Hello fellow campers! IÕm Dr. Amber and this is another campfire edition of the civic flame. For those of you who donÕt know, the civic flame is a podcast where we take a deep dive into the Constitution and discuss how it is and is not shaping contemporary politics. Our campfire sections are when major legal of political issues come out that we want to get you some context for. This week is an I told you so episode. Why? Because Twitter just released a geography/location feature and guess what? I was right. A lot of that right wing MAGA-sphere stuff online was coming from bot farms. If you missed where I told you so, we did a 3-part campfire series on bot farms and rage farming a few weeks ago, so you can check that out where ever you listen to podcasts. Today, I want to talk a little more about whatÕs behind all of this stuff. Buckle up, because weÕre going in! (transition) If you missed parts 1-3, the key points are that bot farms come in two forms. One is the machine learning kind of stuff that drives your google search or when youÕre shopping you see those Òyou might also likeÓ sidebars. Sometimes helpful, sometimes annoying, but mostly fine. The stuff weÕre talking about is more what we think of as generative AI (like ChatGPT) or other types of algorithms (computer programs), that pretend to be people. In these bot farms there are hundreds or more computers all dedicated to fake accounts, fake posts, posting fake news, and generally gaming the algorithms to look like theyÕre more important. This does something called astroturfing. You know how grassroots movements are from the ground-up? Well, astro turfing is pretending a movement is grassroots when itÕs not. If you think back to the Global financial collapse of 2008, you saw grassroots movement Occupy Wall Street develop from a genuine anger not just at Wall St but at the government for bailing out Wall St and not Main St (the effects of which many communities still feel today). Well the astro turfed version of that was the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party was an astro turfed movement funded by billionaires like the Koch brothers who wanted to take legitimate anger (tea stands for taxed enough already) and redirect that towards social issues and minorities and away from billionaires. These broke people (who were rightly taxed enough already) should have been on Wall St demanding that Wall St and the Koch brothers get taxed because they are not taxed enough, but instead, they got hoodwinked into working for the Koch brothers by making sure the billionaires didnÕt get taxed. Bot farms work the same way. They create fake news websites and stories and then share/like/follow them across different levels of social media giving the illusion that they are popular and grassroots. The other thing that goes on with these bot farms is rage farming. These companies learned that rage bait increases time spent online, likes, and shares, and maximized profit. This is something Facebook learned first hand when it handed Donald Trump the 2016 election. ItÕs important to note that right before the 2020 election, Facebook turned off its user maximizing features and fake news got buried under real news and real people. But when money went down and user engagement went down, Facebook turned it back on. Just in time to help users plan the January 6th insurrection against the Untied States government. So fun. And this brings us to todayÕs point: you see people looking around at all the hate and divisiveness on every continent and start to wonder, is this the End Times? And I get that, there are a few dozen people in the world who fit the description of anti-christs (IÕm of the opinion that there is more than one anti-Christ, but thatÕs an ecumenical thing youÕll have to make some choices about on your own). But one thing I know for sure, as much as this looks like the End Times? This isnÕt the Rapture. ItÕs the Algorithm. These companies are deliberately constructing these narratives, including fake news and fake accounts and fake people, to keep users and advertisers on their platforms. YouTube is genuinely awful about this. During the 2016 election, the YouTube algorithms drove people not only to wards content that would keep them engaged, but content that was harmful. It drove them most often to things like Alex Jones and conspiracy theories and even towards pedophilia content (check out the Behind The Bastards podcasts on this). Even when searching for something informative, it would produce something negative or incendiary. Studies found that people looking up Hillary Clinton to learn about her policies were sent immediately to anti- Clinton pages. And not just a few, but tens of millions of people. Likewise people looking for movie reviews were sent to the most incendiary reviews that said things like ÒStar Wars is trying to replace white menÓ and then sent people down the Ògreat replacementÓ white supremacy rabbit holes. Because it kept eyeballs on platforms. Now of course that isnÕt going to radicalize everyone, but it radicalizes enough vulnerable folks to make money. When the world went into lockdown, this only got worse because people didnÕt have real folks to keep them in check. They started making online communities around these shared interest groups. But what IÕve been saying for a while, what others have been saying for a while, and most importantly, what these tech companies have known for a while, is that a lot of these interactions, in some cases up to 60% of them include bots NOT people. Why did tech companies not do anything if they knew? Because if they got rid of the bot farms, then they would lose users and advertisers. People might spend less time engaging with their content and their money. So, itÕs not the rapture, but it might be the end times. Not for salvation but for the profit of a handful of jerk wads. If companies like Twitter and Facebook already knew this, why would Musk have just made such a fuss about the geo-location feature and drawn attention to it? There are a few possibilities. One is that Elon Musk actually has no idea how the world words. He might have just thought that those people were real, that there was an equivalent amount of fake news on the left as the right (the reason thereÕs not has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with the fact that it is right wing billionaires funding the bots). ItÕs also possible Musk genuinely believed those people who ate up his rhetoric were people. Narcissism is a heck of a drug. Then thereÕs the Epstein files/doge break up reason. This was meant to draw attention away from already big news stories by pointing out something people deal with on a regular basis. Honestly, any and all of those reasons can be true. What is interesting is going to be to see how people will deal with it. Our legacy media has been horrifyingly negligent in covering any of this for more than a few seconds at a time, so itÕs possible people just wonÕt even know or care. But I like to think it will ruin a few peopleÕs holiday. (transition) Okay, thatÕs that for me. In the meantime, the Civic Flame is taking a Thanksgiving day break this week, but weÕll be back in December with some more content for you on Articles 2-7 of the Constitution. Take care out there and keep the civic flame Buring bright! (outro) This has been a campfire edition of the Civic Flame, a Dr Fun Sponge media production with creator Amber Vayo and sound producer Mathew munyon. Thank you for listening.