Unpopular opinion: “the other side is just bots” is the new “the other side is just paid protestors.”
Bot warfare is a very real and very serious form of information warfare but the idea that any particular political actor is using it disproportionately is pretty difficult to prove. This article, for example, identifies a study which found a third of internet traffic is made up of “bad bots.” The study shows that the VAST majority of bad bot traffic is targeting Gaming (virtual currency farming), IT (DDoS), and Data Scraping, with propaganda bots making up less than 2%.
Unpopular opinion: “the other side is just bots” is the new “the other side is just paid protestors.”
That’s literally what’s happening here…
They use to pay people thru an app to do this, now they use bots…
Like, I got called a racist once for telling another white employee that if they wanted the admin leave for an office holiday party, they had to stay at work till it started.
That obviously doesn’t make me a racist, but if you put on an Obama mask and started making monkey noises… That’s still racist, even tho that old guy called me racist for not letting him leave before the holiday party started.
Before they had bots, they had the Act.il app.
People could submit random social media comments/posts that were critical of Israel, and if you went to that site and commented, you got “points” that could be redeemed for gift cards.
Not much money, but it was all online so people from a lower income country could make decent money off it compared to local employment.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ishmaeldaro/act-il-social-media-astroturfing-israel-palestine
After blow back they delisted the app
Now I think it’s just a website instead.
It’s good people are finally talking about all the propaganda Israel puts out tho. But it’s not a new development. They’re just switching from humans in poverty to AI.
Hell, we’re probably better off if they think AI can do as good of a job at this as humans.
Quick edit:
Mentioning the act.il app on Reddit used to get you banned from a lot of the major news/politics subs
So it was really hard to talk about.
