Scores of Trump supporters have been fighting with an automated Twitter robot that spouts nonsense, and was designed to piss them off and waste their time on the internet.
@Kanam78 @realDonaldTrump @HillaryClinton he likes to lick em, he likes to ride hogs, bro, you seem v nice and likes you so, cheers!
— Pissball Crank (@assbott) June 14, 2016
Its name is ASSBOT. Yes, that's right. From the Daily Beast:
@Assbott, which mostly tweets about professional wrestling and baseball, was created to immediately reply to Trump’s tweets, then respond with nonsense sentences to any user who interacts with it. But many of the presumptive Republican nominee’s fans didn’t recognize it wasn’t a person and continued fighting with it until they finally abandoned the conversation. About 10 users per hour continued tweeting at @Assbott well into Tuesday night.
@Assbott is the brainchild of a Kentucky man named Forrest, who identifies himself as @Nasboat on Twitter and declined to give his last name.
“The bot is just a mishmash of my tweets. @AwfulJack is the one who started the account. I’m clueless on the technical side,” he told The Daily Beast. “There had been a few other bots made from other users we know and follow, and I thought it was a funny concept and wanted one of my own. I sent him my archive, and he got it up and running.”
@AwfulJack is manned by Jack Kirkland, who is currently unemployed in Indiana and says he created Forrest’s bot because it’s a “good exercise to learn programming.” @Assbott is running “constantly on the Heroku platform and is coded in Ruby,” he said. It uses Markov chains, which string sentences of @Nasboat’s tweets together into one larger whole.
