From Dr. Malone’s Substack:
PsyWar: AI Bots Manipulate Your Feelings
The magazine “Fast Company” recently published an article on bot farms, detailing how these automated systems are increasingly sophisticated and can manipulate social media and other online platforms. According to Fast Company, bot farms are used to deploy thousands of bots that mimic human behavior, often to mislead, defraud, or steal from users. These bot farms can create fake social media engagement to promote fabricated narratives, making ideas appear more popular than they actually are.
They are used by governments, financial influencers, and entertainment insiders to amplify specific narratives worldwide. For instance, bot farms can be used to create the illusion that a significant number of people are excited or upset about a particular topic, such as a volatile stock or celebrity gossip, thereby tricking social media algorithms into displaying these posts to a wider audience.
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Welcome to the world of social media mind control.By amplifying free speech with fake speech, you can numb the brain into believing just about anything. Surrender your blissful ignorance and swallow the red pill. You’re about to discover how your thinking is being engineered by modern masters of deception.
The means by which information gets drilled into our psyches has become automated. Lies are yesterday’s problem. Today’s problem is the use of bot farms to trick social media algorithms into making people believe those lies are true. A lie repeated often enough becomes truth.
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But Tim’s insights opened my mind to aspects of the current landscape that Jill and I did not cover in the book. In particular, he provided great examples of the effects and use of “small rooming” – otherwise known as freedom of speech but not of reach (which is explicitly a core “X” algorithmically-enforced policy). But what really expanded my awareness was his discussion of how AI-driven bots are being deployed.
[He discusses how a certain well-known influencer was “delegitimized” by the use of AI and bot farms.]
Here’s the thing- the majority of the new “followers” who were egging on the influencer were not real people. They were bots. Bot armies that had been launched specifically to drive the influencer into self-delegitimization by promoting and advancing what most perceived as hate speech. Mission accomplished, and another influential conservative voice bit the dust.
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Bot farm amplification is being used to make ideas on social media seem more popular than they really are. A bot farm consists of hundreds and thousands of smartphones controlled by one computer. In data-center-like facilities, racks of phones use fake social media accounts and mobile apps to share and engage. The bot farm broadcasts coordinated likes, comments, and shares to make it seem as if a lot of people are excited or upset about something like a volatile stock, a global travesty, or celebrity gossip—even though they’re not.
Meta calls it “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” It fools the social network’s algorithm into showing the post to more people because the system thinks it’s trending. Since the fake accounts pass the Turing test, they escape detection.
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If one of the leading social media intel companies in the world has a hard time distinguishing between real accounts and bots- particularly AI-enabled bots- then if you think you can easily tell the difference, you are fooling yourself.
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Today, stock market manipulators use bot farms to amplify fake posts about “hot” stocks on Reddit, Discord, and X…. The self-proclaimed finfluencers behind the schemes are making millions in profit by coordinating armies of avatars, sock puppets, and bots to hype thinly traded stocks so they can scalp a vig after the price increases.
“We find so many instances where there’s no news story,” says Adam Wasserman, CFO of Narravance. “There’s no technical indicator. There are just bots posting things like ‘this stock’s going to the moon’ and ‘greatest stock, pulling out of my 401k.’ But they aren’t real people. It’s all fake.”
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Malicious actors engineer virality by establishing bots that leach inside communities for months, sometimes years, before they get activated. … Other tricks include staggering bot activity to occur in local time zones, …
Using AI-driven personas with interests like cryptocurrency or dogs, bots are set to follow real Americans and cross-engage with other bots to build up perceived credibility. It’s a concept known as social graph engineering, which involves infiltrating broad interest communities that align with certain biases, such as left- or right-leaning politics.
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And here is the mousetrap that caught our influencer formerly with the “Daily Caller”:
On October 7, 2023, as Hamas launched its deadly terror attack into Israel, a coordinated disinformation campaign—powered by Russian and Iranian bot networks—flooded social media with false claims suggesting the attack was an inside job. Social media posts in Hebrew on X with messages like “There are traitors in the army” and “Don’t trust your commanders” were overwhelmed with retweets, comments, and likes from bot accounts.
Along with the organic pro-Palestinian sentiment on the internet, Russian and Iranian bot farms promote misinformation to inflame divisions in the West. Their objective is to pit liberals against conservatives. They amplify Hamas’s framing of the conflict as a civil rights issue, rather than the terrorist organization’s real agenda—which is the destruction of the state of Israel and the expansion of Shariah law and Islamic fundamentalism. The social media posts selected for coordinated amplification by Russian and Iranian actors tend to frame Palestinians exclusively as victims, promoting simplistic victim-victimizer or colonizer-Indigenous narratives—false binaries amplified not to inform but to inflame and divide democratic societies from within.
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In the case of the pro-Palestinian campus protests, they erupted before the Israeli death toll from the Hamas attack had even been established. How could it happen so quickly? Radical Islamic terrorists were still on the loose inside Israel….
“We think most of what we see online is real. But most of what we see is deceptive,” said Ori Shaashua,… “It doesn’t make sense when 418 social media accounts generate 3 million views in two hours,” says Shaashua.
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