When it comes to political and cause-driven initiatives, SS+K creates killer products that live at the intersection of creative and technology. It was no surprise to us that they created a totally different kind of experience with a treasure trove of quotes from a certain presidential candidate — a chatbot that's a far cry from the friendly assistants we've become used to interacting with, all in service of motivating action this election.
We were thrilled they picked Dexter to build on. I love it when non-linear storytelling succeeds, and believe BFF Trump is just a wonderful execution of the method. I consider myself pretty well-informed, and there’s more absurdity to this man than I could have ever imagined. I’ll leave it to @kskobac and @claudiacukrov to talk about the bot’s evolution!
@bilko@kskobac Thanks Brendan! Super excited to share this with you all.
To give a little background, we're hoping this experience will allow users to navigate the depths of Trump's positions on everything from key election issues like the environment and gun control, through to "Robert Pattinson" [Trump's a strange beast] and ultimately, motivate people to get out and vote this November.
@bilko@claudiacukrov thanks for sharing! We're super excited to launch BFF Trump, playing our small part, leveraging new tech to shine a strong light on the hateful and damaging rhetoric Trump spews, and hopefully get people more aware and determined to take action this Fall. Dexter was awesome to work with, wouldn't have been possible without your fantastic platform.
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Is this really a tool to "inform about positions" or is it more beating a dead horse? Trump's a horrible candidate, etc, to be sure, but I don't see the societal benefit to stuff like this. It's focusing on negativity when we could spend our time doing better things.
@lukedeannif Hey there! This product was born from three key insights we found when looking in to how youth are engaging with both politics and Trump on social platforms:
1) Facebook is the number-one political news source for Millennials
2) Engagement algorithms are increasingly driving the social audience further apart in their beliefs and values
3) The average number of apps a smartphone user downloads is zero, while our audience is spending more time in messaging apps than anywhere else, online or offline
In a nutshell, if someone isn't politically engaged, they're not seeing Trump for what he is in their newsfeed. BFF Trump aims to bridge that gap in both a language and an environment youth know all too well. It's designed to make people understand who Trump is and motivate them to vote against hate this November.
@gabriel_whaley that would be awesome -- shout out to @bilko! We would love to add some sort of viral sharing of the message stream so people can spread the insightful exchanges people are having to other people they know.
@gabriel_whaley that's something we would love to support, and have a few internal ideas we've tinkered with over SMS. Unfortunately, it is distribution platform specific and FB doesn't support it. I know Telegram supports bringing a bot into a group chat, though the times I've tried them, they've been a bit janky.
MOB: Mother Of all Bots
BFF Trump
BFF Trump
BFF Trump
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BFF Trump
MOB: Mother Of all Bots
Toaster Bath Bomb