For all the criticism of President Donald J. Trump’s ongoing Twitter habit, one unexpected beneficiary has emerged: dogs, cats and other animals being helped by the ASPCA.

An Austin marketing and innovation agency, T3, has created a piece of automated software (a “bot” to use the current terminology) that scans Trump’s Tweets.

If he mentions a publicly traded company moving jobs to Mexico or talks about it in some other negative way, the “Trump and Dump” bot will find the company’s stock ticker, use Google Finance to determine its price, use E-trade to make a short transaction on the stock, and then keep a record of its actions.

A notification is posted to the messaging service Slack and “Trump and Dump” waits for the profits to roll in. Those profits are donated to the ASPCA.

Ben Gaddis, president of T3, said they are using the company’s money to fund this project.

“We aren’t sharing the number right now but we are starting small and will continue to invest more as we see results. We plan on tracking donations and releasing those, likely on a monthly basis,” Gaddis said.



It’s not the first or only bot that is taking advantage of Trump’s tendency to unload on social media and cause stocks to drop in price, but it may be the first that automatically donates to charity.

The project took about a day to map out and since its launch has already gotten a write-up in Adweek.

Gaddis said the company has already been working on applications that tie together artificial intelligence and social media.

“This project seemed like a natural progression — and who doesn’t love puppies?”

As to why ASPCA was specifically chosen, Gaddis said, “We support a number of charities but wanted to do something on a national scale. And because we have dogs in our office it was a natural fit.”

You can check out a video that shows how “Trump and Dump” works below:

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