Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Did Russian Bots start the Anti-Gaming Moral panic after the Parkland Shooting?

I read an article online talking about how hashtags surrounding the Parkland School Shooting on twitter got amplified by Russian bots. They pretended to be liberals attacking the NRA and conservatives defending guns.  What does this have to do with video game violence? I was checking the same hashtags looking for posters attacking video games after the shooting the night before I read this article.  I saw a LOT of people attack video games, several hundred.  I became suspicious, because after the previous mass shooting that I covered (the Las Vegas Shooting) there was not nearly as many people targeting games on twitter.  So I always wondered if Russian bots were doing anti-gaming attacks as well...

I've touched upon the idea that a moral panic of this size was orchestrated by Russian bots before people but now, I think I have proof.  I saw some idiot posting video game bashing stuff that didn't quite make sense. I saw that he was trying to say video games violence is correlated to real life violence but could not quite make sense.... Well fastforward to tonight, and I notice the same poster posts THE SAME EXACT MESSAGE to someone else that he posted before, using the same hashtag as well..

Ok... Why the blue hell would someone post the exact same message twice?  Why would they do that. People don't act like that. They type what they feel... If he was really a person he would be saying a different sentence, but this guy said the same exact thing he said before... Here is a screenshot for proof...


Ok... I got that and I was lucky to be able to track this down... I think this guy is a bot. He says a badly written message when posting on twitter and it's filled with grammar problems like "Extremely More Violent" and whatever.... Why would you post the same message copy and paste like that? So I think this is proof that bots may have contributed to this moral panic at the very least..

I don't know if this guy is a Russian bot though... That is up for debate. All I know is that there have been tons of people bashing games on twitter since the shooting. And at least 1 other copy and pasted a message multiple times several days apart to try to get it out there multiple times.. Finding this other person is very hard for me to do so you just have to trust me on this...

IF this is true, this is bad... It possibly points at the GOP for trying to use their Russian Allies to try to "stir the pot" in favor of video game legislation. Right now very few people outside of the conservative world blame video games for shootings... But if they can make more people believe that BS than they might have a chance to pass any legislation they start after the shooting... I think I caught them in the act...

People who are looking for Russian bots should really look for the following searches on twitter to try to find people who do this kind of thing...

#Parkland Games
#Parklandstrong Games
#MarchForOurLives Games
#EndGunViolence Games
#GunControlNow Games

Keep looking through these searches and you will eventually find people posting the same messages over and over again... I think they are bots but I have no proof... If they are this will be a new thing for moral panics, bot started moral panics...  It's bad and I think something needs to be done. If you see people posting repeated messages that attack video games and use the hashtags listed above, report them to twitter. We need to fight this...

EDIT : I think I found another bot...

Proof is in this image:




EDIT : One more bot found... This one is trying to get media to attack games by tweeting to them...



Yet Another Bot....


This guy I found while doing my Moral Panic Post. Didn't recognize him as a bot till now...