The bot scourge is not an accident

It’s a new form of conditioning and most major players already bought in.

Five hours ago, popular YouTuber and Twitch streamer Charlie White, better known as Cr1TiKaL, uploaded a video entitled Isabella. It’s the fifth instalment in a series of videos five years in the running addressing the bot problem on YouTube, which continues to go completely unaddressed by platform authorities. It’s a fairly short video—clocking in at under six minutes—so I recommend you watch it first:

The reason I’m writing this today is to add some character to the phenomenon Charlie is addressing here. If you were present on the site formerly known as Twitter before and/or after it was taken over by Elon Musk, you probably remember one of the biggest broken promises he made in the course of justifying his unsolicited takeover bid: solving the bot problem. Elon knew the platform was absolutely flooded with bots—many of which post illegal material as Charlie describes the YouTube bots doing—and claimed that he was going to solve it, infamously not bothering to specify how.

At some point Elon claimed the solution was to have everyone give him $7/month via Twitter Blue—bots can’t SPAM unlimited money, of course—and this shifted the burden off of him and onto his user base: if you won’t pay for Twitter Blue, it’s your fault the bot issue persists, or alternatively it’s your problem the bot issue persists, since you can’t make your Tweets exclusive to Blue users without having Blue. Either way, it was a good parry to allow Elon to take the heat off of him in his own mind and the minds of his enablers, but it avoided solving this problem which turned out to not be technically feasible to solve at all. But why would that be?

To put it simply, these bots belong to what the cybersecurity industry calls Advanced Persistent Threats, or APTs. We know this because they are the only hostile entities active on the Worldwide Web that have enough resources, stamina and protection from law enforcement to wage years-long and sometimes decades-long campaigns against both one another and the general public under the umbrella of what serious men who wear blue ties and don’t cuss refer to as ‘cyber-warfare’. Well-known governments engaged in this include Russia, China, North Korea, Israel, and the United States – FVEY is also indirectly involved at the lead of the US in this. The bottom line at hand for all of these very serious groups is that their botnets serve as a soft check on the power that tech companies like Google and X.com have to manipulate and shape public opinion through the levers of public policy vis-à-vis their algorithms and their various guidelines for user and content producer behaviour.

If this is the case, you may be wondering, “why would such serious groups fund campaigns to essentially SPAM comment sections offering links to scams?” Unfortunately, to answer that is to crack the very campaign being waged here – if we knew what the big idea was, it wouldn’t work very well, would it? Hence why the best cybersecurity folks can do is often just guess which APT is probably behind the attack. But besides that, we can still speculate what the intention may be – if nothing else, there is a short list of things these APTs probably intend to do both against their enemies and potentially against the public.

Firstly, the big elephant in the room applies to all of the SPAMbots linking to illegal content. The rationale for this is very simple: sites containing links to such things incur a massive liability that they cannot trivially shake off legally even with proactive moderation. This is how sites like Backpage were obliterated in contrast to Craigslist even though there wasn’t much of a gulf of culpability between the two websites. This example also perfectly demonstrates the intention: by prosecuting and making an example out of Backpage, a message was sent to all sites like it, prompting Craigslist to permanently remove their personals section. This is what civil rights activists call a chilling effect, and boy did it work. Linking to illegal content is simply the most forceful and blunt way to goad a website into changing its behaviour, because unless you have political protection of some kind, the feds are probably going to make a case out of you if it keeps happening on your website. The nature of botnets combined with the legal immunities enjoyed by APTs virtually guarantees the perpetrators will never suffer the consequences of the crimes committed here.

In the case of sites like YouTube and the rest of FAANG which enjoy a much more politically privileged existence than the likes of Craigslist or Backpage, the reasons become more nuanced, and it starts to resemble a general kind of arms race. It’s best to understand it as a non-lethal sort of muscling that the APTs do in the spaces these platforms provide for their users – by competing amongst each other at who can wage the most effective bot campaign—measured by engagement statistics of course—they can hone their skills and be ready and able to win when more politically salient moments arise, as they often do.

Remember the euthanised squirrel? A few tabloids do, and everyone who was logged on to X.com right before the last presidential election just might. That was probably Mossad flexing its ability to manipulate public conversation on the site, enabled by their inside partnerships with key staff after Linda Yaccarino took over as CEO. This is one example of the complicity that most of these platforms most likely have with the people running the botnets – after all, how could they keep creating YouTube accounts to spam Charlie’s videos when, ostensibly, one needs to create a new Google account with a valid phone number each time? Someone has built a cat door into the house, of course. But you weren’t supposed to know that, because if you did, the jig would be up, right?

In any event, being able to goad users into believing in made-up falsehoods and fantasies is understood by APTs to be a superpower of the Information Age. The dystopian fiction of George Orwell has come to serve as a kind of field manual for every arrogant cynic in government who doesn’t understand the fundamental nature of information. And about that, I have some bad news for would-be or has-been manipulators: there is too much information. I want you all to think about the dynamics and implications of that. Or don’t – either way, it’s your funeral. People are creatures of information and this is less of a new age and more of a Wild West that’s as embellished and romanticised as it is nasty, brutish and short. It’s not apparent from the Clint Eastwood films, but the Wild West was objectively bad and nobody missed it. How do you think real people are going to look back on the big players of today?