If you’ve browsed social media and examined the users that the algorithms recommend to you, as well as those in the comment sections, you might have encountered “people” who post controversial opinions. There’s a ton of pro-Israel bots among this horde who come in droves to any tweet that has the word “Israel” in it.
Recently Ukraine struck down Russian Yandex data servers with missiles, and social media users noticed a huge decrease in vitriolic content on their feeds. It’s like a curse was lifted off of social media platforms.
It’s widely known that countries like Russia seek to sway American political opinions, particularly by increasing the right-leaning population, given the strong ties between the Republican Party and Vladimir Putin. These bots post all sorts of hateful messages; whatever you can think of, a bot has posted for clicks and more.
Originally, one of Elon Musk’s reasons for buying Twitter was to eliminate the bots, but there are now more bots than ever before.
I think this isn’t a problem anyone can solve at the moment because social media platforms are used internationally and controlled by corporations, not governments.
Corporations have power over their platforms but either prioritize profit over ethics or prefer to avoid conflict with a major country like Russia, allowing them to exploit these platforms. These platforms are operated by billionaires who want engagement; the bots farm engagement regardless of how positive or negative it is. Any attention is beneficial because that means the number of people using their platform goes up, and by extension, the money circulating around that platform goes up.
Elon Musk’s stance on social media is that he’s a “free speech” guy, even including all of the blatant bigotry and other horrifying material posted on Twitter.
If somehow, he cared enough to actually do something about the bot problem, he wouldn’t have fired over half of Twitter’s staff during the takeover, and he would have had to deal with an angry Russian government who would have potentially tried to assassinate him or even wage war with the United States over any sort of slight.
International websites lack enforceable rules, so international criminals do not have to worry. It’s like scam calls in the middle of countries with lax laws on scam crimes. People over there can just make scam center businesses, call anyone on earth, and scam them for their money; nobody can do anything about them because the government responsible for policing these scammers either cannot or will not stop them, and they’re not in any country where they would get stopped.
Stopping these international communication exploits requires everyone to punish the same international crimes, but countries either cannot afford to enforce laws against these scams or do not care enough to do so.
Bots are an unfortunate problem of social media; my personal solution is to block any account I see and don’t like, which mainly consists of hate bots on the internet. There should be ways to block people en masse so blocking bots wouldn’t be a tedious chore.
I don’t think they’ll be gone forever or going away permanently any time soon, but I at least understand how big of a problem bots actually are and the lack of effort corporations put into their platforms because that would remove engagement revenue. Dead internet theory goes strong for reasons like these.
