The Beandogs became infamous in 2010, accused of “working for” Neal Rauhauser in Twittergate. As the tweets below show, these accounts first banded together as the Super Troll Crew on January 22, 2010 and used the hashtag #STC, mainly to troll Greg Howard.
please use hashtag #stc for all super troll crew-related tweets
— Corn W. (@Perfect_Beanis) January 22, 2010
It wasn’t until late in the summer of 2010 that Super Troll Crew started using the name beandogs and using the “mameshiba” avatars. It was even later than that when Neal interacted (briefly) with them. Neal didn’t create the beandogs nor was he their leader. Rauhauser was busy screwing up the political social media business he started with Beth Becker called Progressive PST.
Progressive PST ran Twitter accounts for their clients, who were liberal candidates for assorted political offices. For this service PPST charged a fee as any business would, somehow this was twisted by the authors of Twittergate into some grand conspiracy that these Democratic candidates were paying to have conservatives trolled. That was untrue, a major distortion of the facts.
The public posting of nasty tweets made by Conservatives was the essence of Twittergate. The gathering and posting of those vile tweets was originally done by an account called @oxyconservative on a website called viletweets.com. Oxyconservative also had nothing to do with the Super Troll Crew or Neal Rauhauser. Rauhauser attempted to copy what oxyconservative was doing but crazy Zapem jumped the gun and broke her Twittergate scandal before he got to far with his Flickr version of vile tweets.
Twittergate was a poorly manufactured attempt to glue three separate situations together to create a major scandal. It didn’t work. The bottom line is that nobody forced Conservatives to make nasty tweets. That conservative accounts were trolled or their tweets publicly posted for all to see doesn’t remove their authorship and responsibility for making those tweets.
