Meet one of the “cyborgs” spewing conservative vitriol on Twitter all day long
Much has been written about how Donald Trump was carried to victory in the arms of trolls, whose relentless #MAGA-ing and meme-ing were the dank incantations that finally conjured one Dark Shitlord to rule them all. But while you already knew most of those people were dead inside, perhaps you didn’t realize some of them were actual robots? Or in the case of the popular conservative accounts run by Daniel John Sobieski, the 68-year-old subject of this nightmarish profile in The Washington Post, a half-bot, half-human hybrid who’s one of Twitter’s growing numbers of “cyborgs.” Like RoboCop, Sobieski prowls a corporate-owned sci-fi dystopia, spouting a series of programmed prime directives (and, most likely, eating baby food he shits into a bag). But unlike RoboCop, there’s nothing fun about it.
Sobieski sounds a lot like any other cranky conservative retiree—“a prolific writer of letters to the editor” who also used to send complaints to the local TV stations in Chicago whenever they got too dang liberal. Technology only hastened and amplified that cycle of agitation. Sobieski got his start freelancing his outrage for conservative blogs, then he joined Twitter in 2009 under the name “gerfingerpoken” (a reference too dumb to aggregate here; go read it yourself if you want) so that he could share links to his writing.
Eventually, he figured out a way to splatter his viewpoints across social media without having to even feint toward thinking about them: He currently tweets more than 1,000 times per day by using an auto-scheduler, which pulls from a vast database of pre-written messages and sends them out, over and over again, in repetitive loops all day and night. As with Trump’s most vocal supporters, it doesn’t matter that some of these messages now seem woefully out of date; a meme about Hillary Clinton’s emails sent out today will still pick up retweets and replies from fellow human mimeographs. Collectively, the impressions Sobieski gets on his tweets number in the millions.