The Facts and Figures: What am I up against?
How do you make something viral? Aspiring writers, commentators and observers such as myself bless the internet with diverse, insightful and provocative takes on practically any subject you can think of. But as we all know, the challenge is getting people to read it.
That takes trending, search algorithms, mechanics built into sites such as YouTube and Twitter to lift what people are talking about up in prominence so more eyes can take in and digest what a person has to say. It’s a wonderful system, a victimless method of rewarding good content for being what it is — good content.
But as with anything humans touch, give something long enough and someone or something will abuse, contort and manipulate it with much sinister purposes in order to push a narrative that to the casual viewer might seem informative, but underneath lies a black, twisted lifeless heart.
The results are in and…wait, what?
According to a recent study, there are nearly 48 million bots running right now on twitter — and that number could be massively underestimated. 48 million conversations per minute that you might think are real, but in actual fact provide a manipulative form of psychological warfare that has taken international political conflict onto the digital platform in a way far more destructive than any bomb that has been dropped in human history before. After all, how can you rebuild something that on the face looks like it is not even broken?
Now 48 million is quite a big number, but, well, you’re thinking, there are a lot of users on twitter. 330 million to be exact. 48 million accounts can’t be influencing everyone, can they?
Yes, they can
This is an audit of the president’s twitter account. You can see it for yourself here
Nearly 15 million accounts of the President of the United States are not real — they are machines of war, converging on the most controversial and chilling account on social media today. Doesn’t seem right does it, that out of 48 million bots, a THIRD OF THEM follow the President.
Their job is disinformation, mistrust in our media, and to cover up the ties between the Kremlin and The White House. To do this, it abuses the trust of millions of Resistance revolutionaries with a barrage of misinformation that sucks in the poorly educated and low achieving, while tying us up with pointless arguments that go nowhere, all with the same talking points.
And This is just ONE PLATFORM
Do not think that you are safe from Bot manipulation if you don’t have a twitter account either. Recently a scandal hit YouTube where a news broadcast reached #1 Trending — hundreds of thousands of eyes sucked into a narrative constructed by manipulating information with a false context
This video was artificially boosted by an army of Russian propaganda bots on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and 4Chan (this site is for another article in itself). It took less than 2 hours of Bot manipulation accompanied by a sinister narrative of confusion, fear and anger to be spread across millions of people across the world. Taking advantage of YouTube’s built in algorithms, the fact that it was a trustworthy source of information (this is an actual report on CBS Los Angeles channel) the video was promoted in good faith — because good bots only do what they are told as well as bad bots.
I suppose it’s proof in a way of the moronic NRA public stance — A good guy with a Bot cannot stop a bad guy with a bot.
There are many more levels of bots, I haven’t even touched Facebook yet, but I hope you can see now the emerging crisis that we are up against. Millions of people not even on the internet have no idea they are being assaulted by Vladimir Putin’s tech warmachine, it’s up to us to take information like this and return truth to the people.
Steff Maxson
