Rigged BallerAlert Polls, Twitter Trolls and Trump: How Trump’s Twitter Bots Took Over the Internet

If you haven’t noticed, Twitter has made a lot of changes over the years. According to reports, prior to a few months ago, replies on mobile appeared in chronological order. As a result, tech savvy users created computer scripts, set to auto-reply to tweets, in an effort to be seen by the person they were trying to reply to. In this case, they were created to grab the attention of Donald Trump and his trolls.  However, the company quietly made a change that would make it easier to find popular conversations with reply counts and organized conversations.

This means, when someone replied to a tweet, instead of their response getting lost in a sea of replies, it remained at the top, depending on the popularity of the tweet. So, if a celebrity responded to one of Trump’s many outrageous tweets, their response would become the most popular as the auto-reply bots continued to respond and troll.

But, fortunately for Donald Trump and his Twitter trolls, the change didn’t roll out until November 2016, just in time for the election. Throughout the Donald’s campaign, Twitter became overrun with Trump bots and fake supporters. According to Mashable, the fake “bot” accounts were created to look like real people, but were actually mass produced and ran on software programs.

While, it is still unclear who’s behind the bots, researchers believe they may have been created by a few tech-savvy voters, or political action committees in support of Trump, reports state. About 80 percent of Trump’s traffic on the popular social media platform was preserved by bots. Throughout the campaign, Baller Alert generated political polls that almost always resulted in wins for Trump, because of the bots. However, the campaign has denied being involved in any way with the bots.

But, if you haven’t noticed, most of the bots have since disappeared, partly because creating automated spam bots violates Twitter’s terms of service, but also probably because the campaign has ended.