Recent it was revealed that the Fox News PR machine had staffers set up thousands of fake commenter accounts on sites across the web to put a positive spin on the avalanche of negative stuff written about Fox News on any given day. Well, Stephen Colbert is sympathetic to that effort, so he set up a bot Twitter account to help the fine folks at Fox because, as Colbert explained it, “these days, people get their news via the Twitter bird, and Fox can’t police the ‘tweeterverse’ by themselves.”
So he had staff writer Rob Dubbin design an algorithm that takes positive Rotten Tomatoes film reviews and swaps out the film names with the names of “beloved Fox News shows and personalities.” The bot posts tweets every few minutes using this algorithm along with the hashtag, #PraiseFOX. It’s kind of genius.
