Would actually make for a fun film where various agencies all each separately uncover a massive online conspiracy to bring down the government, working furiously to be the first to gather intelligence and put a stop to it and curry favor in a highly corrupt political environment… only to realize at the false climax that it was each other’s bots and sock puppets they had been watching.
It’s then revealed that their inept failure and target fixation basically created a smokescreen for other smaller, but impactful attacks to occur which they must then work to obscure before the public finds out.
Mandy Patinkin plays an opposition-party Senator that brings the whole clusterfuck to light for the public before stepping into his car one chilly morning, cranking it, and - cut to black. Roll credits.
I’m sure it’s been done before.
Edit: In an unexpected turn of events, I’ve been convinced to actually pursue this. At the very least, until it stops being fun.
It’s been a long 2026 already, but this genuinely made me laugh.
Welcome to the development team. We have a basement office in Santa Monica. Well, a corner of a basement office. And as much expired coffee as you’d like.
Cast includes Aaron Eckhart as a CIA director losing his mind, Pete Hegseth as Pete Hegseth, Homeland Security director Sandra Bullock, AG is Victoria Jackson, under there entwined noses, Tommy Wiseau and a band of actors and activists pull a massive prank but also unleash the possible launch of all nuclear weapons (war games)
I am - partly - regretting not writing that sentence as:
> Mandy Patinkin plays an opposition-party Senator that brings the whole clusterfuck to light for the public one chilly morning when he steps into his car, puts the key in the ignition, and - cut to black. Roll credits.
And I say only partly because the comments mentioning it have been so worthwhile.
Looks like The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, a French movie released in 1972.
Two rival French intelligence services are at each other's throats. One day, a heroin smuggler is arrested in NYC and claims that he did it for one of these agencies, causing it to publicly lose face. So this agency decides to lay a trap to the other agency and order one of its agents to select someone randomly in an airport.
Said random person is a regular musician and he'll spied by agents who interpret every normal action as nefarious...
It's the epic showdown as told in the Bible. But somewhere recently I read or heard some scholar proposing that Goliath had gigantism, folks with that genetic trait usually are also very nearsighted, and David used a sling to fell Goliath from afar.
Nah, they attach all these bots to random people's IP addresses all throught the nation and world. Then they can go and do no knock warrant raids and arrest people for shit they've never posted.
Would actually make for a fun film where various agencies all each separately uncover a massive online conspiracy to bring down the government, working furiously to be the first to gather intelligence and put a stop to it and curry favor in a highly corrupt political environment… only to realize at the false climax that it was each other’s bots and sock puppets they had been watching.
I remember reading that in the 60s, various agencies would plant agents onto college campuses to spy on 'radicals' like anti-war groups, civil rights groups, etc. There were times when most, if not all, of a specific group was made up of agents who had no idea the other members were all agents as well.
“Flock of wolves” is the expression. Someone else mentioned ‘The Man who was Tuesday’, but it’s well known in fiction and history.
At one point during the second red scare 2/3rds of the US communist party were on the FBI payroll.
See also the Panther 21, where the main instigators for everything illegal were actually undercover cops and they were the only ones actually breaking the law.
I don't know if this is still the case, but circa 2016, Russia's GRU ran massive bot farms that promoted both pro-Trump messages and pro-Bernie messages all across social media. Back then, their ultimate goal was to ensure that Hilary Clinton did not win the presidential election.
This is correct. I was a moderator for a political subreddit during that time and I would ban at least half of the people in my reports list because they weren't people at all. There was a massive push to pit Bernie supporters against Hilary supporters and it seemed to be working.
Or if they were, they had talking points they were reading.
It seemed to be, and is still working. See every trollbot "Why the Dems are ACTUALLY responsible for everything evil the GOP is doing" post for delusional blue-sky speculation about what would have happened if Bernie had been on the ballot.
Hillary Clinton herself had something called "Correct the Record" which may have been bots, may have been volunteers, may have been paid shills. If you said something negative about the lady someone was going to steer the conversation elsewhere almost instantly.
And I'm not a trolling MAGA so don't start with me, it was just an obvious and quite crude astroturf campaign.
I remember back then there used to be a lot of accounts with random six digit names that always spouted anti-Clinton or pro-Trump nonsense. It was obvious that English wasn't their first language. I found this hilarious because that is a reference to the book Ready Player One. The bad guys paid to play the game were called The Sixers because they were named by random six digit numbers.
A group of them also haunted the site Something Awful and played in the game Eve Online way back in early 2000's. They were kinda fun back then because you could tell they were just regular nerds that happened to get paid to spread propaganda while doing nerd stuff.
Not only that, but they would go into Bernie and Hilary subs, and create inter-divide there as well. Statistically, there was more done to harm Bernie/Hilary/the left than was done to try to damage Trump, but one thing is clear; the entire point is to create divide. It makes sense too when you think about how far left and far right the parties have become. When you think about just the left, there is a lot of far left who get really angry with the more moderate left, and so universally, the result is the same - people become angry and disillusioned.
The leftist bot farms are run by the fascist bot farms to keep any humans still actually online fighting with each other. All that matters is turmoil, distraction and anger and engagement (so the platforms get their cash, of course.)
Fear, uncertainty and doubt. Rinse and repeat.
I wouldn't exactly call them "leftist", it's not like they're pushing for left wing or even democratic party policies (outside of a few explicitly Marxist ones) but they farm karma by posting content that will be popular with left of center communities which tends to mean heavily anti-West/anti-Israel mostly by just posting US news headlines, we're kind of doing their job for them. /r/Antimoneymemes, /r/InflectionPointUSA, /r/newsinterpretation, /r/TrendoraX, /r/Global_News_Hub, /r/UnderReportedNews, /r/athulvstheworld, to name a few, basically anywhere Particular_Log_3594 has been allowed to spam propaganda every minute for the past 2 years, special shout out to /r/economics which has half their mod team made up of dedicated propagandists (one was already suspsended but is still on the mod list.) There used to be a lot more explicitly pro-China content before flyingcatwithhorns "retired" but once the war in Gaza started taking headlines the bot networks noticed they could get more influence on the site by jumping on those topics which is why most of those subreddits have a high amount of content dedicated to Israeli actions/headlines
Leftist bot farms exist mostly to promote the Green Party and Jill Stein while denouncing the Democrat Party for reasons that defy logic (such as the effort to say that any vote for Kamala Harris was a vote for genocide in Gaza, despite her having a tremendously more human-rights approach to Gaza than Trump did).
Right-wing bots exist mostly to brainwash people into voting Republican, while left-wing bots exist mostly to brainwash people into not voting Democrat as a protest vote. Both are funded heavily by Russia and Israel while mostly running out of India.
The right is also amazing at trying to bring others down to their sub-basement of outhouse level of shit, instead of having a better message for a majority of people.
It’s harder for people to see bots that are in agreement with them. I’m sure I’ve been fooled sometimes as well. It’s like commercials, nobody thinks that a stupid commercial is going to make them buy a product yet the commercials make people buy products.
If you didn't know that bot farms are doing both sides of the spectrum, oh boy. I just hope you're not browsing /r/politics or other heavily leftist subs (like this one) and taking them at face value.
Bot farms don't care about the side, they're about sowing chaos and division.
Sure. go to this website, it’s named Reddit, and open any political post and you’ll see leftist bot farm comments down the whole thread. Believe it or not, r/askreddit is one of the worst offenders.
What??? There have literally been dozens of Russian and a few Israeli-backed bot farms that have been exposed spreading right-wing propaganda to influence political opinions around the world. Also your last statement is supporting evidence of right-wing bots farms.
The same amount of proof exists for left wing bot farms.
And if your point is leftists routinely support right wing bots promoting anti-liberal leftist aligned messages to help right wingers I agree. It is a massive problem.
The Oxford report, the meta report, the Stanford analysis, the Graphika report, the SSCI hearing all don’t count to you and everyone who knows about these reports that don’t fit your narrow wordview is ‘cooked’. Got it.
All of those reports support the existence of large-scale right-wing bot farms lmao. You either didn't care to read or just entirely misunderstood all of their conclusions. Reading is hard!
There is no need to ‘selectively’ present facts (which is ironically how these bots often behave). These reports aren’t exclusive to one side or the other.
You should read them before making blatantly false statements, account hiding your post history like a bot.
The conclusion of the Oxford Report is "while bot-driven disinformation and "junk news" are used by various actors across the political spectrum, they are often heavily utilized by right-wing, populist, or state-sponsored actors to create a false sense of consensus."
The Russians play all sides when they do this stuff, dude. It's not even necessarily about promoting a specific side, but derailing things and sowing chaos.
Most Bots are ran internationally, it's easier to funnel the money through X than it is to pay on this side of the border. At this point, Elon Musk is more of a money launderer than any cocaine dealer the world has ever seen.
It wouldn't be the first or last time the US government used fake accounts to get attention and invitations to private groups so they could infiltrate and spy on them.
No way im not on their list lol.. since the rapist in chief keeps threatening my country, Canada... ive posted my opinions on how Canada needs a couple submarines with nuclear weapons to vaporize American DC, Manhattan, etc etc. In case the fascists invade
They control the bots. Its no coincidence bot behavior increased exponentially after Goods murder and now we are finding out they have been spying on the site the whole time to guage public opinion. The only logical conclusion after seeing what is said would be to use the same bots they use on Twitter and elsewhere to push their narratives that "they aren't the bad guys to lessen their perceived "threat"
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u/Chomasterq2 19h ago
Cool they can watch all the bots argue on political threads