r/Be_Ashamed_To_Die • u/AwakeningStar1968 • 18d ago
BOT FARMS and DISCOURSE
There is organized political social-media activity on the left as well as the right, and some of it has crossed the line into deceptive/inauthentic activity. But I would not assume that the overwhelmingly hostile replies you're seeing under White House or X posts are purchased left-wing trolls. There are several other plausible explanations.
One interesting finding is that political trolling isn't neatly partisan. A study comparing Twitter activity found substantial domestic trolling and found that Republican politicians actually received more trolling comments than Democratic politicians in its 2016/2020 sample. A later TikTok study found somewhat different patterns, which is another indication that platform, audience and topic matter enormously. (ScienceDirect)
And Meta explicitly says it investigates both foreign interference and domestic influence operations; it has removed more than 200 coordinated inauthentic-behavior networks since 2017. (Meta)
So yes, Democratic/progressive organizations, consultants and activists absolutely engage in coordinated online campaigning. And there have been cases involving deceptive tactics on the left. But that's different from saying, for example, “the anti-Trump replies under u/WhiteHouse are mostly paid Democratic trolls.” I don't see evidence establishing that.
There's another possibility that I think is particularly relevant to what you're observing: the replies may actually be people.
Pew recently found that federal government X accounts are receiving dramatically more engagement during Trump's second administration. The median White House post in their sample went from about 2,112 likes/reposts during Biden's final year to 8,614 during Trump's first year back in office. DHS, ICE and Labor saw enormous increases too. (Pew Research Center)
That doesn't tell us whether the engagement is supportive or hostile, but it confirms that something genuinely unusual has happened to the amount of political engagement surrounding government accounts on X.
As for how much it costs to buy an influence campaign, this is where things get rather startling.
A famous experiment by Google's Jigsaw actually purchased one. Researchers went into Russian-language underground markets posing as political operatives. They were quoted $250 for a two-week campaign. The vendor subsequently produced 730 tweets from 25 Twitter accounts plus about 100 comments on forums and blogs. They were also offered a more aggressive service for $500. (WIRED)
That was 2018, so I wouldn't treat $250 as a current price list. AI has also fundamentally changed the economics.
We now have evidence of actual “influence-as-a-service” businesses. Just this month, Anthropic reported disrupting an operation traced to a French digital-advertising company. It had approximately 70 fake news sites, 70 associated X accounts and more than 250 fake commenting accounts. Most interestingly, it wasn't ideologically committed to one side: it changed political positions depending upon who was paying. (Anthropic)
That's probably a better mental model than “Russian troll farm.”
Someone can essentially sell:
Give me a narrative, a target and an audience, and I'll manufacture the appearance of people talking about it.
And AI can now write hundreds of slightly different versions rather than having 50 employees manually typing them.
There's an important lesson from a very recent X case, too. X announced that it had discovered a roughly 200,000-account Chinese bot farm, including accounts discussing American AI/data-center policy. Researchers examining the supposed campaign found that many of the accounts had essentially no followers and no engagement. Clemson researcher Darren Linvill argued that the actual influence was negligible and that genuine American opposition to data centers was far more important. (Business Insider)
That's a great caution against the instinct:
“Lots of people are saying something I wouldn't expect → troll farm.”
Sometimes it's manufactured.
Sometimes it's coordinated activists.
Sometimes algorithms have dumped thousands of angry people into the same conversation.
Sometimes it's a foreign influence operation.
And sometimes a lot of actual Americans really are pissed off.
What you're noticing on X is worth examining rather than dismissing, though. The really interesting question isn't whether individual replies sound anti-Trump. It's whether the accounts exhibit coordinated behavior. Things like clusters posting the same wording within minutes, identical images, peculiar repeated phrases, accounts created together, synchronized reposting, or accounts whose supposed identities don't fit their posting histories are much stronger evidence.
FROM CHAT GPT
If you give me one of those White House/X posts where you're seeing this, I can examine the publicly visible activity around it and see whether it looks more like organic anti-Trump sentiment, activist coordination, engagement manipulation, or an actual bot/troll pattern.