Marcus Hutchins :verified: on Nostr: Something I've always found fascinating is social media troll bots, because on paper ...
Something I've always found fascinating is social media troll bots, because on paper they shouldn't work at all.
Every US election, a bunch of the US' adversaries spin up call centers where they register social media accounts pretending to be Americans. The goal is to basically drive a wedge between the left and right by taking up the other side of any political debate, while being as annoying as humanly possible.
In theory it shouldn't work, because the people running the accounts are minimum wage employees in foreign countries who aren't Americans and have zero understanding of American culture or politics. It should be a "how do you do, fellow kids" type situation, where they immediately get clocked by any actual American.
But it works fairly well, and I think a big factor in why it does is the existence of MAGA. Their politics are so inflammatory, simplistic, and devoid of nuance, that it's actually really easy for someone with little understand of US culture to replicate their talking points and debate style.
So essentially what you get is a situation where the left can't discern MAGA trollbots from actual MAGA voters, the right can't discern MAGA troll bots from actual MAGA voters, MAGA voters can't discern MAGA trollbots from themselves, and MAGA voters can't discern left wing troll bots from their own mental caricatures of how the left behaves. The left wing troll bots seem a lot more apparent to everyone, except for MAGA, but the MAGA ones blend in almost perfectly.
As a result it turns a "this person clearly has no understanding of the US, US politics, or US culture" type situation into a massive raging debate where nobody's really sure who's real.
Every US election, a bunch of the US' adversaries spin up call centers where they register social media accounts pretending to be Americans. The goal is to basically drive a wedge between the left and right by taking up the other side of any political debate, while being as annoying as humanly possible.
In theory it shouldn't work, because the people running the accounts are minimum wage employees in foreign countries who aren't Americans and have zero understanding of American culture or politics. It should be a "how do you do, fellow kids" type situation, where they immediately get clocked by any actual American.
But it works fairly well, and I think a big factor in why it does is the existence of MAGA. Their politics are so inflammatory, simplistic, and devoid of nuance, that it's actually really easy for someone with little understand of US culture to replicate their talking points and debate style.
So essentially what you get is a situation where the left can't discern MAGA trollbots from actual MAGA voters, the right can't discern MAGA troll bots from actual MAGA voters, MAGA voters can't discern MAGA trollbots from themselves, and MAGA voters can't discern left wing troll bots from their own mental caricatures of how the left behaves. The left wing troll bots seem a lot more apparent to everyone, except for MAGA, but the MAGA ones blend in almost perfectly.
As a result it turns a "this person clearly has no understanding of the US, US politics, or US culture" type situation into a massive raging debate where nobody's really sure who's real.