HeatStreet’s Louise and Her Russia Troll-Bot Map

By all accounts, the Trump-Clinton debate on Tuesday night was a dreary draw, although Trump fans were quick on the trigger to vote in online polls at DrudgeReport, Time, and elsewhere. Verdict: an overwhelming win for Mr. Trump.

Few people take such polls seriously, least of all the Trump or Clinton campaigns, and the online fluff would ordinarily have been forgotten the next day. This time however some wag conjured up a “map” putting forth the theory that all those online votes for Trump really came from the region of St. Petersburg, Russia!

fake-russia-poll-tweetThe widely circulated geolocation map appears to be a Photoshopped hoax, as it doesn’t resemble available images from TrendsMap or Google. The fakery was quickly exposed by Philip Bump at the Washington Post, with a follow-up in BuzzFeed. It may or may not have been created by a tweeter calling himself “Dusty,” who posted the ur-image on Wednesday morning (right).

Hoax exposed, most of the media soon lost interest.

One online personality refused to take the memo, however, insisting for days that Trump’s post-debate triumph in online polls was largely the work of Russian tweet-bots.

That would be Louise (“Tweet-a-minute”) Mensch of HeatStreet, the Rupert Murdoch clickbait site invented in imitation of Takimag and The Daily Beast.  She quickly retweeted the “Dusty” image on Wednesday morning, and continued to retweet it and defend its veracity for the next two days.

screenshot-2016-10-02-11-35-41Then embarrassment took over and she covered up with a flurry of tweets about British Parliamentary things (left).

Louise Mensch, alias Bagshawe, is a Sacred Heart girl and chick-lit novelist who was briefly a British MP.  She did not use the name Mensch (her second husband’s) till she came to New York to work for NewsCorp. It is a folk belief among London journos that you get on better in America if you pretend to be Jewish.

Louise is a friend of Milo Yiannopoulos.

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Author: Moderator has moderated nycforum.org since 2016.