Short Take: A Case Study in Demoralization Bots

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

In case any of you wanted a prime example of what a lot of the state and NGO run demoralization bot/Indian Poster farm look like, or how extensive it is.

This is a poster who after 4 months follows no one and is followed by no one, has made exactly 20 comments in 5 months of basically no substance in that time… Yet is intimately interested somehow in my personal screentime. And is commenting specifically with details that no one casually following would really have a feel for (Most of my followers go months not seeing a single post of mine because I’m shadow banned so often) but would be available to a botfarm scraping data, or with access to internal twitter metrics.

I actually am away from my phone way more often than most people… My mother bitches and complains that I’m unreachable for days on end. But this bot doesn’t know that because I use the Tweet Scheduling feature so that there’s always new content on my account, and it looks like I’m terminally online to anyone scraping data. Notice also that it references events years before it’s account was created.

Notice that no matter HOW active Left wing commentators or Centrists, or what have you are… They NEVER get posts like this and certainly not from such odd and plainly botted accounts.

I’ve never seen any of these snide, passive aggressive, really calculated post like this except against accounts and posters the regime would really just rather shut-up and go away.

Such posts are calculated not to piss you off and make you comment back, but to second guess yourself and post less. It’s really out of trend with all posting that’ you’d naturally get.

And you see the same thing with cheep demoralization calling you a “Fed” or “Glowie” or whining about “The Optics” or that you’ll “Get in trouble” if you say anything spicy.

See my latest long-take:

Cry Havoc and Bray for Blood

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Likewise this post does not even match the context.

This post is in response to a funny VIDEO MEME I edited with ZERO commentary, no text whatsoever. Not even on News or anything of the sort.

The video is actually pretty rad:

(BTW please download and repost this…. I’m Shadowbanned ATM)

Also Note: that somehow I’m wasting MY LIFE by spending one hour editing and combining a recent viral piece of UK propaganda with a meme I liked… but the teams of government employees, artists, programmers, etc. who spent MONTHS making the dystopian propaganda aren’t wasting their life?

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Nor do any of the subsequent replies vary from the most default—fit any situation— cliches that you could pre-program, or give to a dollar an hour Indian who posts 10k times a day on 10k different accounts via some cheap workflow GUI like Call-centers useso there workers can make 400 calls a day (If you think my screentime is miserably wasting my life now, you should see some of the jobs I’ve had… Canada is terrible country).

BTW Please read my latest article:

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And yet in spite of all the markers of being a bot even at the Metadata level, No follows, No followers, zero top level posts, less than 20 replies in two months, not verified, no backsplash image, not media files (photos, video, etc.) ever uploaded…

All things that the most naive anti-bot effort from 2017 would cause to rank lower, rank in the “probable spam” comments, or get auto-removed….

This person. Who does not even follow me. Got ranked HIGHER than verified accounts with 10k followers in the replies.

Because the bot farm running it is from a NATO/”ally” country or associated NGO, and X’s algorithmic carve-outs let even something so naked slide right through.

Note: Defense, “De-Radicalization”, and “digital security” contractors are selling invisible products to old boomer Generals and DEI hires in government who don’t need to produce results… So they tend to actually be kinda shit… And if you have a carve out and cheat codes why would you spend money to do a job well?

Anywhere you see weirdos online acting and posting completely discordantly and frustratingly oddly… Whilst trying to be low energy, passive aggressive, weakly-confrontational, or whose sole proposal is “Do nothing” or “Nothing will work and you shouldn’t try”… It is a probably a demoralization bot.

If they think you’re wasting your time, why are they wasting their time commentating on you wasting your time? Shouldn’t THEY be employing THEIR time more productively? Do YOU troll the forums of people you disagree with just to be a low energy wet blanket and not even confrontational or triggering? Do YOU go on Reddit, Tumbler, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Just to tell people you don’t know to stop wasting their time?

remember most people are high energy, angry, aggressive, and high confrontation when engaging with someone they don’t like online… Because they’re safely in their home and feel secure in venting their spleen and giving themself a feeling of power. There’s a big internal mental reward if you can get someone to react or crash-out, that’s fun, you feel like you did something.

Just repeating limp wet blanketisms that no one reacts to? That’s not fun. That’s the least rewarding thing you could do. You’d be focusing on misery, low energy crap, and probably getting no reply to even give feel-good feedback.

The “Yes, and” rule of improv is also how people behave when they’re just having fun, or feeling important

People like to “Yes, and” on social media, even if it’s negative they’ll subconsciously play up the importance of an account and them interacting with it… because it makes them feel important if Destiny, or Fuentes, or Radfemhitler really is a threat the balance of western civilization or Our Democracy or the Relation of the Sexes. Then by posting against them they’re heroes defending what is just and good.

Leftist activists will call Fuentes a Nazi and develop bizzare psycho-sexual attachments and fantasies of him… Some of these even lead to violence. You know what none of Chubby Blue Haired women will say about Fuentes though? That he’s a terminally online 1990s Republican Moderate, that his content doesn’t matter, and he’d really get more out of life if he traveled more and recorded less.

That might be true, that might even be devastating if you could get Fuentes to believe it and actually stop… But if you believed it, then how little do you matter that you’re a negative-Nancy with 5 followers going after a Moderate with a million followers who himself doesn’t matter? What’s 00.0005% of Nothing?

The Conservation of Indifference is an Iron Law. If no one actually cares and it actually doesn’t matter, and its actually a waste of time, then not a soul will waste their time saying so. No one goes into your room and harasses you to touch grass when you’re just lying in bed sadly. You have to actually go online where they’re already online for them to tell you that you shouldn’t be online.

Now consider:

What type of person goes up to a 67k follower account, with dozens of podcast appearances, a large blog/website, someone successfully living off their poasting and writing… A professional commentator/philosopher with the following to show it… and Says “you’re on your phone a lot” in the most passive aggressive manner that almost certainly won’t get a response?

You wouldn’t… If you thought a person didn’t matter you’d ignore them like 99.999% of the human race, or if you thought they did matter you’d try to attack them…

Only if you assume coordinated campaigns of demoralization behind the scenes does stuff like this make sense… And boy is there a lot of stuff like this to support such a theory.

Now again I just find stuff like this bizzare when it’s posted at me…

I meet Special Forces, Military Officers, Senior Tech People, Adventurers, Major commentators, Outlaw Bikers, aids to politicians, Tech Oligarchs, Ministers of State for odd countries, and other assorted people who read my blog. (now if only they’d become paid subscribers)… It does not fit the context at all of talking to me.

If you were going to attack me (which many have) there’s a whole lot of shit you’d say Sexual, Political, Ideological, ethnographic, national what have you… That if you said in the right way you might get to bite…

But look at how really UNTARGETED this is… Look at how you could say basically the same thing to anyone on twitter under any tweet, have a little bot changing the time variable (11 years, 5 years, 3 years, 6 months), and then have just that much demoralization.

Imagine how insidious and cloying this demoralization is for small accounts, ordinary poasters, meme makers with maybe 500-5k followers, how insidious this is for activists and dissidents who do this in their spare time and don’t see any reward from it except the feeling of a job well done.

Imagine how if you had bots tweeting this context-less demoralization at 10s of thousands of your ideological enemies how you could get 1-4% to post less, or stop posting at all, or conclude that what they were posting about didn’t matter…Imagine if you were in sad funk… That you were having a bottom 1-5% day or series of days. A lot of people do their posting and creative work when they’re feeling down like that, or buried in the darkness of winter.

Imagine how effective and high reward you could be if you got those people to stop or lose their energy, or just doubt themselves. We have memes and pieces on the devastating impact of demoralization going back to the cold war.

Yuri Bezmenov is a legend.

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This is the real bot and astroturf game, not posting about Trump, not even commentary on Ukraine, or the Middle East… Posting these demoralizing nothings in a high enough volume that you suck the energy, optimism, and resolve out of your opponents.

“Until Death All Defeat is Psychological”

You don’t need to out-meme, out-argue, out-fight, out-reason, out-organize, out-think, out-art, or even out-last your opponent.

If you can just convince them that what they’re doing doesn’t matter and to walk away… You win by default.

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Notice they will say this to posters doing this in their spare time off work… Yet none of them say this to the paid de-radicalization experts who got 4-10 years worth of degrees, and work 40+ hours a week just to watch and commentate on the poasters?

Notice they never say this State employees or local politicians or company media accounts being run by Purple Binder Girls making $20-30 an hour to stare at a screen 40hrs a week and be the voice of Texas-Compliance-Solutions instead of having kids?

Somehow people purely expressing what they mean to express to people who want to hear them on the topics and subjects that they care about most and want to pour their creativity, rage, whismy, knowledge, research, passion and effort into, at the exact moments they care to, for its own sake… Those people are wasting their time.

But the people going through the motions, dragging their feet, lying, putting out boiler-plate, phoning it in with chat-GPT, repeating a company line, generating political filler, repeating NGO buzzwords, and marking their time til the weekend…

Those people somehow AREN’T wasting their lives.

All the social media managers could be having sex, playing with kids, or working on a passion project instead of Lying 40 hours a day for their companies in their “Jew Daycare”

And yet you expressing exactly what you mean on exactly the subject you care about at exactly the moment you care? That’s the waste of life?

And its not a waste for the people who go around harassing you and snidely sniping at you?

Again I’m very convinced that the wider demoralization posting is almost all astroturfed and botted, with maybe 1 AI, or Indian, or Quebecois (There are so many call centers in Quebec— lowest minimum wage denominated in Canadian dollars) to 1000 bots working on the back-end to try and cover if the bots get into trouble, or a conversation goes 4-5 replies deep.

We’ve seen social media and influence companies hire physical people at minimum wage to do even more indignant things.

So ya I thinks its bot and influence ops… Classic demoralization.

But think to yourself? What if it’s not?

What if there are actually this many miserable regime-loyal centrist wet-blankets with nothing better to do than go on social media, seek out people who care about things and are expressing themselves, and then pretend to “not care” at them or criticize their use of screentime?

Wouldn’t that be even sadder?

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But again I think its bots, and I can recall a time very recently when such comments did not exist, and such demoralization was not anywhere in the meta of replies and concern trolling (as The Conservation of Indifference would predict) and we already basically know such things are happening because we have the example of how governments and social media do this to demoralize in relation to violence:

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