© Dado Ruvic / Reuters
The internet can be a warzone of trolling, insults, arguments and just about anything you can imagine. Now a bot has been created to engage "internet bigots" to fight by tweeting controversial statements on everything from white privilege to Donald Trump.
The bot, created by Twitter user Sarah Nyberg, goes by the name of Liz. Her job is to tweet inflammatory statements from her handle @arguetron, in order to "bait internet bigots into fighting with it for hours."
Liz seems to be left-leaning, with most of her statements designed to engage Twitter's more conservative users.
It's perhaps no surprise that Liz is a liberal, as Nyberg - who Breitbart says is a transsexual formerly living as Nicholas Nyberg - is apparently known online for supporting "prominent progressive commentators." Nyberg herself has been a target of a number of online controversies, ranging from discussions of the #GamerGate scandal to accusations of pedophilia.
If Liz's goal is to infuriate those who disagree with her, she seems to be most successful in her task - at least some of the time.
When she tweeted that "white privilege is real," one user was quick to ask for proof, accusing the bot of believing things without evidence.
But even those trying to engage with Liz in a kind way are often told they're "wrong," because Liz seems incapable of doing anything other than fighting.
Most of the time, however, Liz is called out for being a bot - a claim that she denies.
According to Nyberg, Liz was largely inspired by Norasferatu, the "official robot voice of the millennial generation," which tweets under the Twitter handle @NoraReed.
Comment: This is what internet arguments look like in 2016. Soon it will be nothing but an endless storm of bots vs bots. Of course, they will only argue about the officially approved topics as above (race, gender, abortion, guns, red vs blue). It really makes you pine for a nice cabin in the woods away from all the insanity.