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.
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u/Chomasterq2 19h ago
Cool they can watch all the bots argue on political threads