From the Times of Israel: Over the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts — perhaps hundreds of thousands of them — to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump. Besides posting adoring words about the former president, the fake accounts ridiculed Trump’s critics from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador who is challenging her onetime boss for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. When it came to Ron DeSantis, the bots aggressively suggested that the Florida governor couldn’t beat Trump, but would be a great running mate. [snip]The sprawling bot network was uncovered by researchers at Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm that shared its findings with The Associated Press. While the identity of those behind the network of fake accounts is unknown, Cyabra’s analysts determined that it was likely created within the US. [snip]The new pro-Trump network is actually three different networks of Twitter accounts, all created in huge batches in April, October, and November 2022. In all, researchers believe hundreds of thousands of accounts could be involved. More at Source: I am also fairly certain there is a troll farm out there somewhere that will sometimes viciously attack you for having any criticism of Trump. For right or wrong, these will be attributed to both Trump (due to his attack behavior) and/or his adversaries trying to cleverly besmirch him.
As I recall there was a lot of Trump-Bot account issues back in the 2020 election time frame. Do you think these were disinformation, reality or a clever, false-flag operation?
Bots, Deep Fakes, biased A.I.s…historically we had to dig for information. Now there is an unending river of it and unfortunately an awful lot of it is just garbage, if not outright propaganda.
All of this makes cognitive dissonance and "people believe what they want to believe" even more of an issue. The solution, IMHO, is to question everything, assume little and think for yourself.
I can remember when half of Obama's Twitter followers were bots, so I don't concern myself much with that stuff. When I first started with Twitter, as a marketing tool, you could buy fake Twitter accounts by the hundreds of thousands, and a lot of people, politicians, and businesses did that to make themselves look more popular than they were.