As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

The following article by Craig Timberg was posted on the Washington Post website February 5, 2017:

Daniel John Sobieski, a retiree in Chicago, is able to tweet more than 1,000 times a day using “schedulers” that work through stacks of his own pre-written posts in repetitive loops. (Alyssa Schukar for The Washington Post)

Daniel John Sobieski, 68, climbed the stairs in his modest brick home and settled into a worn leather chair for another busy day of tweeting. But he needn’t have bothered. As one of the nation’s most prolific conservative voices on Twitter, he already had posted hundreds of times this morning — as he ate breakfast, as he chatted with his wife, even as he slept — and would post hundreds of times more before night fell.

The key to this frenetic pace was technology allowing Twitter users to post automatically from queues of pre-written tweets that can be delivered at a nearly constant, round-the-clock pace that no human alone could match. In this way, Sobieski — a balding retiree with eyes so weak that he uses a magnifying glass to see his two computer screens — has dramatically amplified his online reach despite lacking the celebrity or the institutional affiliations that long have helped elevate some voices over the crowd. Continue reading “As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work”