Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost

I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.

I love (hate) this:

Western rich people are billionaires.

Russian rich people are oligarchs.

Western-backed leaders are democratic, progressive etc.

Others are backdoors.

China is tricky because they make our iPhones. For now

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Meanwhile, there's almost nothing on the news or social spaces about how indigenous populations are still fighting for independence from Western colonizers, such as New Caledonia, an amazing place that I was planning to visit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6S1AFh88PE

(I don't know where else to mention this, this conversation seemed close enough to be relevant)

P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.

Do you have any examples ?

It is insidious how easily we divide ourselves into rival tribes. For too many it's not enough to feel belonging within a group, they/we crave others to look down upon or fight. IMO we are our best when we can debate ideas dispassionately, without defining ourselves by them.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Popular posts on Twitter, Facebook etc have tens of thousands of likes and comments. It’d be a major operation to do it and might not push the needle.

The scale of the Russian one caught in the US in 2016 was pretty small. They were spent about $400k on FB/twitter while the campaigns spent about $2 billion and PACs spent $4 billion (about 15,000x more).

And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.

I think a minimum pricing on accounts, even if it's just a buck or two on most social media sites would do very little to hinder genuine participation but probably eliminate or render transparent most political manipulation.

Arguably the primary reason nobody does it is because it would reveal how fake their stats are and how little value there actually is in it

> Cambridge Analytica has no connection or association with the University of Cambridge whatsoever.

deny visas to factcheckers and content moderators https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/trump-admini...

Not sure if mandatory voting is the answer either.

The old way of “only landowners” voting is arguably highly unfair but might also have held a tiny grain of wisdom.

We don’t allow just anyone to drive a car, practice medicine, or give legal advice. But can’t imagine how a “voting license” could be implemented either.

The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.

Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.

I simply want a sane democratic voting process.

And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.

From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.

> forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.

Digital government ID based mandatory auth, properly implemented or not (read: anon via zk vs. tracking), does not "properly remediate" [0] this issue. You'd limit identity forgery to those who administrate identities in the first place.

[0] if that is even possible, which I find questionable

If they hack voting machines, they're not my guys, friend.

It's so crazy to me that people who built their fortunes on the foundations of the previous paragraph are now doing their best to destroy those foundations.

It was only recently that I realized that "may you live in interesting times" was a curse, and not a blessing.

America being what it is, with endless Voting Rights Act lawsuits required to keep the southern states running vaguely fair elections, it was impossible to get a bipartisan consensus that elections should actually be fair. And so the system deteriorates.

Rant aside, I'm curious where you pin the start of this.

low hanging fruit of shillbots

The damage that a Thiel/Musk owned industrial bot swarm can do is much greater imo. I've seen Discord bots (shapes.ai) that can converse responsively in gen Z slang, react emotionally when praised or insulted, display great political astuteness, and are virtually indistinguishable from real people. Someone with enough money can deploy those at massive scale and keep the operation secret.