I never said the bot thing was an anti-SJW conspiracy, nor did I say that it even happened, just that it plausibly could have. Using bots is not “hacking,” and wouldn’t even be that hard to do. When I say bots I mostly mean people making a ton of socks accounts, which isn’t something that anyone in their right mind should think is a possibility far divorced from reality. The potential of someone making a script that’d do the work for them logically follows, though again I’m not saying it definitely happened (honestly the bot thing was pretty clearly beside my point).
Then why bring it up at all other than to obscure the lack of logic in the argument? “Hacking” doesn’t just mean breaking into a computer or network or writing malicious code; social engineering is a form of hacking. Using bots to overwhelm a system and subvert its intended purpose qualifies as hacking even though it works within the confines of the system. And bots aren’t people with sock accounts; bots work independently, which is what makes them bots. Words mean things.
I think you’re intentionally blurring meanings because your argument that RT is an invalid source for audience opinion was based on your opinion (you admitted yourself you couldn’t bother to research it) and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. At worst, it’s no more faulty than any other audience metric.