Skip to main content

Fake News and weaponized bots: how algorithms inflate profiles, spread disinfo and disrupt Democracy

by T.J. Coles

Algorithms are getting so sophisticated that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell which online comments are real and which are generated by “bots”; which sites are genuinely popular and which are generating fake hits. In my new book Real Fake News (Red Pill Press), I argue that fake news can be traced back to ancient Babylon (at least) and that today’s hi-tech fakery is merely a continuation of policies designed to reinforce elite domination, be the given elite “right-wing” or “left-wing.”

DO BOTS AFFECT PERCEPTIONS?

Online fake news has become a phenomenon. By the time President Trump came to power, few Americans had heard of the “alt-right,” the ideological grouping partly responsible for Trump’s electoral success. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.6 million, but he won the Electoral College vote. In other words, “alt-right” voters were numerous enough to give Trump a plurality in the overall vote and thus the Electoral College. How do we explain this discrepancy, that online fake news is a phenomenon, yet its main champions remain obscure to most Americans?

It turns out that bots are pushing fake news to make stories go “viral” by sharing them among fake bot accounts (“sock puppets”) on social media. In 2011, a team at Texas A&M University created gibberish-spewing Twitter accounts. Their nonsense could not have possibly interested anyone, yet soon they had thousands of followers. They found that their Twitter “followers” were, in fact, bots.

In 2017 under a Pentagon grant, Shao et al. analysed 14 million Tweets spreading 4,000 political messages during the 2016 US Presidential campaign. They found that “[a]ccounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots.” Fake news, they say, includes “hoaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories, fabricated reports, click-bait headlines, and even satire.” Incentives include sending “traffic to fake news sites [which] is easily monetized through ads, but political motives can be equally or more powerful.” During the presidential campaign 2016, it was discovered that the popularity profiles of fake news are indistinguishable from fact-checking articles.

The authors note that, “for the most viral claims, much of the spreading activity originates from a small portion of accounts.” The so-called super-spreaders of fake news are likely to be “social bots that automatically post link to articles, retweet other accounts, or perform more sophisticated autonomous tasks.” Regional vote shares toward Trump did not match the geographical location of (likely) bot accounts. Though it is unconfirmed, it is likely “that states most actively targeted by misinformation-spreading bots tended to have more surprising election results.

Ratkiewicz et al. argue that Twitter has a structural bias for fake news due to its “140-character sound bytes [which] are ready-made headline fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.Ferrara et al. write that bots can “engage in … complex types of interactions, such as entertaining conversation with other people, commenting on their posts, and answering their questions.” The authors go on to note that bots “can search the Web for information and media to fill their profiles, and post collected material at predetermined times, emulating the human temporal signature of content production and consumption,” including the time of day when bot activity spikes.

Not surprisingly, the military is in on it, too. In addition to the Pentagon funded mentioned above, in 2014 the Guardian revealed that the UK Ministry of Defence was spending over £60,000 of taxpayers’ money on a project called Full Spectrum Targeting. The project was conducted with Detica (a subsidiary of BAE Systems), the Change Institute and Montvieux. “Emphasis is put on identifying and co-opting influential individuals, controlling channels of information and destroying targets based on morale rather than military necessity.” The Cognitive and Behaviour Concepts of Cyber Activities project cost over £310,000 and included Baines Associates, i to i Research and several universities, including Northumbria, Kent and University College London.

BOTS AS PSYCHOLOGICAL WEAPONS

There were serious underlying structural problems that led to Donald J. Trump becoming President of the USA. But fake news and the “alt-right” acted as a trigger for those underlying problems. Social media and bots helped Trump’s cause. Scientists have argued that the sheer volume of social media users means that the comparatively small influence of psychological targeting can translate into significant numbers of impacted users.

In 2014, scientists working for the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California and San Francisco exploited nearly 700,000 Facebook users by making them participate in an experiment without their knowledge or consent. “The experiment manipulated the extent to which people … were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed,” says the research paper.

The experiment “tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors.” The two parallel experiments involved 1) reducing friends’ exposure to positive content and 2) reducing their exposure to negative content: “[F]or a person for whom 10% of posts containing positive content were omitted, an appropriate control would withhold 10% of 46.8% (i.e., 4.68%) of posts at random, compared with omitting only 2.24% of the News Feed in the negatively-reduced control … As a secondary measure, we tested for cross-emotional contagion in which the opposite emotion should be inversely affected: People in the positivity reduced condition should express increased negativity, whereas people in the negativity reduced condition should express increased positivity.

The results concerning emotional contagion were statistically miniscule: 0.001. But, as the authors, point out: given “the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences.” This, they theorize, equates “to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.

This is relevant to fake news because it shows how bots can spread fake news and cause emotional contagion among large numbers of potential voters.

FAKE NEWS, BOTS & THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT?

The New York Daily News reports that Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s billionaire hedge-fund backers, worked for IBM on technology used to develop its Watson super-computer (“Brown clustering”), as well as Apple’s Siri technology. Mercer is a Trump mega-donor. There’s no evidence directly connecting Robert Mercer to pro-Trump bots. Yet, the kind of technologies and services in which Mercer-related companies are involved include influencing elections: “Trump has 30 million Twitter “followers,” only half of whom are real; the other 50% are bots. The newspaper also spoke to Simon Crosby of Bromium technologies, who explained that some of the Watson technology, allegedly developed by Mercer, “can quickly build, test and deploy bots or virtual agents across mobile devices or messaging platforms to create natural conversations between apps and users.” Crosby goes on to say that “arbitrary and ridiculous information [is] spread very quickly, and now to targeted user[s],” who are “more susceptible to believing it and spreading it.

One of Trump’s first Twitter “supporters” was a bot called PatrioticPepe, in reference to Pepe the Frog; the unfortunate creature appropriated by the “alt-right” for its bigoted agenda. A whole fifth of Twitter accounts tweeting about the election in 2016 were bots. Hilarity ensues when the organization reporting on this, the Washington Post, also reports that the data for fake, Trump-supporting accounts are accrued from Twitter Audit. Twitter Audit also points out that an estimated 35%+ of the Washington Post’s Twitter’s followers are also bots! The reporter overcomes this hypocrisy by writing that Trump’s percentage of fake followers is higher than that of his own organization—so that’s okay, then.

As I (in The Great Brexit Swindle) and others (e.g., Cadwalladr) have documented, Brexit was in part a psychological operation aimed at the public by mega-wealthy hedge fund managers who want out of Europe and its financial control directives. The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr spoke with Andy Wigmore, communications director at the Leave.Eu campaign. Wigmore was behind the famous Trump-Nigel Farage meeting and photo op (Farage being the hard-right, pro-“free market,” former leader of the UK Independence Party).

Recall the contagion effect measured above. Referring to Brexit, Wigmore explained that (in Cadwalladr’s paraphrase): “Facebook was the key to the entire campaign.” Wigmore is quoted as saying: “using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert,” i.e., spread contagion about things that matter to voters, such as immigration.

CONCLUSION

Psychological warfare emanating from billionaires like Mercer under the guise of online, grassroots (in reality astroturf) organizations, as well as from the military in as-yet-undisclosed forms, cannot dictate politics in a vacuum. Rather, they provide a subtle background to and trigger for complicated underlying factors, the main one being widespread discontent with current political systems. Fake news lights a fuse, igniting the powder keg of discontentment. But we should keep in mind, too, that monarchs, despots, big business, and advertisers have, throughout history, used the latest technologies to manipulate, dazzle and even the terrify those over whom they exercise power.

Source, links:


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Kidnapped in Int'l Waters": Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Aid Ship, Detains Greta Thunberg & Others

Democracy Now!   Eleven peace activists and one journalist on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla ship, the "Madleen," were detained by Israeli soldiers as their ship carrying vital humanitarian aid for starving Palestinians approached Gaza.    The ship was intercepted by Israeli forces in the middle of the night in international waters. Its supplies were seized and communications jammed. The unarmed activists will likely be transported to Israeli detention or "immediately deported," says Ann Wright, a U.S. military veteran who has participated in four Freedom Flotilla journeys and now serves on the steering committee of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. She calls on citizens of countries around the world to push for the activists' release and an end to Israel's war on Gaza. 

How Israel’s Supporters Play Victim to Justify Genocide & Silence Critics

BreakThrough News   As Israel commits a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, Western media and political elites continue to center one narrative: Jewish fear. But what about the actual victims of this genocide—Palestinians? Journalist Nora Barrows-Friedman joins Rania Khalek on Dispatches for a fearless conversation on Zionist indoctrination in the Jewish diaspora, how antisemitism is being weaponized to silence critics of Israel, and how Jewish identity politics has been manipulated to cover for unspeakable crimes. From the media blackout on Israeli war crimes to the erasure of anti-Palestinian hate crimes—even in the diaspora—Nora lays bare the contradictions and power structures behind it all. 

How the EU is using anti-Russia sanctions to criminalise journalism

The EU sanctioned me and my media outlet for covering Palestine protests in Germany. It’s part of Europe’s growing authoritarianism and militarism, cloaked in language of fighting disinformation and defending democracy.   by Hüseyin Dogru   Part 2 - How the EU uses anti-Russian hysteria to smear Palestine solidarity journalism   The official rationale for sanctioning me hinges on red .’s alleged links to Russian influence. The EU sanctions listing cited just two pieces of “evidence”: that some red. staff had previously worked for Russian-funded media, and that we covered “politically controversial subjects” – specifically: Palestine. That’s it. The listing accuses me, through my work with red ., of “facilitating violent demonstrations”, amplifying “radical Islamic terrorist narratives” and claims our staff “coordinated with occupiers”. Not a single piece of evidence is cited, apart from the fact that we published footage of a pro-Palestine student occupation in Berlin. I...

UN report confirms: Israel is a terrorist state and its goal is to exterminate all Palestinians

Israeli attacks on educational, religious and cultural sites in the Occupied Palestinian Territory amount to war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination, UN Commission says.     globinfo freexchange Israel has obliterated Gaza’s education system and destroyed over half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip, part of a widespread and relentless assault against the Palestinian people in which Israeli forces have committed war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, said in a new report [yesterday]. While the Commission paid special attention to the situation in Gaza, the report focuses on attacks in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a whole, and in Israel. “We are seeing more and more indications that Israel is carrying out a concerted campaign to obliterate Palestinian life in Gaza,” said Navi Pi...

Keir Starmer admits Ukraine a proxy war

The Grayzone   The Grayzone 's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on the British PM's unintentional acknowledgement of an inconvenient truth. 

[LIVE] War in the Middle East after Iran's retaliation against Israel

globinfo freexchange      Explosions in Tel Aviv as sirens sound across Israel amid Iranian missile attacks in response to Israeli strikes.      The Israeli military continues to launch waves of strikes against Iranian military and nuclear sites, as well as major cities.   Updates:  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/6/13/live-explosions-reported-in-iran-amid-israel-tensions  

How the U.S. & Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran

Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.   by Medea Benjamin - Nicolas J. S. Davies On June 12th, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote. The United States contacted eight board member governments on June 10th to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or not to vote. Israeli officials said they saw the U.S. arm-twisting for the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, revealing how much Isra...

War criminal Netanyahu is pushing the Orange Clown and the US into the abyss

globinfo freexchange   It seems that the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, is rushing to accelerate the decline of the US empire by forcing Donald Trump into an utterly devastating war with Iran.   Trump shot himself in the foot during his first term by killing the Iran nuclear deal just because he wanted to erase everything from the Obama legacy. His insane narcissism pushed him into crazy acts and made him believe that he could make another deal with Iran credited solely on him.   But now he is in big trouble because he has to deal with a corrupted psychopath who won't hesitate to burn the entire planet just to save himself.  As if the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza was not enough, the out-of-control psychopath Netanyahu, is doing whatever he can to drag the US into a war with Iran. As he realized that the Iranians are approaching the negotiating table again, (rather surprisingly with the man that killed the first deal and assassinated Qasem Soleimani), he decide...

UNHINGED CNN, FOX War Propaganda After Iran Strikes

Breaking Points   Krystal and Saagar discuss unhinged war propaganda on mainstream media. 

Trump in SHOCK: Putin & China FLIP His Grave Mistake into STUNNING Victory

Danny Haiphong   Putin & China just gave Trump a rude BRICS awakening, and this bombshell will change everything for generations to come. Geopolitical analyst Ben Norton details the truth about Trump's biggest failure against the rising power of BRICS led by Russia and China, and why the US's role as super power is now in serious question.     Related: Trump's tariffs: A unique opportunity for BRICS and the Global South to fully escape from dollar tyranny