These days, social media feeds are heavily exploited by monied interests. Even the Defense Department is amassing an army of slick-talking influencers to manipulate feeds and, if successful, capture hearts and minds.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, researchers have sounded the alarm about how foreign adversaries could deploy “AI bot swarms” to undermine democracy and disrupt elections.
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But online influence campaigns aren’t exclusive to politicians and foreign adversaries, and just about anybody can set up a bot farm for a few hundred dollars. Perhaps one of the biggest tells: The internet is overrun with spam, with legions of social media bots pushing crypto schemes, fake product reviews and politically motivated rage bait.
Taken together, the inauthentic accounts seek to shape public narratives about everything from hot-button political issues like data centers to the glowing, too-good-to-be-true reviews for the newest restaurant on Main Street.
For people looking to buy online clout, look no further than Amazon. The globe’s largest online retailer sells just about everything: Funky socks, kangaroo meat and, yes, bot farms.
The listings make setup sound straightforward, with tips on how to build vast social media campaigns designed to evade detection from social media platforms “to achieve group control functions.”
“One person can control 20 mobile phones at the same time, perform the same task or perform different tasks separately, and easily build a network matrix of thousands of mobile phones,” according to the listing for one bot farm, which includes a chassis, four cooling fans and “20 mobile phone motherboards” — for just $800.
YouTube is similarly flooded with videos offering step-by-step instructions on how to set up bot farms that, as one video notes, “simulate real users, quickly boost your exposure” and can be “used for any mobile phone project.”
Online marketplaces like Amazon are supposed to vet items sold by third parties, yet enforcement boils down to “playing whack-a-mole,” said Renee DiResta, a researcher focused on digital influence operations.
“Look, Amazon doesn’t know what the hell Amazon sells,” said DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.”
“The entire internet is fake,” DiResta told Straight Arrow, and bot farms are its foundation.
“I would be curious to see if anybody actually bought one off Amazon,” she said. “That wouldn’t be the place I’d think of to go get one.”
How bots pollute the internet
In just the past week, multiple storylines have emerged about how political actors leverage inauthentic social media behavior to fake engagement and advance agendas. Big Tech is struggling to keep up.
In some cases, politicians and government officials have leveraged undisclosed, paid relationships with influencers to reach targeted audiences. The Pentagon quietly tapped conservative military veterans with large social media followings on X to amplify the viewpoints of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, The Washington Post reported on Sunday. The revelation comes amid speculation that Hegseth, a former Fox News host, is weighing a run for president in 2028, which he denies.
The arrangement appears to be part of a broader effort, from across the political spectrum, in which U.S. politicians are paying influencers on TikTok, X and other social media platforms to reach the feeds and minds of targeted audiences. An investigation published Saturday in The New York Times outlined how candidates are paying influencers tens of thousands of dollars to speak favorably about them on social media.
The influencers don’t disclose the financial arrangements, which “fall into a legal gray area,” The Times reported, because federal laws don’t require candidates to disclose payments to social media influencers like they do for television advertisements and other promotional materials.
There are paid influencers — and then there are the paid robots.
Among them is a pro-Israel website masquerading as a think tank studying antisemitism in the U.S. It recently published 124 reports — totaling more than half a million words — in just nine days. The site is actually a state-sponsored operation designed to influence how chatbots frame Israel-related issues to their users, The Guardian reported last week.
OpenAI announced announced last week it had banned a swarm of Russian-based ChatGPT accounts that were part of an online “influence campaign” to populate social media platforms with praise for Russia and to criticize the U.S.
The campaign’s reach appeared limited, the company said, but its significance was important because of “the infrastructure it had built,” including a fake academic institution and purported experts who don’t actually exist.
“This illustrates how influence actors can use AI as a supporting tool within a broader effort to manufacture authority, obscure the source of favored narratives, and establish assets that could be scaled over time,” OpenAI said. “It also illustrates how their supporting use of AI can lead to the broader operation being exposed.”
Meanwhile at X, the social media company owned by Elon Musk, executives are pointing to bot farms as the culprit behind Americans’ growing resentment against data centers — which is, in turn, part of broader public backlash against artificial intelligence and the political influence of technology executives. In an announcement on Thursday, X revealed it had uncovered a Chinese bot farm operating some 200,000 accounts.
The announcement framed the bot activity as part of a broader foreign influence operation to “manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”
Whether any of those bots had an influence may be another story entirely. Darren Linvill, a Clemson University researcher, told Business Insider the bot accounts were a “non-story.”
Many of the bot accounts spreading anti-data center sentiment, Linvill noted, garnered virtually no engagement and were deactivated by X before they had an opportunity to sow widespread disinformation.
“No real humans saw these posts about data centers,” Linvill said.
Social media fame, for a few hundred dollars
This all brings us back to Amazon. Are people turning to the globe’s largest online retailer to build bot armies?
Who knows? Amazon didn’t respond to emails requesting comment from Straight Arrow.
But the listings illustrate how the tools for disinformation are readily available for purchase — for as little as $188. And some people are, in fact, running their own click farms. In a 2019 article about “America’s DIY phone farmers,” Vice reported on the people building bot farms in their homes to make quick cash.
The offerings on Amazon, which claim to be from China-based companies, are riddled with typographical errors and what appear to be poor Chinese-to-English translations. One bot farm listing describes the tool as a “social mdia marketing tool.” Another is listed as an “Android farm robot farm phone farm mobile farm box.”
Each of the listings identified by Straight Arrow had the same brand name: “Generic.” The listings themselves have few reviews or user comments, and the frequency that people are buying them is unknown.
One listing notes the devices are “ideal for large-scale app testing, social media operations or data automation tasks that were previously impractical with traditional setups.” This particular device, according to the listing, can be used for “TikTok matrix customer acquisition, Facebook customer acquisition, Google matrix customer acquisition, virtual currency mining, YouTube video promotion” and other tasks.
Straight Arrow sent interview inquiries to the third-party bot farm sellers through the Amazon app. In a response, one of the sellers didn’t directly answer questions about how the bot farms function, their intended purposes or sales.
“If you have any custom requests,” the seller wrote, “feel free to contact me.”
People are likely able to sell bot farms on Amazon “because the Bot Farm concept is something that you can use for legit purposes,” said Spain-based cybersecurity researcher Sergio Pastrana, an associate professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid.
Legitimate purposes for bot farms, Pastrana told Straight Arrow, include academic research and to test the functionality of phone applications. But perhaps more often, they’re used to manipulate social media feeds in ways that often violate social media platforms’ terms of use. They can also be used in ways that are illegal, including for cybercrime.
“Of course, you can turn this into a weapon, you can weaponize it to do something illegal,” Pastrana said. So, probably, the technology is not illegal, per se, so you can buy it. But the use of the technology is what makes it illegal or not.”
These days, he said, it’s difficult to distinguish which social media accounts are run by bots. Pastrana cited a comic published in The New Yorker in 1993: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
“On the internet, nobody knows if you’re real or not,” he said. And while social media companies have failed to take an aggressive stance against bot accounts, state-sponsored actors and companies now employ chatbots “as a regular mechanism” to manipulate online sentiment.
Bot farm listings on mainstream web platforms like Amazon, he said, lower the barrier to entry. People who plan to build armies of inauthentic social media accounts don’t need to visit illicit marketplaces, where people have advertised social media manipulation services for years.
“The fact that you can go and buy this kind of box from Amazon and you can go to some forum to learn the techniques and tactics about how to make the most of it,” he said, illustrates just how widespread the practice has become.
Round out your reading
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- Inside the effort to make data centers pay their share of electricity costs.
- Why did the Feds seize the ’largest Martian meteorite on Earth’?
- Photos and video show exactly where and when Trump visited Ground Zero after 9/11.
