorithm controlled social media accounts) on Twitter had masqueraded as “Bernie Bros” during the 2015-2016 election cycle, it was not news to me — it was confirmation of my experience.
During the campaign season, I was vocal on Twitter about my support for Hillary Clinton. As a result, I became used to receiving sexualized and gendered abuse, and even rape and death threats, on a daily basis.
A great deal of the abuse came from so-called #MAGA accounts, the “Make America Great Again” hashtag by which Donald Trump supporters, and those pretending to be such, identified themselves. As more and more information came out about Trump’s ties to Russia, I began to suspect — correctly — that many of these accounts were not real people but rather were accounts with fake identities or bots.
Indeed, some estimates now say that as much as one-fifth of Twitter traffic was controlled by pro-Trump, anti-Clinton bots and troll accounts during the election. With these #MAGA account attacks, it was relatively easy to block them and move on — emotionally, at least, as the abuse they delivered was easy to deflect because “they” were not “people” with whom I believed I had values in common in the first place.
However, the rest of the abuse came from accounts purporting to be supporters of Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. And these were “people” with whom I believed I shared common values and policy interests. Almost all of the accounts presented as men — mostly young and white — and used sexist and misogynistic tones and words. I was called “mom” and “grandma” as epithets by these “young men.” I was called every vile sexualized name you can imagine. For some reason that I did not understand at the time, they liked to call me a “vagina.” (I now believe non-native English — i.e. Russian — speakers wrote the algorithms controlling these bots and perhaps imagined “vagina” to be the equivalent of the c-word when hurled at a woman.) Not being conversant in the mechanisms of Russian psychological warfare techniques at the time, it never occurred to me that, like the #MAGA bots, these “Bernie Bro” accounts were actually bots too.'>>>
http://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-bernie-bro-harassers-may-have-been-russian-bots/
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