It's NEVER a Coincidence with the Left

I don't pretend to understand Twitter all that well, but I'm smelling some corruption in their hallowed halls.

Each morning when I post this column, I send out about 25 tweet messages to various public figures in politics and the media, with a short descriptive phrase for the topic and a link to the essay.  Often links to my postings have gotten picked up by various media and online newspapers as a result.  Then I send a public Tweet, same descriptive phrase and the same link.  To that public Tweet, I add a few "hashtags" so it will get read by people who are searching for specific, popular hashtags.

That pretty much exhausts my knowledge and understanding of Twitter.

The 25 messages daily are made a pain by Twitter, because after about 12-15 of the same message it forces me to change the phrase, lest I be thought to be "spamming" -- even though I have sent 25 messages to the same people for over a year, every weekday.  And there is no Twitter support line, so that's a daily pain.

The hashtags have generally been the more popular candidates' names on the Republican side, but over time they have evolved.  For example, now there's only one candidate left.  So I'll use, among others, #trumptrain and #trump2016, given that I'd like to be read by any searching Trump supporters, where I used to add #cruz2016 and #rubio2016 and that sort of thing.  OK, you get it.

Lately, though, with only one candidate, I've tried to go with the tide.  So I started adding two popular ones, #neverhillary and #hillaryforprison2016.  You have to love that second one.

Now, I'm sure you know if you do use Twitter that, as soon as you start typing your Tweet, and hit the # sign to start typing a hashtag, Twitter senses that's what you are doing.  It starts to suggest popular hashtags in a brief pull-down type list, so that you can just click on a choice instead of all the keystrokes.  Popular, as in "used a lot."

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Hashtagland.  People are Tweeting all over the place with #neverhillary hashtags, right?  It's a very popular one.  So I was surprised on Tuesday when I started typing "#neverhillary" and the previously-suggested #neverhillary hashtag no longer appeared in the list.  No problem, I thought; I'll just type it out.  And I did.

Then on Wednesday, I thought I'd slowly type the letters and see what came up.  Sure enough, after I got as far as "#neverh" and the suggestions came up, I was startled to see that there was indeed a suggestion, but it was the oddly-spelled "#neverhilliary", with the extra "i", not "#neverhillary."

That makes no sense whatsoever.  We are supposed to believe that (A) not enough people are sending tweets with the correct "#neverhillary" hashtag for it to be a popular suggestion; but (B) people are misspelling Hillary's name in the hashtag so frequently that it does show up in the list, and they're doing so in far greater numbers than those who spell it correctly.  Seriously.

Think about it.  You want to do that #neverhillary hashtag with your Tweet, and as soon as it suggests the very similar-looking misspelled version, you click it and probably don't notice it's the wrong one.  People then searching for, or counting, Tweets with the correct #neverhillary hashtag get far fewer numbers than they would have otherwise, and the Clintonistas can say that it is not as popular a message.

Yeah, I don't think it was an accident either.  We are faced with Facebook blatantly selecting news stories to choose stories from leftist news entities and not those from Fox, CNS, Newsmax, Breitbart, The Blaze and the like.  That wasn't an accident, either.  Neither is this.

I now wonder if anyone at all is seeing this and making a stink with Twitter.  I'm not exactly on a first-name basis with anyone over there; I can't even get a response when I try to get some kind of tech support from them, so I don't have to retype my last ten Tweets each morning.  But surely someone sees this.

Twitter, you are carefully and intentionally manipulating data in your system to deceive the populace and minimize the perceived size of the opposition to Hillary Clinton.  You should be ashamed.

But I suspect you're simply proud of what you see as a #jobwelldone.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.