Teenagers campaigning for Mike Gravel on Twitter

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/magazine/mike-gravel-teens-twitter-presidential-campaign.html

by ordiblah • 7 years ago

100 48 7 years ago

dluan• 7 years ago

“Everybody is just a larger child,” Williams said, finishing his chocolate-chip pancakes.

I love these kids. Every step of the way they've figured out little hacks to get to the next checkpoint. PG once said that he was always interested in hacking politics, and as someone who's amusedly been watching the Gravel teens, I have a feeling they'll go pretty far.

codesushi42• 7 years ago

PG once said that he was always interested in hacking politics, and as someone who's amusedly been watching the Gravel teens, I have a feeling they'll go pretty far.

Hacking politics has already been done, and more successfully. If you are interested in seeing someone "hack" politics, then Trump's election has been the best case study by far.

ajxs• 7 years ago

Absolutely. Trump also serves as a case study of what kinds of safeguards exist within the American political system to prevent an incumbent president from really moving the needle. You cant go too far off script in the white house. You can be an embarrassing PR nightmare if you like, that's fine. So long as you keep supporting the institutions that have their grip on American democracy it's no problem.

eclecticsceptic• 7 years ago

Vice News did an interesting segment on these kids and Gravel a couple of months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-EDZaV4h4

stunt• 7 years ago

Glad to see these teenagers. Promising to see such examples to remember that we often draw a wrong picture of Gen Z. Regardless of which side they are taking, the fact that they are doing it is great.

apo2• 7 years ago

... @MikeGravel had already established that Mike Gravel was not just an individual but also a kind of group project. Strangely enough, this had opened up a loophole that allowed him to talk like an actual person — and somehow it seemed as if this person mattered least. I found myself imagining a candidateless campaign — fronted by a hologram of George Washington, or “freedom,” or Apple ...

There's an old saying to the effect that:

1. FDR proved that a person can be president forever;

2. Nixon proved that anyone can become president; and

3. Regan proved that nobody need be president at all.

There's a case to be made that a good chunk of the current president's success stems from the fact that his administration/campaign appears to be so tightly controlled by the man himself. Like him or loathe him, with this president, what you see is what you get, and he has gone to the mat repeatedly to make good on his campaign promises no matter how misguided.

So the mental model of a presidential campaign being run by a bunch of kids wrapped in a trench coat is fascinating. As the article points out, the Gravel campaign's uniqueness stems from the fact of how open it is about this:

In an online world where everything is understood to be a performance, @MikeGravel looks us squarely in the eye and admits, “Every politician is just a bunch of kids in a trench coat — so why not make them actual kids?”

It's also not outside the realm of technical feasibility that an AI could make a viable presidential candidate. Whether or not the necessary legislation would ever come to pass is another question, but I sometimes wonder whether this might be the ultimate legacy of Corporate Personhood:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

knolax• 7 years ago

he has gone to the mat repeatedly to make good on his campaign promises no matter how misguided.

Where's his wall?

whenchamenia• 7 years ago

Its being constructed, on schedule, albeit a slow one. Mexico, however, shows no signs of paying for it. Maybe thats the tarrif gambit.

apo2• 7 years ago

Not saying he's been successful, but he has tried repeatedly.

I'm also trying to set aside whether I agree with these policies. Failure to do so is part of the reason so many Democrats have been so utterly ineffective against this president.

Oddly enough, the latest iteration (threatening new tariffs on Mexico) appears to have lead to a concession by Mexico to station 6,000 of its national guard units at the border to prevent emigration to the US.

I'd say this more than demonstrates that this president will take things to extremes few thought possible in an effort to make good on his campaign promises.

I even suspect a large number of Mexican national guard troop stationed at the border might even qualify as a "wall" that was "paid for" by Mexico. It also hints that further concessions by Mexico to fund a constructed wall might be forthcoming by making the same threat again.

tempodox2• 7 years ago

...an AI could make a viable presidential candidate.

You wouldn‘t even need what is hyperbolically called AI. A Markov chain would be fully sufficient.

tempodox2• 7 years ago

But then, with the current usage of the term, a Markov chain is AI.

TillE• 7 years ago

They're doing completely typical Twitter shitposting, on Mike Gravel's verified account. It's a funny joke, but that's all it is. You could hand over the account to anyone on lefty irony Twitter and get the exact same results.

It's been somewhat disheartening to see people take this at all seriously, to think that Mike Gravel is going to even have anything useful to say at the debates. We all (well, maybe not the teens) remember Gravel from 2008. He's not about to blow anyone's mind.

tanderson922• 7 years ago

Calling out the hypocrisy of top-tier candidates like Biden or Harris with the same panache as in 2008, while advocating policies not considered ‘Practical’, is their explicit goal. Some people view the 2008 performance as brave truth-telling—how many of those serious, smooth-talking candidates voted for the Iraq War?

Speaking truth to power doesn’t always mean speaking truth to people with elected power.

extr• 7 years ago

"say the line old man"

https://twitter.com/adrenaline_etc/status/113595904753695539...

tx86533• 7 years ago

This shows that the Twitter verified accounts system/blue checkmarks are pretty worthless. Gravel may have handed his password over to the kids, but other “individual” accounts are run by multiple admins using Twitter’s built-in features, and some politicians have the disclaimer “tweets by me have my initials”.

Twitter should restrict verified individual accounts to a single user (the actual person who owns the account) and remove the check mark from people who violate those rules. There are also individual accounts that seem to be selling access to their followers by giving admin rights to others.

Accounts that have multiple admins should have this explicitly called out in the profile/name (“Office of XYZ”) , and which admin posted the Tweet needs to be made explicit.

tanderson922• 7 years ago

We could also just designate a limited number of people as politicians’ voice, who speak for him. We could call this new job, I don’t know, “spokesperson”?

tx86533• 7 years ago

People on Twitter don’t expect spokespeople, they expect the actual person whose name is on the account. If they can’t be bothered to Tweet 280 characters on an issue personally, maybe they shouldn’t be Tweeting about it at all, or leave it to the “office of” or “campaign of” accounts.

ryanmonroe2• 7 years ago

It's not feasible for Twitter to evaluate what person actually typed the characters, and that isn't very relevant to the issue of knowing whether the message is something the person supports anyway. The check-mark means the account is verified to be owned by a certain person, and I think it's very useful to know whether an account is owned by a certain figure/politician. It's very useful to know that this account is making posts supported by Mike Gravel, and that these kids are not just people he's never met making posts under his name. Most popular politicians have a lot of popular parody accounts, and knowing whether you're looking at a message made by a campaign vs one made by someone parodying a campaign is valuable information. At the end of the day, if an account is making posts [verified person] does not support that person can either (a) change their password or (b) ask twitter to remove the verification. The blue checkmark then signifies the account is actually run by that person, regardless of who is typing the majority of the posts. It's a matter of common sense that it's possible for me and anyone else with an online account to give my password to someone else, and then that person could make posts with my account. What the check mark tells me is that no one has taken the account and locked the owner out of it, because if they did the person would have just told Twitter and the check mark would be gone.

tx86533• 7 years ago

That's not what it means, and I don't think any large number of people actually think that's what it means. It means the account is verified to be owned by X,

I beg to differ. Twitter accounts of individuals come across as a personal medium, not a mass propaganda outfit. I would be extremely surprised if a majority of users realized that an individual account with a blue checkmark was actually being run by a team.

As for sharing passwords: Twitter has to have mechanisms for detecting multiple logins to the same account.

riffic• 7 years ago

Twitter has always had a "namespace" issue and verification icons are just a hack.

The most manageable solution to this namespace issue is to let everyone with a domain also own their own namespace (DNS + ActivityPub, for example)

SomeOldThrow• 7 years ago

Au contraire, twitter is popular only because it is a shared space with no barriers. Namespaces complicate this: see mastadon.

willart4food• 7 years ago

This is great!

Looking forward to see more of these types of candidates phenomena.

angel_j• 7 years ago

This might be a stunt, or it might just be... news?

teh_klev2• 7 years ago

Jeremy Scahill interviewed Mike Gravel back at the beginning of May this year, I found it quite enjoyable:

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/08/everywhere-is-war-the-am...

Gravel's an interesting guy. He filibustered the Senate with a reading of the Pentagon Papers back in '71.

Teenagers campaigning for Mike Gravel on Twitter

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