Dallas News by Forrest Milburn 8/7/2018
Jake Lee spent much of last year attending rally after rally for Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic congressman from El Paso running for U.S. Senate. He felt inspired to become more involved with the campaign, but he didn’t know how.
Last month, the 25-year-old from Austin found his answer. Lee, a longtime lurker on Reddit, developed the Beto_bot, a bot that gets the word out about O’Rourke’s campaign by spreading his policy stances to curious commentators on several subreddits.
“I thought, at one point, I didn’t know a lot about Beto, so I figured probably a lot of other Texans don’t know a lot about Beto,†Lee said. “I figured a bot on a big website like Reddit could potentially have more of an effect than even I could phone banking.â€
Beto_bot works by scanning several subreddits, parsing through comments to see if a user has asked a question about O’Rourke and his stance on a specific policy. For example: If a user comments on the r/TexasPolitics subreddit asking, “What is Beto’s health care policy?â€, it would trigger the Beto_bot to reply with an answer directly from O’Rourke’s website under the issues tab.
The Beto_bot is one way candidates and their supporters are attempting to replicate the success of Barack Obama, who was one of the first to harness the power of social media during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Donald Trump also used his massive Twitter following to attract supporters and free media attention on his way to winning the presidency in 2016. But aside from Trump, most Republicans haven’t invited supporters to “virtually join†in on their campaigns, said Stephanie Martin, a political communications professor at Southern Methodist University.
More:
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas-politics/2018/08/07/beto-orourke-ted-cruzs-texas-senate-race-turns-reddit-bots-facebook-live-court-voters
