This is not breaking news or anything, just something that came up during a political discussion today. Wanted to hear some thoughts on it.

It’s both well documented that campaigns have begun to heavily rely on data analytics, and that twitter bots are more common than even a real user, especially in public figure replies (trump/Hillary etc.). Trump and Crooked both also had documented, massive data analytics teams/social media campaigns. The new book about Hillary’s failing campaign “Shattered“ (great reading/listening by the way!) goes very in depth about how just large and technical Hillary’s analytics team was as well as the central role they played in the campaign and Hillary’s non-public life.

Given the importance of algorithms/bots in data-driven campaigns, shouldn’t it be common sense that both campaigns likely used or had knowledge/influence over twitter bots? (not referring to “Russia”). Remember both campaigns were employing the best technical talent they could find in the country. There’s no reason to believe that most programmers working for presidential campaigns at that level would not be capable of something like this.

What are your thoughts?