YouTube comment sections on videos related to covid are an absolute cess pit of covid deniers, misinformation spreading and conspiracy theory peddling.
I would like to think these are bots and not a very vocal but significant section of society but given recent world events I am not sure at all.
I don't use social media a lot but I do regularly post on HN for instance. I don't know what my average message rate is but it's probably around 1 message/day. Now if I just wanted to spam my political agenda on the site (and the site let me do it) I could very easily copy/paste the same bullshit a hundred times a day on every story on the frontpage. If like 20 other people did the same thing the amount of noise we'd generate is pretty large
Look at random fan wikis to see the amount of free work some dedicated individuals can achieve. I'm certain that many of these super active troll accounts are just that, dedicated individuals who feel very strongly about something and just spend 10 hours every day spamming and harassing and copy-pasting. If your output is like 100x that of a normal user (and you know how to game the algorithms to amplify your message) you don't need a huge number of accounts or automation to become a real nuisance.
Sometimes it is more obvious. People had MAGA campaign apps that lets Trump's team remotely activate otherwise-legit social media accounts. So the account is real, but popular messages were bot behavior. Twitter is even less likely to want to take down such an account, despite the prohibited behavior.
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists"
- Ascribed to an unnamed Yosemite Park Ranger. The quote may never really have happened, but I think it fits here.
If the people are intentionally acting as bots per the direction of other people, then what does that make the people acting as bots?
And of course similar things are happening on all social media platforms.
It's deeply ironic that the West built all these tools with the intention of "connecting" people, something that's still Facebook's main mission statement, yet its biggest effects have been exactly the opposite, causing division and distrust between people, and contributing to real world conflicts and toppling of governments.
Social media today is weaponized by political agents to spread misinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale and the platforms are paying them to do it. The current political climate in the US is no surprise. It was a coordinated psyops attack and its enemies are laughing at how easy and inexpensive it was to destabilize a nation compared to traditional warfare.
I fear that we still haven't seen the worst of it, and frankly I'm not sure what the solution is.
[1]: https://www.lawfareblog.com/biggest-social-media-operation-y...
Then my tweets would get liked and followed. 95% of that was just bots.
Every now and then I would unfollow a real person and my account, which was clearly a bot, would get some hate mail telling me to re-follow them.
It was pretty surreal.
I think their purpose is equally interesting. I'd guess a lot of them are there to polarise discussions and drive people apart, but there are probably ones that have an agenda to drive a specific opinion as well.
I think this isn't just on Twitter, but other platforms as well.
Give that bot a foreign name and virtually every native English speaking person will assume it's simply bad grammar.
Have recent events involved significant sections of society?