Trump’s proposed anti-trans gun rule suddenly had thousands of new supporters. Most were bots

This story originally appeared on Assigned Media.As Monday, July 20 came to a close, public comments about a Trump administration attempt to restrict trans gun ownership were overwhelmingly negative.Citizens lambasted the proposal, which would require trans people to list their assigned sex on mandatory purchase paperwork even if that would conflict with their ID. Submissions called it “blatantly unconstitutional”, “government overreach”, and a clear attempt to further disempower a vulnerable minority.Then, practically overnight, the tone changed. On July 21, supportive comments began rolling in on an industrial scale — first dozens at a time, then hundreds. By the end of July 23, more than half of all comments were in favor of the new rule.Nearly all of those comments show signs of being machine-generated, according to an investigation by Assigned Media — part of what appears to be a coordinated bot campaign that accounts for fully 96 percent of all submissions in favor of the rule.“If I wanted to screw up astroturfing, it [still] wouldn’t be this bad,” Kate Gray, a Las Vegas-based cybersecurity engineer who spotted the pattern while trying to do a sentiment analysis on the data, told Assigned Media.“If it was an organization sending out [a template], what would happen is a lot of people would just copy-paste what they provided, and some people will modify a little or add things.“They will not do Mad Libs, where they pick this word and that word and that phrase, but with the exact same punctuation, with the exact same spelling, and with exactly one sense. That is statistically impossible.”Other commenters noticed a suspicious patternGun rights activists have condemned the ATF’s plan as a backhanded attempt to scare trans people away from exercising their rights under the Second Amendment. Some trans gun owners have further expressed concern that the scheme would make it possible for federal agents to identify which gun owners are trans.Mak