They had fake comments flood in support of cancelling net neutrality in the first term, and they pretended to believe they were real in that too.

I’m sure it’s widespread, on social media it sure is, you can’t gauge public opinion well online anymore, not only are you getting just certain types of actual people, but an increasing number of influence agents, bots, mechanized troll brigades, fully autonomous chatbots working for the government approved issues we pay for, then older less advanced autonomous chatbots on lower level influence operations like corporate.

Once the more advanced autonomous chatbots get sold to corporate interests and whatever else it’s going to get real bad. Social media is doing nothing to combat them either, I heard it’s over half of all material now are fake, influence agents and bots, over half of comments, and half of all websites even as computers write websites to hit search results, written in a way to hit the engine but not provide much value, and you are now forced to click on the site for an easy answer and wade through the page that may not even have it, when the answer used to show on the search results. The only page answer now is their ai assist actually to force you to use that bs. With no apparent search engine that still works, I can’t find one they are all enshitified.

But the internet is dead, it only gets worse from here. We need to expand the fediverse and craft some social media with protections for users to get critical mass. Moderation done fairly, appealable to jury trials of actual users, and at some point we need a way of making sure real people are on social media without forcing them to identify themselves, don’t know how you thread that needle.