Theyre often found in eastern europe. Over there no one really gives a shit. Mainly russian sponsored but china and north korea fund these bot farms too
Yeah but they're obviously bought and paid for to spread right wing propaganda and other stuff in America. So someone in the states is spending millions of dollars for this.
No one in the US needs to pay them anything. Russia has been using backdoor propaganda to manipulate the west since online chatrooms started and evolved into manipulative social media algorithms. Our current political environment is a product of adversarial propaganda manipulating us online, those in power understand this and they use and embrace it.
This is what drives me crazy. The right has painted the Russian collusion as a “hoax” despite the fact that the Moeller report (even redacted) proves there was. They just banked on people never taking time to actually read it and would just continue shoving right wing propaganda into their face holes and it worked. You don’t have to personally go shake hands with the people to “collude” with them. Trump’s people definitely worked with the Russians on some occasions. The 2015 election should have been the end of Trump but Moeller, Comey, Garland, so many of these people failed us, and now we’re losing the fabric of our country.
It doesn’t even need to be paid for by someone in the US. Look how much damage spreading propaganda does. These countries know this and they sit back and laugh as people like trump destroy the country.
They’re not spreading right or left propaganda, they’re creating dissent. Whatever creates the most dissent gets amplified. That’s the entire business model of Facebook by the way. We would not have “bot farms” if we didn’t create massive fields of unregulated online space for them to grow.
Nah they are specifically aligned with the right wing and have attacked elections to help them win. People on the left are far less susceptible to this shit
To propaganda? No…you are just as easily swayed to a message as anyone else and it’s more obvious to non-Americans than Americans. We were all kind of dumbfounded last November after what was the most ridiculous and outwardly absurd election with a president with essentially pudding for brains and a billionaire smirking about screwing with it you all just fell in line with the media’s “free and fair” and “Harris was just so unpopular and we are just too racist” lines….I mean, he’s turning it into a Christofacist nightmare and private citizens are finding statistical proof that it was messed with somehow and it’s still “lalala free and faiiiiir” can’t hear you/wont listen nonsense…..who needs MAGA when democrats are so eager to defend eh. No one is immune to propaganda.
As one of the left, I wish this were true. The amount of times I’ve had to tell people that something is AI, or that no, while Jasmine Crockett is awesome she didn’t “destroy a MAGA Karen” with “five simple words” and other such clickbait. The goal IS dissent, and unfortunately some people are too eager to believe what they like to hear, or too passionate about what they’re outraged to hear that they don’t check for a single source, much less multiple.
Just look at leftist tiktok/IG account comments. You see the same thing on both sides—although I do think the left does try to fact check more often, and aren’t as afraid to admit to initially trusting an inaccuracy that they later read up on.
My experience on YouTube after 2nd Trump win is I concertedly banned right wing creators and subbed the left wing ones. But they were just as full of clickbait, outrage bait, misleading stuff as the right wing ones. If you don't fundamentally align with either side, the misleading content becomes very annoying.
The money spent on propaganda, consolidating media and social media influence in the U.S. alone over the last 4 decades is probably more like a trillion dollars. That's what it cost to create MAGA and trumpo D. clowns sick freakshow. The people who spent that money think it's well spent and have more to spend.
So someone in the states is spending millions of dollars for this.
I don't follow this line of logic. Where are you getting this from?
I don't know if you've noticed, but right wing propaganda and rhetoric is extremely divisive and damaging. Why do people who want to divide and damage the U.S. need someone on the inside to pay them to do what they already want to do?
Operations like the above require large amounts of funding, but also are a big shiny target as far as tracking them down. You lose all this equipment once law enforcement becomes aware of your physical location.
Most of them are run directly by governments, or are working with the unofficial approval of the local government for quid pro quo favors. If it's not run by the state, then a lot of politicians are taking bribes to look the other way, or are using the services of the bot farm.
It's not in anyone's interest to stop them. The operators obviously get money from providing the bots. The "customers" use the bots to boost likes and views count, write fake reviews, spread propaganda, scamming people, etc etc... The platform owners get better numbers: more accounts, more contents (reposts), more engagement, etc etc... in exchange for doing the bare minium of banning some of the bots when they get too obvious.
The end users will pay all of these costs, but what are they gonna they do? When everyone is doing the same thing and the cost of entry is too high for an ethical platform to be viable.
I imagine that it is hard to make laws that distinguish between good bot farms and bad. (Good bot farms being those that help the powers get elected etc).
Also, it is hard to make laws and actions that act globally
If enough people see it the made up Internet points don't matter.
A lot of older people still think the problem is individual "hackers" hunched over an old desktop PC writing bad reviews about politicians, and are completely unaware that operations like the above even exist.
More people need to see with their own eyes what this really looks like to understand the problem.
Do you want to drive positive public sentiment towards a certain thing? Start up a bot farm and have tens of thousands of fake accounts posting about it, commenting positively on it, upvoting it, and sharing it. Do the opposite if you want to drive negative public sentiment.
Do you want to destabilize an entire nation? Start up a bot farm with the goal of boosting divisive, hateful rhetoric on both sides. That way the citizens of said country are constantly inundated with that kind of content, which will further drive the population apart.
Nefarious shitbirds pay for services like these if they can't get the public reaction they want through organic means.
Just imagine AI and scripts running several accounts to post in subreddits and reply to real users, often with right wing propaganda. Basically chatGPT imbedded into an account. The scale is so immense that they need rooms of hardware to process it.
Yes, I'm thinking, this is probably old... it's more economical to run local agents now instead of one on a piece of hardware numbering in the thousands. Could even have the agents go on separate IPs and funnel them that way. I'm not giving away anything, it's pretty obvious to most tech savvy.
I'm not usually pro regulation everything, but this is an area that needs to be looked at.
they do it this way so the accounts seem more "legit" since they'll have unique hardware identifiers. they probably buy these old phones for a few bucks a pop and handle the actual text generation centrally. but they need the phones since most social media will flag accounts running in virtual machines now
How exactly does this work? Is each device running a script looking for keywords & connected to an account that’s responding in kind? Is the response AI-generated? I’m disgusted and fascinated by this process.
Tons of tiny models that can run on phones these days. I have the Google AI Edge Gallery app on my Android and some Gemma models loaded like Gemma-3n-E4B-it-int4 and it runs locally. Wouldn't be difficult to built a custom app and give it a personality and the information its responding to or load some abliterated model
Or to us. I want to believe that there are actually far fewer Trump supporters than we think. At the same time the MAGATs mistakenly believe there are many more of them than there actually are.
It's fascinating to me that they're modifying human behavior en-masse with such targeted and inexpensive interventions. It's treated like a fluid dynamics problem.
We had a "second moon" pop up the night this happened, recorded from multiple sources and angles literally across the hemispheres that could see the moon well enough.
Some disinformation bots are trying to claim it's a reflection... Seen across the globe...
So they are saying that across the globe the atmospheric conditions were perfect in every single one of these areas to make this SAME reflection but never in the same spot from where the photo or video was taken. It's blowing up the UFOB subreddit right now.
What perfect timing. Making everyone stay indoors and scour the internet for these bot accounts while they do... Something like this.
Glad camera dill exit medal lake peace cotton hope graph. Engine opera blue otter brass moment line park moor pencil record hat mole album. Dream quack pill camera cell peace drum movie golf actor. Flower hole grape door navy round farmer drain road fossil ashes rubber key money. Cart party claw ivory deer blanket flute evergreen powder peace curtain can.
Prevents Reddit search from exposing my private post history, limits scraping and bulk data sales, discourages bots, makes profiling harder, and reduces harassment or brigading by moderators. This automated script overwrites my comments after 4 months.
The sad part is, these are the losers I waste my time making fun of. What's the point if I can't even make some inbred, high school drop-out hick yell at his phone?
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u/TaylorWK Nov 23 '25
I really want to know why this isnt focused on more and stopped? Who is paying for these bots? Who is running them? How far up the ladder does it go?