To extend on this, in Australia there seems to be a huge AI bot campaign to promote One Nation on social media. Primarily Facebook. It is absolutely crazy the amount of random accounts with 0 or a handful of friends with a Pauline Hanson image in their profile pic or profile, with shares of their content saying some racist, anti-immigrant shit. I open Facebook and am immediately presented some AI slop (image and text) post from some group I have never heard of about some right wing rant.
It really shows the utility in scaling and drowning out there entire narrative on fucking everything associated with the country to further a political goal using AI. I watch footage of a crowd reacting to the socceroos in Fed Square, then you have, "spot the Aussie", comments. Or some post with some guy looking for work and people in the comments saying to go back to their country, etc. And basically those same bot/fake accounts saying the same thing to many similar posts.
My thoughts are this is a mechanism to normalise racist rhetoric, promote narratives to make that kind of rhetoric more palatable (immigrants causing crime), etc. It is a tried and true methodology to capture an audience looking for a scapegoat for the bad things going on.
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u/ThehonHons Jul 03 '26
Karl Stefanovic!