Leah McElrath, Senior Writer and Twitter Director at ShareBlue, has some observations on the effects that the bot war had on Clinton and Sanders supporters throughout the 2016 primaries, and what she has to say is something that supporters of both should take to heart:
Democrats may not have been as divided as we were led to believe during the 2016 election season. I received daily abuse from "pro-Bernie" Twitter accounts I now know were not real people, but Russian bots.
When it was revealed during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that Russian bots (computer algorithm controlled social media accounts) on Twitter had masqueraded as “Bernie Bros” during the 2015-2016 election cycle, it was not news to me — it was confirmation of my experience.
During the campaign season, I was vocal on Twitter about my support for Hillary Clinton. As a result, I became used to receiving sexualized and gendered abuse, and even rape and death threats, on a daily basis.
It was one thing, she says, to be attacked like that by trump supporters; it was something else — something intensely upsetting and discouraging — to believe similar attacks were coming from fellow progressives.
However, the rest of the abuse came from accounts purporting to be supporters of Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. And these were “people” with whom I believed I shared common values and policy interests. Almost all of the accounts presented as men — mostly young and white — and used sexist and misogynistic tones and words. I was called “mom” and “grandma” as epithets by these “young men.” I was called every vile sexualized name you can imagine. For some reason that I did not understand at the time, they liked to call me a “vagina.” (I now believe non-native English — i.e. Russian — speakers wrote the algorithms controlling these bots and perhaps imagined “vagina” to be the equivalent of the c-word when hurled at a woman.) Not being conversant in the mechanisms of Russian psychological warfare techniques at the time, it never occurred to me that, like the #MAGA bots, these “Bernie Bro” accounts were actually bots too.
And the abuse from these accounts was much harder to dismiss. It went in further, emotionally speaking. The vitriol of the attacks felt like a painful betrayal. After all, “we” probably shared 99 percent of our political perspective; we just supported different candidates — which is something I said repeatedly in my attempts to appeal to reason with some of the attackers over the course of those long months. Nonetheless, even the mildest criticism of Sanders or comment of support for Clinton would bring out a swarm of these “Bernie Bro” accounts spouting off with abusive language and mockery.
It was a widespread experience for Clinton supporters online — women and men, white, black, and brown.
None of us knew we were being targeted for psychological warfare by a foreign power during these exchanges....
The experience was confusing and deeply concerning. I worried if my generation of feminists had missed huge numbers of young men self-identifying as progressives who so clearly hated women. I worried for my daughter’s future as she grows up and enters into a world populated by such supposed allies.
It was even worse when I spoke to friends who were Sanders supporters; they often didn’t believe the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon I described had any basis in reality. It simply did not match with their experience of Sanders supporters — they believed their reality, and I believed mine.
It was a shocking and painful division that has still not healed, and it continues to fuel animosity and distrust on both sides.
Clinton supporters felt they had been outrageously abused.
Sanders supporters felt they had been outrageously accused.
The first time I knew the #MAGA accounts had been bots, and the first time it occurred to me that the “Bernie Bro” accounts might also have been, was on November 9th, the day after the election. The accounts went totally silent. That is just not a normal human reaction. I had expected them to be making victory laps on Twitter. In fact, they were not just silent; the vast majority of them were gone. Poof. I blocked thousands of these accounts on Twitter over the course of about 18 months. When I went to check my list of blocked accounts, there were about a dozen left in existence....
But here is the good news: those “Bernie Bros”? A significant number of them — perhaps even the vast majority of them — were bots. They were not our progressive allies, weirdly hurling racist and misogynist language in overwhelming waves....
The challenge now is to mend these tears in the fabric of the Democratic Party that were exacerbated and sometimes created whole-cloth by Russian active measures, designed to destroy America from within by turning us against one another.
And that really is the challenge. Are we up to it?