I had no idea we had gotten this far... how much of everything we see is manufactured? how much of everything we say and do has been written for us? How are they so afraid of wrongthink when they can just bury anything you say in a mountain of bots?
This is a MAJOR problem. China has warehouses with botfarms for marketing. Israel is notorious for doing this shit in online spaces. The left especially does this through Super PACs and Dark money groups. The right is completely out of touch and useless with technology and never really got into it that much (They do do it, but on a microscopic scale). Politicians are even more out of touch and don't regulate it and probably wouldn't regulate it if they did know.
Companies love to astroturf their products by paying a chinese botfarm to shill it. Disney got caught doing this with The Little Nigmaid recently. It's like Monsanto, when Reddit has a front page thread that trashes them, bots and shills swarm in and do damage control. I read fox news at work and saw this shit in real time today when some completely nothing article about Jim Jordan being pushed for speaker was getting flooded with Reddit types going "But what about Trump selling nuclear sub secrets to an Australian CEO!"
Here's two videos that showcase Chinese bot farms. So you have dozens of people running thousands of accounts.
AI has been a problem for YEARS, and didn't just appear with CHATGPT this year. Some of these places have had advanced enough AI to argue with people for years.
Here's an r/politics thread from a few years ago where the thread was about some impeachment bullshit and a botfarm talking about the presidential debate got incorrectly turned on in it. (Warning: Huge image)
https://i.imgur.com/Q4LoTRd.jpg
I thought I had that test that was conducted by a guy where the guy was sending messages to bots with the message "This link is a virus" and the bots would click the link INSTANTLY as the mail went through and reply back "it's not a virus". The goal was the grab the ip range and the time the link was clicked. And they were all coming from the same ip range in AWS. I always fucking save that thing and forget where I put it, and the place I put it is never the folder where I save all this shit for easy access.
As a consolation prize, here's reddit stating that the most active reddit city is an american airforce base.
