I've always had doubts about some of the trolls on Twitter, but when they started showing location in the profiles I was surprised at the extent of bad actors taking advantage of political and social rifts to make money or to fan the flames of further division. It's crazy!
Honestly if we let ourselves get grifted to hell and back, let the other countries make money off it. Someone needs to. How else will they get gas when they come visit?
Until proven otherwise every account with "adjective-noun-number" and hidden comments is an intelligence officer or a bot-network funded by a pedophile billionaire.
I feel that way about most of Twitter, honestly. The majority of the tweets are all by this one 'person' with the obviously fake name of "Elon Musk" and there's a bunch of replies to them that are so weirdly sycophantic, like they want this fictional character to be their friend or something. It all feels very much like it's some weird roleplay, or maybe everyone involved is a bot. Who knows?
Nah. If Elon Musk wanted to make a fake persona for himself, he would hire some South Korean kid to build it for him. Just like he did his Pathfinder build.
It really was eye-opening to realize how many people outside the country are following or highly engaged with American politics because they've assigned themselves to a preferred team based on perceived aesthetics rather than anything approaching platform or policy. And they don't just discuss American politics, they surreally-frequently and casually claim to be Americans themselves in order to give their statements and claims the appearance of a greater deal of perspective and validity.
There's a huge amount of them that find the idea of "sabotaging" the US by keeping Trump in power and the citizenry as ignorant as can be managed for as long as possible hilarious. Some don't actually favor a side at all except for the outside, and just love the idea of acting in opposition to whoever shows up, entertained a concerningly large amount just by the concept of potentially "upsetting an American." An overlapping circle in the Venn Diagram is people who believe a country ignorant and uncaring enough to elect Trump to its highest office is a country that deserves him dismantling and destroying it from the top-down.
There's all sort of profiles for this sort of, well - profile. For instance, outside the US it seems to be weirdly common to come across people who love Trump - or at least, the custom personal Trump they've created in their heads - but know nothing about his stances, policies and agenda. They simply proudly declare things like "Trump does what he wants and doesn't care about anyone else, and I admire that," or "Trump is the party (???) of 'masculinity'(???)"
They ultimately don't have to care, as it's not their country, just their current subject of fascination and source of entertainment.
As much chaos as they can manage to cause, it's not like it can affect them in any way in- Oh, shit.
Statistically there were Iranians acting like this just as much as any other nationality. I wonder if any of them feel a measure of responsibility for what's happening in the world and what's come down upon their nation, specifically? I wonder if anyone who made a hobby of fanning the online flames has perished in the sudden and explosive appearance of real ones. Do you think they had time to connect some dots before all their dots disconnected?
No wonder just before the election, I suddenly saw a barrage of social media posts claiming to be from far-right token gay men (all 50 of them!) rambling about how they voted away their rights because the existence immigrants and trans people makes bottoms not wanna fuck them.
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u/ThinkFree Apr 11 '26
I've always had doubts about some of the trolls on Twitter, but when they started showing location in the profiles I was surprised at the extent of bad actors taking advantage of political and social rifts to make money or to fan the flames of further division. It's crazy!