The vacuum at the center of the culture---Twitter

(This article is Part-3 in a series. For Part-2, click here.)

This is a follow-up to my recent piece about millions of bot Twitter accounts—no humans, just propaganda.

Newsweek is reporting on an independent audit revealing that half of Biden’s Twitter followers and 70% of Musk’s followers are fakes. Bots.

I’m making inquiries about how these accounts are launched, and whether it’s possible to discover all of them. If I find competent answers, I’ll let you know.

Since Twitter is standing in for the “Town Square,” it’s quite astonishing to discover that so many of the opinions emanate from non-human robots designed to create a false consensus around vital issues: immigration, racism, climate change, party politics, gun control, censorship, abortion, etc.

It’s on the order of staging candidate debates where the humans don’t show up at all, but are represented by programmed holograms; or staging elections where fake votes outnumber real ones.

Actually, we’re doing rather well on those scores with real humans already. Nevertheless, bots take things one giant step further.

The CIA started infiltrating news media in the 1950s with its Mockingbird program. Now we have infiltration by imaginary humans.