Transparency can be so inconvenient.
Elon Musk’s X recently added a new feature that–among other things– allowed users to see where an individual poster was located. Guess what? A huge number of those supposedly “real Americans” turned out to be what we might delicately call “foreign agitators.”
As Lincoln Square (among many others) has reported,
MAGA is not just a political movement of goateed, 50-ish white dudes who all rock that same avatar of them copping what they imagine is an expression of manly vigor in the front seat of their behind-on-the-payments Ford F-350.
It’s a delivery system.
A supply chain for chaos that starts in Moscow and Tehran and Beijing, runs through bot farms in industrial parks outside St. Petersburg or the Pardis Technology Park north of Tehran, or some Nigerian click farm, or a Chinese-criminal-owned social media and tech scam prison in the wilds of Burma, bounces off a rage-merchant influencer “from Ohio” who has never set foot in America, and ends up in your pissed off MAGA uncle’s Facebook feed as a “patriotic truth.”
What conclusions can we draw-should we draw–from the revelation that, as the linked article says, “a bunch of ‘red-blooded American MAGA patriots’ were not American at all. Why would posters from places like Russia, Nigeria, Iran, India, Thailand, and Eastern Europe be cosplaying as neighbors and “real Americans” who were patriotic MAGA partisans?”
It turns out that a significant percentage of MAGA’s online “grassroots” is AstroTurf shipped from overseas. The multiple accounts that make a fringe movement feel much bigger isn’t composed of real people exchanging real attitudes and beliefs. Instead, it’s thousands of fake ones, formed to promote divisive and polarizing content and turn Americans against each other.
Researchers have been documenting this fake MAGA ecosystem for years: foreign accounts that become amplifiers of actual American MAGA propagandists, plus engagement farms, plus MAGA-centric media outlets who either don’t know or don’t care they’re serving as useful idiots. This Twitter reveal was just the icing on the cake.
These aren’t random trolls freelancing for clicks. The U.S. government (until Trump’s second term, of course) has repeatedly disrupted Russian-directed influence networks aimed at American politics, including domain seizures and sanctions for coordinated malign-influence campaigns.
It turns out that our “techie” world has changed the nature of warfare. In the Ukraine war, battles are fought with drones; in today’s version of the Cold War, Russia and other countries with grievances against America don’t need to fire bullets or endanger their soldiers. Instead, they can use tweets to set one American against others, to disrupt the political environment, to encourage enmity. They can turn Americans against each other, with a minimal financial investment and no need to buy weapons of war. As the article quite accurately points out, “social media is a perfect asymmetric weapon; nations that could never take on America in hard power use the addiction of social media that defines our entire culture to hack our politics, our society, and our brains.”
And why does this work? Why do their domestic American targets fall for the tactic?
Because MAGA’s media ecosystem is already pre-programmed for foreign capture, give it a big, loud, dumb narrative that says American liberals eat babies, the U.S. is a decadent and failing experiment, democracy is fake, all the most lurid conspiracies are real, liberalism is a disease, and strongmen should rule. The whole machine lights up like a Christmas tree….
The Kremlin doesn’t need to invade America to build a Ministry of Propaganda; it buys it cheap, drop-ships it here, and MAGA sells it in bulk.
And the foreign architecture of amplification is at its very center. Every time a MAGA influencer runs a pro-Russia theme, or anything else that deepens the engineered political and social divides in America, these foreign engagement networks show up like a flash mob.
The posts spike. The replies swarm. A million clicks and likes make the MAGA faithful feel like they’re in the biggest, baddest tribe.
What’s most infuriating is that the tech bros could stop this, but they’ve chosen not to.
Independent reporting has documented this activity, and Meta, YouTube, and the others have promised to address it. They haven’t. As we know, the social media business model is engagement, and engagement comes from outrage. If that outrage is manufactured by foreign propaganda, well…it still works. So, as the article concludes, “MAGA gets a firehose of artificial oxygen from abroad, and Silicon Valley stands there with its hands in its pockets.”
Once Trump is gone, we have our work cut out for us.
I can’t say I’m all that surprised. As Steve Bannon (barf) said, “We gotta tear it all down.” This is part of it.
To the more aware and enlightened people who are not totally brainwashed by MAGA bullshit, this has to be a “WELL, DUH!” Moment. After all, what did we expect from dummies with too much money and not enough brains … or anything else.
If Elon got rid of his bot armies, who would like and repost his posts? Same with Trump. These guys buy followers by the hundreds of thousands. Nearly all of them have pseudonyms.
One point of contention with the article is, “Why didn’t they mention the hundreds of influencers paid by Israel?”
The Laura Loomers and Ben Shapiro, including the late Charlie Kirk, etc. We have videos of Bibi Netanyahu gathering dozens of paid influencers to help get more support for Israel. The dummies actually posted the video. Bibi tells them to work with Elon at X since he’s a friend.
One additional note, you have to be wary of any claims that our adversaries are behind these online efforts. With a VSP that scrambles your IP address, you can set up accounts from anywhere. Anytime someone says Russia did this or China did this, I am suspicious. People should realize that our intelligence agencies hire hundreds, if not thousands, of young people to work on social media. They have the equipment to make it seem like account holders could come from any country in the world to stir up their own shit. It’s done frequently. It was done in the whole RussiaGate scandal.
If Russia, China, or Iran were to take the time to set up online accounts to influence our public, they certainly wouldn’t be ignorant enough to use IP addresses from their own country, which are easily traceable. 😉
I am sure that the same bot farms are sending outrage to the extreme end of liberal social media as they do to MAGA. I suppose that statement falls into the category of “Thanks Mr. Obvious!” Still it is worth pointing out that it is not just a one-sided phenomenon.
Just another tenuous attemp at agit-prop by Kagan-Nuland Inc to stir up more support for the proxy war supporting Ukrainazis.
By the glaring omission of not mentioning Israeli government astroturfing…
Propaganda at its most obvious.
“Our New Digital Reality”
Progress does NOT always mean improvement.
Ian, I wonder which country you’re actually from? 🙂
It should be noted that these exposed accounts just represent the stupid and careless. It’s a trivial matter to use a VPN to make yourself appear as though your online activity is coming from almost anywhere on Earth. You just set your VPN to Ohio (for example) and then pretend to be from there. It’ll all look just fine. So, I figure there are at least as many as were found still hidden.
John H :
It’s obvious, I’m in Russia.
Moreover, I support National HealthCare–which means not only am I a socialist– but most likely a puppet of Putin and a bona-fide communist!!!
I don’t know how X implemented the “location” feature, but you know there will soon be work arounds. Todd, you mentioned a crazy video. Is it authentic? AI is really good, so be suspicious.
Social Media is all about clicks, and part of what is driving this is not just state actors. Individuals in far flung places have found a way to make supplemental income off the advertisements they can insert into popular feeds, so why not throw a little chum in shark infested waters where you are guaranteed to get millions of bites.
Sheila,
I’ve been thinking this for some time as a daily reader of your blog, but perhaps its time to say something. Perhaps the time has come for you to begin requiring real full names and locations of your blog posters. Not that some of them wont lie, they will. But anonymity and the absence of responsibility for what you say is the fundamental problem with social media. Its what’s gotten us all into the mess that you describe so well today. Consider it…
Yes. Perhaps require genuine social security numbers and proof of US citizenship to post.
Great idea.
Excellent, Ian!
So, shall we post a story about Ptin being from Alpha Centauri?
I have no idea of this Ptin.??
Person?
Place?
Or thing?
Alpha Centauri is a great tune by English band UFO.
Been using the word DEMOCERY my whole life.
a DEMOCRATE till a few years ago.
When I figured out NEITHER party works for MOST OF us.
Still am Way to liberal minded to Ever BE A MAGA REPUBLICAN.
PS not a good idea to be one who DEMANDs, others do their bidding.