A Friday New York Times investigation headlined “Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media” gets right at the inevitable endpoint of a decade of manipulation of social media by MAGA propagandists, a welcome streamlining for a movement that once relied on sophisticated algorithm-jacking by Cambridge Analytica before the 2016 election – and the Russian troll farms that put half-assed, comically inept efforts to keeping the zone flooded with their broken English and obvious copypasta well after the Orange Degenerate did scam his way into power the first time.
Sorry, “Internet Research Agency” dipshit, but Mother Russia still needs someone to test for Ukrainian landmines along the front. Show the same patriotic zeal there as you did on The Hill.
Anyway, the Times’s article’s pretty funny when they get down to the part where they write “It’s not clear who created the AI accounts, and determining whether they are the product of a hired content farm, a foreign influence operation, an experiment or something else is difficult,” as though it actually matters when TikTok is controlled by a pro-Trump cabal, Twitter by Elon Musk who is at the very least anti-anti-Trump these days, and Facebook/Instagram by fucking wiener Mark Zuckerberg who sucks up to the Orange Allah even after Trump threatened him with prison time. The platforms themselves could be generating the ridiculously anodyne content from within for all we know.
Oh and make sure you’re sitting down for this part: “Neither The Times nor the researchers it consulted found any similar left-leaning networks.” GET THE FUCK OUT! NOOOOO WAYYYYY!
“People gearing up for the midterms should expect that they might see some of this content on their accounts, that it might be crafted to be particularly engaging or exciting to them,” said Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, a co-director of the Governance and Responsible AI Lab (GRAIL) at Purdue University. The Times writes that at least some of the accounts are in other posts hawking “hair removal creams or tours to China,” which isn’t really different from real MAGA influencers plugging MyPillow and other stupid bullshit a couple of times a day in between their other content.
As for efficacy who knows how much it’ll help the GOP. Sure doesn’t seem like they’re getting the dumbasses that fall for it to show up to the polls for special elections lately. However if the short-term value is null and the AI content is obvious you can’t put a price on the larger macro benefit of sowing mistrust and training people to disregard the real content as AI propaganda. After all, a world in which “Uh man. I don’t know what to believe, this TikToker’s story about Trump’s Medicaid cuts closing down my local hospital is probably complete bullshit AI slop too” is the go-to for no-info dopes incapable of evaluating content critically is a world Republicans are perfectly happy to live in.