I it's in the same ballpark as ads.

Or as John Wanamaker said : "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"

No.

And having worked in digital advertising for 20+ years, I'd be shocked if they are anywhere as effective as often claimed.

It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.

They don't need to directly change votes. It can be much more indirect.

For example, you can associate an unpopular celebrity or sports team with a political movement, driving its approval down.

Also, you don't need _those_ accounts to change votes, you need to create small viral effects that will cause people to start spreading ideas.

Thats forcing a claim that wasn’t made in the article.

They absolutely work.

I'm a vegan and its insane the number of bots, who the meat industry pays for, that promote really weird anti-vegan ideas on social media.

This stuff spreads into real life. I run into folks IRL who repeat the same lines the bots do.

What online bots are amazing for is amplification. They take an idea that already exists and blast opposition with comments promoting their misinformation. This then lends some credence to their idea so when grandma Google's it there is discourse on it, or Fox can use online quotes to say "Hey, people are talking!!"

A lot of the weird shit Trump talks about is bot-promoted misinformation. Like, A LOT.

There have been whole subreddits that are just bots and paid PR folks promoting weird stuff or they try to "disprove" things like solar panels or vegan diets.

With online bot stuff it isn't about quality. It's about repetition until the ideas land with someone. It's very cheap to blast people with negativity. Eventually it lands.

So, it totally works when used correctly. I think to most people that's pretty obvious.

The fact countries(state sanctioned) pour a good amount of money and resources into these bot farms proves they work.

Of course they do. And yes there is proof for AI chatbots now, see the link in the other post, but in the last 10 years (since the Cambridge Analytica purchase by Bob Mercer) the usage was sock puppet networks and basic auto reply bots. However, they were microtargeted to individual psychology. So yes they work.

We now have multiple networks discovered in multiple countries, ie Analytica, Team Jorge in Israel, Internet Research Agency in Russia. And that's the ones we know about. Why would multiple countries double down on an idea that doesn't work?

Every right wing movement in Europe that had any contact with Bannon through his "The Movement" "data analytics" training program has all the outer appearances of running a large bot program, now using LLMs. In Portugal for the origins of the bot network they traced them in Angola. In Brasil the origin was Israel.