title:  Meet The Billionaire Behind Trump’s Twitter Bot Army Responsible For Pushing Conservative Lies
text: One of the GOP s biggest donors who used to be associated with IBM is the man responsible for millions of Twitter bots that follow President Trump and are likely designed to spread false or misleading news to voters on social media.Robert Mercer, the man the whole scheme relies on for guidance, is a very reclusive Republican mega-doner and huge Tump supporter, reports the New York Daily News.Mercer and his daughter Rebekah orchestrated an off-the-radar money raising plot during the whole campaign, and also connected to Trump to some critical figures like Bannon.This computer scientist turned billionaire built technologies at IBM used to power its Watson super-computer. Mercer also assisted Apple with the development of the Siri platform.Experts told the Daily News that of Trump s 30 million Twitter followers, 15 million are actually automated bots designed to be  weaponized.  These bots can spread false news stories and mislead voters to distract them from scandals faced by the White House.The scary part is their ability can escalate rapidly with the introduction of more advanced technology. Fooling humans into doing things in the electronic realm turned out to be really easy,  explained chief technology officer at Bromium, Simon Crosby, in reference to campaigns that influenced the 2016 election and Brexit referendum. With a few extra steps that seem available in the right circles, it could get even easier. You have arbitrary and ridiculous information spread very quickly, and now to the targeted user is more susceptible to believing it and spreading it, and we now know that it influences people. We saw it in the election, with Brexit,  he said. Ultimately, the problem is that anybody can talk to anybody, especially if  anybody  is a bot on Twitter or Facebook who knows a lot about you. It makes sense for a man with knowledge of the inner workings of Watson to use his skills to help facilitate a bot-operation for political gain. Even though any computer scientist who is motivated could help Tump do it   almost all AI technology is open source, it s the proximity of Mercer to Trump, in particular, that causes concern and raises questions.Before Mercer made billions at his current hedge fund, he worked at IBM where he developed several patents and published studies on  Brown clustering,  which IMB used to create Watson Artificial Intelligence.Mercer, a big player in getting Breitbart News funded and where it is today, invested millions into a firm called Cambridge Analytica, to mine online data and influence voters. The New Yorker magazine reported that this tech company uses secret psychological methods to pinpoint which messages are the most persuasive to individual online viewers. This type of technology has been employed in previous candidate campaigns that Mercer supported and will be used in the future to target voters on social media, Crosby explained. We re in deep trouble in the sense that it s extraordinarily easy to automate a generation of arbitrarily absurd and ridiculous stuff. Photo by Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post via Images Getty 