This is a theory that's been going around now for a couple of years and imo it's getting worse..
If you're old enough to remember, when Facebook appeared and blew up there was a large amount of real human activity on there. Myself and nearly everyone I knew were on there actively posting, writing and communicating with each other.
Fast forward to today, I don't know anyone who writes and debates with others on major social media accounts however everyone who does have social media will read comments on public topics and share the posts with others whom just like them do not participate yet share.
IMO it was during covid where they really unleashed these bots online.
I am a financial trader by trade and am part of several forums where I communicate with other traders. Well, the majority are just bots. They are designed to create sentiment towards price.
The scripts they use for these bots are getting better and better. They can blend in with various dialects and even create arguments and debates between humans.
The articles and studies are all bots. Everything online has become bot activity designed to give you an opinion and an emotional response.
Even this site is littered with bots. Any criticism of Trump or Q is met with immediate and repetitive angst and hostility. Even if the poster is just curious. On reddit it is the exact opposite. Any criticism of Obama for example is met with the same hostility.
Twitter same shit. All social media sites and forums are mostly bots now.
The bots are programmed to keep you in a state of total trust and never ending faith. Never questioning anything. Any deviation is seen as a threat and they quickly foment hatred toward you.
These scripts are extremely advanced. They can write and respond to you with human like behavior and can only be recognized with advanced language analysis models.
During the elections it was insanity the "red vs blue" narrative was unbelievable online on several platforms.
Remember the intense mask and jab debates? Well the majority of those weren't human beings online. They were bots from both ends. Any reasonable discussion between real human beings would immediately be infiltrated by a bot that would behave in an erratic and unreasonable matter often insulting one member or immediately spouting extreme responses where it would turn off one of the two humans speaking resulting in a unfinished, anger provoking dialogue.
Really think about it? How many people do you know that are active online in public debates? Or are they simply telling you what they read and sharing it?
Think about the fact that especially after covid and BLM the average person became terrified to write their true opinion online on any platform where their public name, email or identity was at risk in any fashion. This was by design to get YOU out of the debate and to live in "Read-Only" mode.
More than likely. Sentiment bots will agree with you and pump you up if you post something that pushes a narrative that the system has cemented into the masses and they will sound like real humans doing it too.
These models are so advanced and getting scarier by the day.
Which is why laws need to be written, killing these bots in the process.
I don't see how you kill em. Everything uses em from small to large companies, individual users who make money advertising products or services to government and other agencies who have an internet is swaying public opinion.
Remove the code. Should be easy. Also, ban every single bot.