Twitter’s AI Bots Are Taking Over To Push People To The Right (Again)
Yes, it’s 2016 all over again. This time, though, Elmo seems to be encouraging bot use.
Do you remember how Twitter became a major troll hotspot right before the 2016 election? I sure as hell do. There was a point where I actually questioned my sanity because so many people got so pro-Trump and argumentative so quickly.
It just seemed wrong. And strange. Surely, people weren’t getting this heated over the election, right? Well, I was right. It was later revealed that Russia had troll farms with people hired to shout down support for Democrats and left-leaning causes.
Russian trolls are now a major trope of social media. We’ve become more skeptical about what we read online, to a point. Our collective started to see the man behind the proverbial curtain — and his name is Putin.
Recently, Russian bots have been making a comeback on X/Twitter.
Author’s Note: Fuck using X. I’m calling it Twitter because that’s how I want to remember it. Twitter was cool. X, not so much.
There has been a noted uptick in Russian bots, and this is not just a matter of people accusing bots. It’s a matter of having real proof. Recently, a set of images went viral on Reddit, exposing a “verified” user that was actually a ChatGPT bot.
I mean, it was exposed because the bot ran out of ChatGPT credits. Others started to use bot commands to change what it said, to hilarious results. Though the bot account was suspended, it highlights a growing issue on social media.
In 2016, around 45 percent of all pro-Russia accounts were bots. That number has grown since then. Their goal? To divide and conquer the United States with rage-inducing tweets.
Users on Twitter are aware of how bad the bot problem has become.
If you go onto Reddit’s Twitter subreddit, you’re going to see a lot of complaints about how bad the bot problem has become. It’s not just about Russian trolls, either. Crypto scams, OnlyFans models, and other businesses are botting up, too.
Contrary to what ol’ Elmo said, the verification checkmark does nothing to stop them. If anything, it just means that he got a nice, fat paycheck from Putin. (Those checkmarks aren’t going to pay for themselves!)
With that said, it’s also common knowledge that most of these bots are right-leaning. Musk himself is also right-leaning. It’s not surprising that he’s turning a blind eye to the bot issue while also asking new users to pay to interact on his social media account.