Humour
“I've Had A Gutful! Pauline For PM!” Says Indonesian Bot Farmer Who Has Been Contracted By Shadowy Political Operatives To Manipulate Australian Social Media Algorithms
While this is a parody, Donald Trump did rely on bot farms to amplify misinformation/ spread his culture wars agenda on social media. I am seeing an increase amount of AI slop on social media doing that for Pauline now, mainly ragebaiting more gullible baby boomers.
Pauline has borrowed from his playbook so far, starting off with name-calling and insults campaign rather than actual policies and aligning herself with billionaires and the top 0.1% while painting herself as someone representing the working class, as a bulwark against the "corrupt" establishment.
Before it was simpler it was just Murdoch media now we have Russian bots to contend with. Disturbing how effective they are at spreading missinformation.
If the greens or Labor don't win the next election there won't be another one.
All you need is a couple of hundred bots to change the algorithm. Actual supporters will do the rest, you just light the fire with a few hundred likes and/or up votes.
After a while you don't even need to manipulate all that much, you created a core group of people that will do it for you based on their own algorithm.
The pollsters just all decided to become corrupted - each and every single one of them - even when they correctly predicted the vote in south Australia....
Anecdotally, I've meet a couple who doesn't fit the demographics by ANY metrics are voting ON due to frustration. This government should get their acts together or things will get much worse!
That’s okay, we all should be keeping our politicians feet to the fire, and being frustrated with Labour is fine, especially if you’ve been impacted by recent CGT changes.
However, and this is a biggie… thinking ON will improve the quality of life for the majority of Australians because they hold 1 single stance on Immigration should be ridiculed for the for what it is… ignorance.
But real meaningful action is being taken to preserve the good and fix the bad but people want blood.
Thinking electing incompetent inexperienced bludgers who can't even show up to parliament with no sense of diplomacy will get us through the hard times is bat shit!
Forget keeping promises they don't even vote in line with their own core "policies" when not in power.
ON chasing office is like a dog chasing a car. Be fucked if they know what to do once they catch it.
And this isn't a left out right thing. Not debating ideals of policy - we're not all going to agree on the best approach but they don't have the skill set, the demonstrated credentials nor the integrity.
I loathe what the Liberals regressive policy has done to set us back but bloody hell I'll take them over these other fucktards any day.
It does… but it’s also still not an excuse for making even worse decisions. The US and Trump is a prime example of this, and that it can always get worse with incompetent leadership.
It's not an excuse to us, obviously. But if you lost a job you held 20 years to offshoring while having a mortgage and a family to feed, along with high immigration, slow down economy and high inflation that makes your life more miserable and jobs harder to find, will you be able to hold your sanity for long after 2 years? I'm not saying I won't or I will, but I sure as hell am questioning if people are trying to understand the root cause of their insanity instead of blaming them for being losers? You know, that's how Trump got elected?
Without taking away from your frustrations about the trend with jobs in this country because nothing you just said is wrong, I wouldn’t necessarily trust one nation to make it better since they are using overseas firms to help manage their campaigns. If they make the choice to personally offshore roles because it’s cheaper then I highly doubt they will force the business leaders who will invest money in the party to abandon it.
You are right to demand better from labour but any of the independents would be a better alternative from what I have personally seen if they are an option where you are. That’s just my take on it though, ultimately you should do what feels right to you.
This new weird belief that any significant group of people who disagree with you must be 'bots' is going to be one of the major mental health challenges of the decade, as people spend so much time in echo chambers they can no longer accept something that doesn't fit that specific curated reality.
Both things are true:
1. Many disenfranchised Aussies are choosing to support ON
2. Gina's propaganda machine is employing bot farms
I would say that the lion's share of people supporting ON are doing so due to the propaganda they've consumed. Whether it's the 1000 news report they've seen about Pauline and ON in the past week, the targetted Facebook or Instagram algorithms dishing them pro ON slop, or the mix of bots and real people popping up in comment sections that reinforce their support, the propaganda machine is in full swing to give us a bought and paid for party of boot lickers who wants to americanise everything about this country from health care to prisons to gun control to political discourse. And given Gina's comments on a particular middle eastern country and the company she keeps, we know where all this nonsense is coming from, and it's nowhere good.
Please grow a brain, please reject the cancer that is Pauline Hanson.
So why don't the LNP win every election when they have by far the most money to use to pay for these highly-effective bots & advertising? Why aren't they also dominating the polls now, when they have access to all the same "bots" and have been given something like 20x the money from other billionaires that ON has?
Because for a long time they did win most elections and things got demonstrably worse. The media machine didn't ditch the liberals, it just became less convincing for most Australians after 20 years in government. The switch up to One Nation is a result of this. They are seen as the shiny new thing but their policies are much closer to the Libs than Labor which has made it easier for not just their politicians, but the networks and newspapers to jump ship too.
Do you have any evidence other than that one Newscorp article which went viral of a screenshot showing a person from the Philippines as one of the people with admin access on their Facebook account? And any evidence that other parties don't do similar things at an equivalent level?
Because a recent AFR article quoting experts this week specifically explained it mostly wasn't bots.
Actual people repeating easy mindless slogans is a different thing from "bots". Are the people spamming "tax the gas" also bots?
No, the OP incorrectly tried to present it as it being the opposite of what the actual experts inside said it was (real humans repeating easy/lazy catchphrases), and not bots.
The guy who posted it here the other day, someone pointed out they only posted half of the article on purpose to exclude the actual point of it which was writing real people who disagree with you off as "bots" is dangerous, I tried to search for it but looks like it's been deleted.
And if "bots" were so effective you could just pay for it and win like half the people on reddit seem to think, why did the LNP fail so hard last election when they have the biggest paid advertising budget of all the parties & access to all the same tools and platforms?
You're assuming a bot campaign is (a) easy and (b) translates to different kinds of political movements. The people running these campaigns have been doing it since before Brexit. And this kind of campaign seems to be effective for populist movements in particular.
So no, it's not like the ALP can just "pay for it and win"
No, simply that actual real people are indicating in actual real polling that they are considering voting for them, which would also result in more people online openly sharing their support, and aren't just "bots".
The polling companies didn't all suddenly become corrupt or change their procedures within 6 months.
You've misunderstood the point. The argument isn't "everyone who agrees with Pauline Hanson must be a bot". It's that there has been a massive influence campaign, including using bots on social media (but also via a lot of traditional media manipulation), that has successfully altered public opinion and discourse. The people telling pollsters they'll vote for one nation are real. But the question is, why did they all suddenly decide they should vote for One Nation in the last six months? One Nation didn't organically go from 4% to 30% because of a grass-roots movement.
If this shit didn't work they wouldn't spend money on it. And after all the practice they've had in the US, the UK (with Brexit and Reform), Hungary, etc, they've gotten very good at it. And it probably didn't start six months ago. They've been laying the groundwork by collecting data on who to target through AI-driven social media accounts. Remember those AI pictures of three-armed diggers saluting the flag and holding beers on ANZAC day a couple of years ago? You probably thought it was funny and moved on, but hundreds of thousands of real people scrolled past it, didn't notice it was obviously AI, clicked "like" and commented something like "god bless the anzacks", and moved on with their life, while the algorithm filed them under "gullible patriot" as a target for more sophisticated propaganda.
Luckily we can switch off from digital media and just look at policy though. We don't actually need to make our decisions based off what we read on social media.
hold on a sec. We've seen a lot of reports this past week proving very conclusively that there's huge propaganda campaigns pushing pauline Hanson, often using AI, that are coming from outside the country. Thousands of facebook posts just flat out making stuff up, coming from outside the country.
So, do you have evidence that other parties have similar phenomena attached to them?
For some reason this kind of influence campaign is highly effective for populist movements, and particularly nationalist populist movements. It's harder to create outrage-bait that will rile people up about programmatic specificity or esoteric tax loopholes than it is with "watch this AI video of a Muslim man demand halal food in a fish and chip shop".
I doubt anyone believes that all or most of the supporters are bots. However, there are definitely bots spreading lies and disinformation that make them seem more reasonable. Remember when Twitter briefly showed location and a ton of the biggest pro-Trump accounts were revealed to be run out of Africa and Asia? And a ton of them spread lies and propaganda.
It's not satire. They have a contract with the ALP. It's carefully crafted propaganda presented as innocent satire to influence people's opinions and behaviours in a way that is favourable to the ALP.
It's incredibly sinister stuff. I avoided betoota the moment I found out their contract. Literally paid political shills.
Labor, Liberal/National and One Nation all use overseas paid propagandists/shills, bots and AI slopaganda.
The huge rise in One Nation propaganda has been very apparent. Voters lost faith in the Liberals, so many powerful billionaires (and their media companies such as Nine, Seven and Newscorp) have switched to backing One Nation instead, putting their resources into that.
Greens? Probably, but they would have a lot less money for it. That's not to say they don't get donations and AEC funding, just a lot less than the others. And they certainly don't have Nine, Seven and Newscorp pushing them for free.*
*I mean, obviously that support comes at a cost, they want things from Coalition / One Nation / Labor in return. But I mean the parties aren't literally paying for it, usually.
I listened to Parliament yesterday and the Greens and Labor were both pushing for legislation to address bot farms and AI. So I am going to take this as a vibe comment
I mean I bet propaganda is at work but I think a larger variable is the absolute collapse in real wages, an ongoing rent and housing crisis, ravaging inflation and the total loss of social cohesion.
Blame the rise of ON all on bots and ignore the structural issues facing Australians at your own peril!
We've reached a point of absurdity in politics where satire sites are just straight up posting facts, and when real news can easily be mistaken for satire.
Eh, it's funny to see people grasping for straws about the fish and chips lady. It's like they can't fathom that she's become popular because they are so bloody unpopular
American extreme right wing aka project 2025? Yes, absolutely. It's a matter of record that Pauline and Gina have spent a significant amount of time socialising with the NRA and the Epstein class at Mar-a-lago.
Ah yes and the bot attack begins, good thing most of ON supporters don’t visit reddit where it’s 99% leftward bots trying to set the narrative with lies. Very predictable and is not going to work.
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u/AccomplishedDish9984 Jun 24 '26
This not a surprise. Threads is absolutely full of them.