Member-only story
Anti-trans bots
In the bad old days of anti-trans media discourse one had to get an article past editors, publishers, and a sceptical audience in order to find acceptance. Printing was a relatively slow process, with books being published in the thousands and newspapers being chip wrappers the next day. Even in the early days of internet 1.0 it was still word of mouth, a slow process whereby you had to know someone who was part of the in crowd, otherwise it was a stroke of search luck you might stumble across the hate. Social media changed all that, specifically the ability to spam many accounts through which you could easily and readily spread your hate, to the point where you could shape the whole conversation through your sock puppets. Bots are fairly easy to spot if you know what you are looking for, but the reality is that it is tiring and tedious filtering them out in your comments section. Spam takes a few clicks, the clean-up takes hours.
For any trans person on any social media platform this has become the norm. Over the last year I have noticed a significant uptick in the amount of spam accounts repeating and reposting the same anti-trans agenda. Often they have low follower/following numbers with a huge amount of retweets of the same sort of material. Their sole purpose is to inflate the message of the original poster, giving that poster an inflated weight in the algorithm so that any actual human user will stumble…
