While our society is buried deeper and deeper in the cave of social media, we see a growing gap between what happens in our real world and what we see on platforms such as X and Tiktok.
A new report from the Bom of the National Contagion Research Institute shows that much of it is led by our foreign enemies. It also shows one of their top goals to infiltrate and distribute the Maga movement.
According to NCRI, Russia and Iran have hired tens of thousands of bots to inject extreme rhetoric in the US discourse of social media, and perhaps even more important, to artificially inflate the influence of content makers who blow out radical and division agendas.
To quote an NCRI analyst: “If you now talk to Republicans, more than 80% of them support Iran. But if you go on Twitter [X] You get the feeling that a civil war is raging. “
US President Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House before they board Marine in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, February 28, 2025: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty images)
This manipulation of social media by our enemies is much more compiler than most Americans realize, so let’s go through how this type of information operation, the technical name for propaganda, works.
For example, imagine that there was an obscure comedian or Instagram model that started asking ‘just questions’, about why Jews run everything, or why black people commit crimes.
Even better, they can post about how they are not allowed to ask these questions and insinuate that you are not either.
At the moment, according to the report Russian and Iranian bot armies, these radical reports will start to follow, so that they pump their number massively. It will hold the most division and share the most division and work behind the scenes to make this person famous.
On platforms that earn money with interaction, this can mean very large payments for makers, because Spy -Bots always watch their videos, and the beauty is that the content -maker never even needs to know that they are being paid off.
Social media apps on a telephone screen (Istock)
When we talk about influencers who are purchased and paid for by foreign enemies, this may not mean a plunge bag full of cash in a bus station cupboard, simply using thousands of bots to sap the figures, the social media companies themselves facilitate the payments.
Perhaps the most obvious way in which we can see this malignant foreign influence online is in the incredible amount of casual racism and anti -Semitism, supposedly by Americans, which we see on X.
These hate posts vary from the straight Nazi tracing, to memes about fatherless black houses, or weird IQ graphics from Eugenics, and if their prevalence in algorithm accurately reflects the level of racism in America, this is a deep racist country.
Only that is not. Because X does not accurately reflect our society, instead of bringing countries that despite America to bring to the platform and to support the handful of real people who are willing to push racism and division.
What the Russian and Iranian Bot farms hope we will believe that America is full of secret racists who will only say their true beliefs by their anonymous personas, but this is absurd, America knows IRL, that that kind of racism is buried in our past.
The question is, what can we do to fight back against this enormous information operation that is aimed at our mind?
Liberals have long followed the exact wrong approach, namely trying to protect the end user against malignant content. This always occurs with censorship, somehow.
The better approach, at least as far as the government is concerned, is to focus on bot farms and countries that support them. This can be done by cyber attacks, sanctions, a number of measures.
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There is also a role for the social media industry to play here. We hear growing calls for X to use a flag to identify the country of origin of its accounts. This would help users immediately by enduring foreign operations.
The silver lining in all this, as the report shows, is that making the leap influence on a screen of social media to influence in the real world is not as easy as we could ever have imagined.
These influencers supported by abroad have few points of sale where they can go on social media. Of course, Piers Morgan can attract someone with 250k followers, no matter how terrible they are, but Main Street America doesn’t see it.
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As a free society, America is by definition vulnerable to informative attacks, and as citizens in that free society we all bear a responsibility to process the unobstructed flow of information that we have access to responsible ways.
Make no mistake, your social media feed is under direct foreign attack. Until now, the attacks have not been caused too much damage, but moving in the first place, starts in the first place with all of us.
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