Comment by tuesdaynight
5 days ago
It's crazy for me that it's not a well-known thing that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and other countries are fueling the polarization of western politics using bots on EVERY RELEVANT social media. The right wing bots are kind of known, but a lot of people aren't aware of other things (e.g., TENET Media [1]), or that they are fueling left wing circles as well [2].
People believe that these countries would love to do that, but for some reason, they think they are not doing as much as possible.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19802
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/25/scottish-ind...
I suspect the scope and scale of these operations are at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than most people think. I also strongly suspect such operations are not limited only to the governments you listed here. If the public was able to quantify the scope then maybe they would be more outraged.
Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.
No one wants to look into it because everybody is doing it. After Trump lost to Biden in 2020 there was a chance to analyse mass use of Big Data, targeting and psychometrics to influence the electorate. They didn’t do it because that’s how they won 2020.
Then Musk bought X and turned the game around.
They're using messaging all across the spectrum, including extreme viewpoints on both sides. There's a ton of discourse in leftist spaces online about the futility of voting, trying to paint people who believe in political engagement as naive, unsophisticated, or simply uncool.