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As our society buries itself deeper and deeper into the cave of social media, we are seeing a growing divide between what happens in our real world and what we see on platforms like X and TikTok.
A bombshell new report from the National Contagion Research Institute shows much of this is being directed by our foreign enemies. It also shows one of their top goals is to infiltrate and divide the MAGA movement.
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According to NCRI, Russia and Iran have been employing tens of thousands of bots to inject extreme rhetoric into American social media discourse, and perhaps more importantly, to artificially inflate the influence of content creators who push radical and divisive agendas.
To quote one NCRI analyst, “If you talk to Republicans right now, more than 80% of them support the war against Iran. But if you go on Twitter [X] you get the sense that there is a civil war raging.”
This manipulation of social media by our enemies is far more insidious than most Americans realize, so let’s walk through how this kind of information operation, the technical name for propaganda, works.
Imagine, for example, that there was an obscure comedian, or Instagram model who began to “just ask questions,” about why Jews run everything, or why black people commit crimes.
Even better, they might post about how they aren’t allowed to ask these very questions and insinuate that neither are you.
At this point, according to the report, Russian and Iranian bot armies will begin to follow these radical accounts, massively pumping up their numbers. It will like and share the most divisive content, and work behind the scenes to make this person famous.
On platforms that monetize interaction, this can mean very large payouts for creators, as spy bots mindlessly watch their videos over and over, and the beauty of it is that the content creator never even has to know they are getting paid off.
When we talk about influencers being bought and paid for by foreign foes, it may not mean a duffle bag full of cash in a bus station locker, simply by using thousands of bots to juice the numbers, the social media companies themselves facilitate the payouts.
Perhaps the most obvious way we can see this malign foreign influence online is in the incredible amount of casual racism and antisemitism, supposedly being posted by Americans, that we see on X.
These hate posts range from straight-up Nazi apologism, to memes about fatherless black homes, or weird eugenics IQ graphs, and if their prevalence in the algorithm accurately reflects the level of racism in America, then this is a deeply racist country.
Only it isn’t. Because X does not accurately reflect our society, instead countries that despise America are infusing hate into the platform and propping up the handful of real people willing to push racism and division.
What the Russian and Iranian bot farms hope we will believe is that America is full of secret racists who will only say their true beliefs through their anonymous personas, but this is absurd, America knows IRL, that that kind of racism is buried in our past.
The question becomes, what can we do to fight back against this massive information operation aimed at our minds?
Liberals have long taken the exact wrong approach, which is to try to protect the end user from malicious content. This always adds up to censorship, one way or the other.
The better approach, at least as far as the government is concerned, is to target the bot farms and countries that back them. This can be done through cyberattacks, sanctions, any number of measures.
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There is also a role for the social media industry to play here. We are hearing growing calls for X to use a flag to identify the country of origin of its accounts. This would immediately help users see through the foreign operations.
The silver lining in all of this, as the report shows, is that making the leap from influence on a social media screen to influence in the real world is not as easy as we might have once imagined.
These foreign-backed influencers have few outlets they can go to off of social media. Sure, Piers Morgan may put on anyone with 250k followers no matter how awful they are, but Main Street America isn’t seeing it.
As a free society, America is by definition vulnerable to informational attacks, and as citizens in that free society all of us bear a responsibility to process the unfettered flow of information we have access to in responsible ways.
Make no mistake, your social media feed is under direct foreign attack. So far, the attacks haven’t done too much damage, but keeping it that way, first and foremost, starts with all of us.
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