As reported by Jason Torchinsky on Jalopnik, Marci Robin was buying a car when the dealership passed her a piece of paper that gave her pause:
I bought a car today, and the dealership had me check off — with a pen, on paper — that I’m not a robot. pic.twitter.com/x6nJ68e6uj
— Marci Robin (@MarciRobin) May 20, 2018
She explains to him:
“The sales guy was handing me paper after paper with a brief explanation of what each one was for, and then he handed me that page — with literally nothing else on it — and just mater-of-factly said, ‘And this one is just to ensure you’re not a robot.’ We both said, ‘Really?’ And I don’t know if he’s just done it so long that it was normal to him now or what, but he was just like, ‘Yep.’“
In an another story, Johnny Lieu writing on Mashable asserts that Donald Trump does not write all of those wacky tweets.
He says:
“Some are penned by White House staffers, and according to a Boston Globe report, these tweets are composed with grammatical errors and irregularities, intentionally included to sound like they’re written by Trump. This comes from two sources at the White House who spoke to the newspaper, both of whom said staffers would copy Trump’s expression. That includes the overuse of exclamation points, the capitalization of words for emphasis, fragments, and loosely connected ideas. While grammatical errors are present, staffers reportedly didn’t intentionally misspell words or names.”
So is “The Real Donald Trump” fact or fiction? How can we tell if Trump is truly tweeting?
Luckily Andrew McGill of The Atlantic can tell us which tweets are real and which are “fake tweets.”
In part, he reveals:
“It’s fun to see the words the algorithm found were most helpful in attributing a tweet to Trump or a staffer. Most of them aren’t words at all, but quirks of spelling or punctuation.
“@realDonaldTrump” (Trump/staff ratio = 14 : 1)
Trump was 14 times more likely than a staffer to mention his own Twitter handle, probably because he frequently quotes tweets about himself.“#” (Trump/staff ratio = 1 : 5)
Staffer Trump uses hashtags all the time, something Android Trump doesn’t bother with much.“Media” (Trump/staff ratio = 5 : 1)
With a president who is obsessed with news coverage and the “dishonest media,” does this surprise you?“@foxnews” (Trump/staff ratio = 3:1)
Trump’s preferred cable channel gets a bump in his own tweets.” “ (Trump/staff ratio = 8 : 1)
The president is also far more likely to include extra spaces in his tweets.”
Follow Trump or Not on Twitter.
My take: I think we’ve crossed a line if humans can’t vouch for humans anymore. Of course, you could also claim humanity crossed that line on November 8, 2016.