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How Scammers Make Money By Infesting The Internet With Bots · The Matt Walsh Show

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: In terms of sheer size, the Internet is bigger than
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: ever by any objective metric. There are more than a
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: billion websites in existence right now, I think like 1.5 billion.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: In 2010, there were just 250 million. And yet for
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: all the growth, the Internet for most people feels much
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: smaller and more restrictive than you probably remember it. Personally,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: if you go back a decade, I was probably checking
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: something like 20 different websites on a regular basis, you know,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: 10 or 15 years ago. There was a thing called
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: surfing the web, which is a phrase that you don't
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: hear much anymore. But kids, that's what your parents would do.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: And today I check maybe two or three websites. And
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: I think most people have had a similar experience. We've
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: been bombarded with so many different apps and so many
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: different websites for more than a decade. And now we've
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: decided that we don't need most of them. So instead
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: of following a dozen different independent bloggers or websites, people
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: are just on social media. They're scrolling Instagram or X,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: the endless feed that just brings everything to one place.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: They're talking to AI.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: And if they want to spend some money, maybe they're
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: subscribing to the Wall Street Journal or the New York
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Times or maybe a premium.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Substack or two.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Our information is coming from a very concentrated handful of sources,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: and therefore we are extremely easy to manipulate. in ways
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: that many people don't realize. This is the exact opposite
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: of the original promise of the internet, but that's where
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: we are. So how exactly did this happen? And how
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: significant is the problem really? Well, to answer those questions,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: we'll begin in Russia, which is still waging some kind
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: of war in Ukraine, a war that, simply based on
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: the fact that it's still going on, we can assume
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: that Russia must be losing. Russia has 10 times the
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: economy of Ukraine, nearly four times the population, and yet
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: they've apparently been on the defensive for quite some time now.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: In fact, as we've previously discussed, Ukraine has been striking
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: targets deep in Russian territory with total impunity. They've been
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: ignoring the Trump administration, which doesn't want Ukraine to escalate
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: the conflict. And for a very small, notoriously corrupt country,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Ukraine is punching well above its weight. And for our purposes,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: what's worth talking about is that when they're not bombarding refineries,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: and spiking the price of diesel, Ukrainian drones are now
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: going after Russian data centers, which handle a significant amount
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: of automated online activity. In the past few days, Ukraine
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: has bombed at least three data centers belonging to a
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: technology company called Yandex, which is Russia's equivalent to Google,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: in the sense that in Russia it handles much more
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: traffic than Google does. The data centers were located within
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: about 100 to 200 miles of Moscow, so these were
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: aggressive strikes. The leader of Ukraine, Zelenskyy, claimed that swarms
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: of Russian bots had been taken offline because of the attacks.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: In fact, he said that so many bots had been
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: disabled that, quote, a lot of people noticed as they
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: were just sort of casually browsing the internet. This was
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: his victory lap from an event in Warsaw.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Watch.
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: When we started responding to Russia's operation against our data centers,
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: became a little easier to breeze on many social media platforms.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: A lot of people, a lot of people.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: Noticed it and there was less hate, less division and
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: fewer provocations because there were fewer bots and it's pretty
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: clear where those bullets were coming from.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: So I don't know if you happen to notice less hate,
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: less division and fewer provocations online.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: I can't say I did.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, all the same, basically the same amount of
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: provocation and hate as I've become accustomed to. But according
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: to Zelensky, that's because Ukraine has been conducting bombing runs
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: deep into Russian territory. Now, even by the standards of
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: wartime propaganda, this is pretty shameless, ridiculous stuff. On its face,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: it's the kind of claim that no one should really
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: take seriously. He's claiming that if you just keep giving
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Ukraine more money and more bombs, then he can fix
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: the Internet by blowing up stuff in Russia.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: Now, credit where it's due, he knows his audience.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: He knows how to manipulate Westerners into giving him exactly
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: what he wants. Ever since Donald Trump very unexpectedly won
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: the 2016 election, A critical mass of Americans have been
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: primed to believe that the Russians can hack anything they want.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: They can hack elections. They can hack Facebook memes.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: They can basically mind control us anytime they want with their,
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: you know, amazing hacking skills. It's much easier for Democrats
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: to just blame Russia for everything than it is to
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: assess their own failure.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: So that's what they decided to do.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: And now Zelensky is once again taking advantage of this derangement.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: by presenting three random Russian data centers as a kind
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: of ground zero for online hate and division. You know,
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: the ongoing concern about data centers in some corners of
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: the country and broader concerns about AI in general, prime
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: people to take this.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: Seriously as well.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: So this is going to be a big theme heading
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: into the elections next month. It's probably going to be
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: a theme in every American election for the foreseeable future.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: And that's because there's a fundamental truth underlying the obvious
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: lie that Zelensky is peddling, which is that nobody trusts
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: anything they see online anymore.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: And for good reason, you shouldn't.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Even when you remove AI from the equation, which you
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: really can't, it's a big part of the picture, it
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: seems like pretty much every influencer and online commentator has
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: been taking money.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: Without disclosing it.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: This is from a deep dive the Wall Street Journal
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: published earlier this year, quote, Last summer, Donald Trump's 28-year-old
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: former campaign aide Alex Brusewitz had some new advice for
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: the president. Reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. Nearly
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: 70% of Republican voters support Trump on this. No brainer,
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: he said, to more than 640,000 followers on X. What
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Brusewitz left out of the post, a political action committee
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: funded by legal marijuana's biggest players had just paid him $ 300, 000.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: Israel made plans over the past summer to spend $ 900, 000
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: on an influencer campaign with a U.S. audience, according to
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: disclosure documents. As Israel fights negative sentiment on the right,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with conservative social media.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: Stars on at least two of his visits.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: The solar energy and health industries have paid thousands of
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: dollars to influencers to support their interests, according to people
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: who have been offered or participated in such deals. Qatar,
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: beverage interests, and others have courted those with online political followings. Now,
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: they go through many more examples. Just a couple of
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: years ago, the DOJ presented evidence that Russian operatives had
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: secretly been funding Tenet Media, which was an up-and-coming media
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: organization that was appearing everywhere all of a sudden, although
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: it was never proven in court that they knew the
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: money was coming from Russia. We cited Tenet's reporting once
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: or twice on the show. For the most part, they
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: were doing legitimate work. But behind the scenes, according to
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: the DOJ, They were taking a lot of money from
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: foreign sources, far more than you would think. You were
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: talking millions of dollars for a relatively small outfit. Then
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: there was the soda debacle of 2025, where you may
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: remember a lot of conservatives with big social media accounts
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: suddenly became mysteriously advocates for food stamps to cover soda purchases.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: It was a strange position, since any actual conservative would
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: support abolishing the food stamp program altogether. No conservative is
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: sitting around worried about making sure that poor people can
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: get soda for free. We don't need food stamps at
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: all because poor people aren't starving. If anything, they're too fat.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: Something like two thirds of food stamp recipients are overweight.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: But in this case, a bunch of alleged conservatives came
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: out and pushed for food stamps to cover soda in
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: the face of possible regulations that would have restricted SNAP
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: for that purpose.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: Watch.
• 8:27
  Speaker 4: Something peculiar happened this weekend. A handful of conservative influencers
• 8:32
  Speaker 4: all defended big soda, people who make sugary drinks. They
• 8:37
  Speaker 4: said the Make America Healthy Again movement is out of
• 8:40
  Speaker 4: line trying to cut soda and other junk food out
• 8:42
  Speaker 4: of SNAP benefits. Arkansas, among other states, wants to ban
• 8:46
  Speaker 4: the use of food stamps for junk food.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: And you can see here all of the posts.
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: And they're all parroting the same talking points and are
• 8:54
  Speaker 4: oddly similar. Why? Well, former swimmer turned women's rights activist
• 8:59
  Speaker 4: Riley Gaines let us know why. She posted on Twitter
• 9:02
  Speaker 4: in response to this, quote, they offered to pay me
• 9:05
  Speaker 4: to post a big fat heck no.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: Robert F.
• 9:08
  Speaker 4: Kennedy, now Secretary of Health and Human Services, thanked her.
• 9:10
  Speaker 4: It's troubling that some companies now think they have a
• 9:13
  Speaker 4: right to demand taxpayer money to poison our children. Podcast host,
• 9:16
  Speaker 4: investigative reporter Nick Sorter unveiled all this on Twitter, claiming
• 9:22
  Speaker 4: the company Influensible is behind it all, paying MAGA influencers
• 9:26
  Speaker 4: to post in favor of the soda companies.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: So this is an incredibly common routine. It plays out
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: constantly on social media, very widespread. In this case, they
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: got caught, but usually it goes undetected. And what happens
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: is that some powerful industry, in this case, the soda companies,
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: see an opportunity to earn some corporate welfare by manipulating
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: public opinion. And here they want poor people to be
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: able to use their SNAP benefits provided by taxpayers to
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: buy soda, because that means the soda company will earn
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: more money, obviously. But there was a plan to make
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: soda ineligible for SNAP. So soda companies decided to engage
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: in some lobbying. And rather than disclose what they're doing
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: up front, they paid social media influencers under the table,
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: apparently using a cutout, some third-party influencer firm, so that
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: the soda companies themselves are not implicated. And after all,
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: advertising is always more effective if people think that it's organic.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: And the problem with these social media campaigns is, number one,
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: They aren't cheap. If you want a big influencer or
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: even a medium-sized one to read your script, they'll often
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: charge tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum. And secondly,
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: as we saw in this case, they carry a lot
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: of risk. The risk of exposure is fairly high. And
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: on top of that, people are getting more familiar with
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: how influencer campaigns work. So the marketing is losing its effectiveness.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: People are starting to realize that these influencers aren't actually
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: offering their authentic opinions, it turns out.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: Big shocker.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: And that's where AI comes in. And this is the
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: reason that bots can be so powerful. Now, if you're
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: a marketing firm, instead of spending a million dollars for
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: a handful of influencers to send a few tweets, it
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: makes more sense to spend half that money and hire
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: a swarm of bots. Those bots will engage with other
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: people and promote your product in conversation without those people
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: even realizing what's happening. This is becoming the default way
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: that these operations are run. So when Zelensky claims that
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: his bombs are putting an end to this insanity, whether
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: that's true or not, a lot of people want to
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: believe that it's true because the problem underlying it is
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: obviously a real problem. They'll support anyone who's going to
• 11:30
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  Speaker 1: or candidate's committee. But while Zelensky is obviously overselling vastly
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: what Ukraine's drones actually accomplished, the bombing campaign does raise
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: a couple of interesting questions. You have to wonder, was
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: there any noticeable decrease in fake online traffic as a
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: result of the destruction of these data centers? I'm talking
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: about AI-generated replies on sites like X, Reddit, and Instagram.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: And even if most people wouldn't have noticed it, did
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: the destruction of these data centers have any impact on
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: traffic on these websites?
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: That's the first question we need to answer. And the
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: second question is, hypothetically, if.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: We eliminated every bot farm and data center in the
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: entire country, what would the internet look like? I'm not
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: necessarily saying we should do that, but as a thought experiment,
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: it's a question that's worth answering, even aside from the
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: wisdom of Ukraine's bombing campaign. So as to the first question,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: the practical effect of this particular attack by Ukraine, the
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: truth is it's difficult to measure. Pretty much everyone who's
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: attempting to answer the question has a conflict of interest.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: As the tech website Mashable notes, much of the buzz
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: about the drone attacks affecting bot traffic traces back to
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: a report from U24 Media, the media arm of United24,
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: which is a platform run, by the Ukrainian government. U24
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: reported that automated web traffic from Yandex's network fell immediately
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: after the first drone attack on October 8th and nearly
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: disappeared after the third attack on October 11th. And you
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: can see the chart on your screen. The chart shows
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: automated traffic plummeted to just 0.3% of its peak as
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: compared with 88% at the same hour from a week earlier.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Even when you keep in mind that correlation isn't causation,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: that seems like a smoking gun. But if you understand
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: what the numbers mean, it's not that remarkable at all.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: As Mashable reports, quote, the catch is that automated traffic
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: and Russian propaganda bots aren't the same thing. Automated traffic
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: is any request sent to a website by software rather
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: than a person.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Most of it is mundane.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Search engine crawlers indexing pages or monitoring tools, checking whether
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: sites are up. Because Yandex runs Russia's biggest search engine,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: its network constantly sends out crawlers to index the web.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: knocking its data centers offline would bring traffic to a
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: halt regardless of whether a single troll account went quiet.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: Okay, so we're back to square one.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: The fact that automated traffic decreased does not by itself
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: tell us anything.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: About bot activity necessarily.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: I saw a few other armchair attempts at crunching the numbers,
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: including this analysis, which happens to show that traffic plummeted
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: on various subreddits following the bombings. And This looked convincing
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: too at first glance, but when you zoom out, you
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: realize that it's highly misleading. They looked at a thousand
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: subreddits and found that only 90 of them had a
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: drop in activity over a three-day period. And as the
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: account Reddit Lies has pointed out, there's nothing remotely unusual
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: about that. Reddit Lies monitors Reddit all the time, as
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: the name implies, so they have some experience here. Sometimes
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: there's a big event that everyone's talking about in that community,
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: and then the next day traffic falls off a cliff.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: For example, One of the subreddits, which focuses on Czech politics,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: experienced a 20% drop after the Ukrainian bombings. But the
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Czech Republic was also holding elections right before the bombing.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: So you'd expect a spike followed by a sudden crash.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: And that's what happened here.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: A researcher named Waldemar Ostead has confirmed that according to
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: his analysis, nothing unusual happened on Reddit. The gray boxes
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: are the normal expected range for posting levels.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: Everything was exactly what you'd expect. on the right-wing end
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: of the spectrum.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: I also saw someone else post this chart supposedly showing
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: that on X, references to free Palestine dropped after the bombings.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: And you can see it there. But again, we have
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: no idea whether this is normal noise or not. At
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: a minimum, as expected, we can conclude that there's no
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: objective basis for what Zelensky is claiming, which is not
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: a great shock. But that leads us to the more
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: interesting question, which is what would happen if we actually
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: could somehow eliminate the ability of bots to communicate with
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: us on the Internet? What if we could revert back
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: to the Internet of the 1990s and early 2000s when
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: AI-powered bots simply didn't exist? Or at least didn't remotely
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: resemble what we have now? To get a sense of
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: how much things have changed, a woman named Ellie May
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: recently conducted something of an unscientific experiment on Instagram. At
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: the height of the Lindsay Clancy hysteria, she posted the
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: following video on Instagram.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Here it is.
• 18:07
  Speaker 5: If you think anything about this trial, listen to this,
• 18:11
  Speaker 5: because Lindsay Clancy is a person. There was just a mistrial.
• 18:15
  Speaker 5: Reddington represented her. And I'm just saying words with emphasis
• 18:20
  Speaker 5: and a certain cadence to see what the algorithm picks
• 18:23
  Speaker 5: up and whether or not bots will drop in to
• 18:26
  Speaker 5: say hello. Because justice. Women. It's unfair. Men. Men. Patrick Clancy. Innocent.
• 18:34
  Speaker 4: Guilty.
• 18:35
  Speaker 5: The judge is a man. The prosecution.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: Woman.
• 18:39
  Speaker 5: Voting rights. 19th Amendment. Children. The second floor window.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: SSRIs.
• 18:44
  Speaker 5: Unalived. Winter.
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: Snow.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Wet. Temperature.
• 18:49
  Speaker 5: Spinal injury.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: Exercise bans.
• 18:51
  Speaker 5: Lindsay Clancy.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: Wheelchair.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: Honestly, when it comes to the quality of female created
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: Lindsay Clancy content on Instagram, this is probably in the
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: top 5%, maybe even top 1%. There's more depth and
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: intellectual horsepower on display in this footage than the vast
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: majority of content that women were uploading unironically.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: Throughout the trial.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: So low bar, but still, she does a great job
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: with it. Maybe she could have thrown in a few
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: more references to astrology, but otherwise, pretty much dead on.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: But the point is, she's trying to attract bots to
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: comment on her video. She was weeding out humans to
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: see how many bot replies she would get. And very quickly,
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: some unusual replies rolled in. And we'll put them up
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: on the screen right now. Quote, don't give a crap
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: about her disability, more so about her children.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: Retard.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Liberal white women in Dahmer glasses. Where's the footage from
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: the police body worn cameras? Why didn't the police arrest Patrick?
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Why hasn't Patrick's phone examined? Why wasn't his phone examined?
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: Will be forced to repeal.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: The 19th Amendment. And they continue from there.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Now, while this is both entertaining and kind of depressing
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: at the same time, we do have to concede that
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: there's a pretty big problem with this experiment, which is
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: that She just sort of assumes that all of these
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: responses must be from bots simply because they have nothing
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: to do with her video. But as someone who's been
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: uploading videos online long before the current AI bot epidemic,
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: I have to take some issue with this methodology. Based
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: on my extensive experience, she is vastly underestimating the number
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: of people who are actual people and will respond to
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: a video with very passionate and lengthy responses that have
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with anything because they haven't watched it.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: That's not to say that most people don't watch the
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: full videos. We have the metrics on that, at least
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: in the case of our videos, and the average viewer
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: does indeed watch most of the show. But when you're
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: talking about people who leave comments, that's a demographic that's
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: hit or miss. And as far as watching the actual
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: content of the video, it can kind of go either way.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: People will leave comments because they want to get something
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: off their chest. So they go to the first video
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: that's tangentially related to something that they're upset about and
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: they'll just let loose. People will leave comments because they're
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: heavily intoxicated and they think they're writing the State of
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: the Union address, which will be personally delivered word for
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: word to the President of the United States. People will
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: leave comments for all kinds of reasons that would shock
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: and horrify the typical God-fearing American. Not to disparage the
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: good name of many people who comment on my videos,
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: because most of them are great, but There's a very
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: vocal minority of lunatics that drift from YouTube video to
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: YouTube video like a swarm of locusts, and they're totally
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: unbothered by the content of whatever they're responding to. And
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: with respect to the internet lady running this experiment, she
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: doesn't appear to have considered that possibility.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: There's always a.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Possibility that human beings can be very stupid. There's always that.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: You can never discount that. You got to factor that in.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: You got to bake that into the equation whenever you're
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: doing any kind of experiment like this. But there's no
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: question that as a general matter, she's making a legitimate point.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: From my perspective, and this is anecdotal, but I think
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: many people would relate, if I go to just my
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: X feed, which is one of the two or three
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: places I go on the internet now, feels like 95%
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: of the feed is fake now. And maybe it's not
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: that high in reality, it's probably not 95%. But if
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: you go there, you go to any social media, or
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: you read the comments under anything, it does appear that
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: a huge number of them are fake.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: Comments are fake. Posts are fake.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Bots will come up with some irrelevant or idiotic take,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: and then another bot will respond to it. So you've
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: got fake posts and then fake comments responding to the
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: fake posts. So you've got bots talking to bots all
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: over the place. And this happens millions of times every day.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: You know, it's a particularly big problem on Facebook where
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: this image here was posted.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: Check this out.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: So it's, you know, I don't want to, I mean,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: I've done my own assessment of this very scientifically. And
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: I can tell you that this appears to be AI generated.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: So this is an AI generated picture of a wounded
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: soldier in a wheelchair with the sign that says, today's
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: my birthday. No one loved me because I'm poor. And
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: he appears to be sitting, where is he? Like he's
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: in some kind of control room. He appears to be
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: in some kind of control room over at NASA or something.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, that picture makes more sense if he's on
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: the street corner. So he's in a control room somewhere
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: in his uniform, in a wheelchair with a cardboard sign saying,
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: today's my birthday. No one loves me because I'm poor.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: And the hashtag on this post naturally includes Wonder Woman,
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: Kylie Jenner, Christian Bale, and Angelina Jolie. Now, this post
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: that you see there, obviously completely fake and nonsensical, racked
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: up more than 290,000 likes.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: And 49,000 comments.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: And yes, most of those likes and comments are fake
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: as well. It's an endless cycle. And it's compromised many
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: different websites from Quora to Reddit to pretty much every
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: other social media platform. You've got these conversations that are
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: happening on these sites between thousands of accounts. And there
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: might not be a single real person there at all.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Then you have the many different AI slop accounts that
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: post fake photos of celebrities doing something incredibly generous or selfless.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: Peyton Manning is one of the more prominent athletes in
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: this genre for some reason. The point isn't simply to
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: trick boomers, although there's plenty of that going on. And
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: once again, as we talk about, you can't discount the
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: possibility that people are stupid. When you see posts like this,
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: a lot of the comments are fake. A lot of
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: the accounts that are responding are not people at all.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: But then you also have people who genuinely will look
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: at an image like that and not know that it's fake.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: And I don't know what's more disturbing.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: You go back to the The Wounded Warrior, I don't know, 50,000 comments.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: What's more disturbing, if 50,000 people actually believed that and
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: thought it was real or if 50,000 bots are responding?
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know which is worse, honestly. I think it's
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: just kind of a combination.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: It's the worst of all worlds.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: But the idea is also to scam Facebook's algorithm into
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: thinking that these are legitimate views so the account owner
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: gets the advertising revenue from the post. And this is
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: a totally hands-off process now. You could program AIs to
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: go out and create these posts for you all day
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: across every platform you can think of. Realistically, there's no
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: way to stop the flood of constant garbage. Five years
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: from now, the entire internet is just going to be that.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: A year from now, maybe.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: It's going to be totally unusable. And there doesn't appear
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: to be any real plan to stop that from happening.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: Every year, the holiday shopping season starts earlier and earlier.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: We used to wait until Thanksgiving and now Halloween candy
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: shares an aisle with artificial Christmas trees because the retail
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: calendar has abandoned all restraint. Somewhere right now, an inflatable
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: reindeer is on sale and it's still October. So before
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: you start buying gifts for everyone you care about, handle
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: something that can protect those same people long after the
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: wrapping paper is gone. Life insurance is nobody's favorite purchase.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: Nobody's ever excited to unwrap it. which is why it
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: keeps getting pushed to next year and then the next one,
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: the next one, the next one. If you've been putting
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: it off because the process seems complicated, Policy Genius is
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: exactly the kind of place I'd want to start. Policy
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: Genius is a free online marketplace where you can compare
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: quotes from some of America's top insurers side by side.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: Their license team helps explain the coverage, the prices, and
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: the terms, answers your questions, handles your.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: Paperwork, and advocates for you throughout the process.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: With Policy Genius, you can find 20-year life insurance policies
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: starting at just $ 276, 000 a year, For a million dollars
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: in coverage, head to PolicyGenius.com slash Walsh to compare life
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: could save. That's PolicyGenius.com slash Walsh. Just the other day,
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: the DOJ announced that a 54-year-old man named Michael Smith
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for running
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: a scam kind of like this from 2017 to 2024.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: So he was doing this for seven years before he
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: was caught. started doing this back when the AI and
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: bot technology was nothing like what it is now, so
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: it's only getting worse.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: But here's what he did, according to the DOJ's press release.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: He targeted Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: in particular. Quote, First, Smith created thousands of fraudulent accounts
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: on the streaming platforms, the bot accounts, that he could
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: the bot accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: which were generally created using superintelligence.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: Artificial intelligence. I'm not doing the superintelligence thing.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: I'm not respecting the AI's pronouns that Donald Trump has
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: assigned to it for some dumb reason. Anyway. Third, Smith
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams that he orchestrated
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: his own bot accounts to conduct. Smith spread his automated
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: to any single song. which would likely cause the streaming
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: platforms to discover his scheme. At times, Smith was using
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once to fraudulently
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: obtained debit cards to create the bot accounts. To obtain
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed,
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: Smith turned to superintelligence, otherwise known as artificial intelligence, which
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: for which he could manipulate the streams. Smith's hundreds of
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his bot accounts
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: billions of times. Yes, billions of times. So his only
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: mistake was getting too greedy. Otherwise, nobody would have suspected anything.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: To give you an idea of how brazen this was,
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: in the month of April 2023, Taylor Swift's entire catalog
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: That same month, according to DOJ, Smith's bot accounts used
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: Million times on YouTube music.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: As a result, he collected more than $ 8 million in royalties.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: This is why if you use Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist,
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: you keep coming across like terrible covers all the time.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Most of them are made with AI for the sole
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: purpose of scamming the system. And because of these scams,
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: the service gets noticeably worse for everybody. We're seeing this
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: play out all over the Internet. It is a gold
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: rush for scammers. And meanwhile, people actually create good content.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: actual humans are being drowned out. It's harder than it's
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: ever been to get a real audience. And again, there's
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: no plan in place to do anything about this really,
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: other than to rename AI, to call it super intelligence.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: Maybe if we flatter it, it won't kill us all.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: Maybe that's the plan. Good idea.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: That'll solve it. As best I can tell at the moment,
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: and maybe this is self-serving to say, but I think
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: it's true. You know, The only way to survive right now,
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: if you're creating content, maybe, is to create actually good content,
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: and particularly with writing, great writing. This is one thing
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: that the AI has gotten very sophisticated in a lot
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: of ways very quickly.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: It still can't write for sure. I mean, it cannot
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: write at all.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: And if you're even vaguely intelligent, you can spot AI
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: writing from a mile away. Now, if you're a media
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: organization that wants to continue existing in a few years,
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: this is non-negotiable.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: You need good writing.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: The problem is that most writers, even human writers, are
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: generally god-awful. And we kind of talked about this last week.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: They're only going to get worse as human writers who
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: are already, many of them, especially on the internet, are
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: really bad. And now they're reading a lot of AI-generated
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: content and they're using AI more and more. And so
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: their writing skills are getting worse and worse. That's why
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: the phenomenon of the viral article which used to be
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: a thing, is dead now with rare exceptions. There was
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: that Boston Globe article about the lesbian bar, the one
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: we covered on the show a couple of weeks ago.
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: That was a massively viral article. It's the first one
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: that I can remember in months. And one of the
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: things that made it a viral article is that aside
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: from the fact that the story they were telling was
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: so ridiculous and funny, it was good writing. Whoever write,
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: I forget the author's name, but whoever wrote that was
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: actually good writing, good human writing. This is a change
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: that I've seen up close because I was an independent
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: blogger in the early 2010s, which was a reputable career
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: back then. Well, not reputable, but it was a career
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: and it was a thing you could do. And all
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: I did was write blog posts. And in doing so,
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: I made enough money to support a family. I'd get
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: four or five million views on a single viral post easily.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: Even with a base of... My follower base, mostly on Facebook, was...
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: very small compared to now. It was like maybe 50,000, 60,000 followers.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: That was enough because you actually had access because, you know,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: 50 or 60,000 followers, they were all humans.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: First of all, they were real people.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: And you could access like all of them. It isn't
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: like it is now where you've got a bunch of followers,
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: but through the algorithms, you only really only about 0.1%
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: of them will see what you post. Back then you
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: have 50, 60,000 followers. All of them will see your
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: stuff because they're following you. And, um, I had a
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: post that would go viral once a month, sometimes more
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: frequently than that. And now that's impossible. Somebody with my
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: exact perspective and skillset writing the same kind of stuff
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: today would have an infinitely more difficult time getting noticed.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: And if they did get noticed, there's no way they
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: could scratch out a career just writing long articles or commentaries.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: That just doesn't exist anymore. You might remember Matt Drudge.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Remember how in January of 1998, he blew open the
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: Monica Lewinsky scandal because Newsweek had spiked the reporting on it.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: They didn't want to run the story.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: Because they couldn't verify the authenticity of Lewinsky's conversations with
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: Linda Tripp. So Drudge just went ahead and published it himself.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: And here's how the BBC covered that development at the time,
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: all the way back in the ancient past. Quote, holding
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: the story wasn't an issue for Matt Drudge, the maverick
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: internet reporter who authored the story.
• 34:11
  Speaker 4: Mr.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: Drudge proudly admits he has no editor but himself. On Saturday,
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: he published the story to the web's worldwide audience. Plus,
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: according to his own calculation, is more than 85,000 subscribers.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: By the early hours of Sunday, the news had hit
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: internet news groups. It moved from alt-current events, Clinton, Whitewater,
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: to alt-impeach Clinton, and then to more mainstream political discussion groups.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: An early interview about the scandal, former Clinton aide George
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: Stephanopoulos dismissed the report. And where did that come from?
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: The Drudge Report? You know, we've all seen how discredited
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: that's been. This was the moment it became clear to
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: everybody that the mainstream press has lost its ability to
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: control the national narrative for the first time. The internet
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: gave everybody the ability to become a blogger and reach
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: an audience of millions. Anyone could reach an audience. And therefore,
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: as the scandal broke, people were wondering what the media
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: would look like in 30 years. Would many more websites
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: like the Drugs Report spring up challenging the established narratives? Well,
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: And people wonder, would people still be making those little
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: geosites pages about their pets and sharing them with their
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: friends and family? How advanced would those websites be in
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: 30 years? People could only imagine. Well, what they didn't
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: expect was that 30 years later, all of this creativity,
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: most of it, all of the value of surfing the web,
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: as they call it at the time, would be replaced
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: in large part by a flood of AI slop and
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: scams designed to manipulate the algorithm. They probably didn't imagine
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: that 30 years after Drudge took down the mainstream press,
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: Drudge itself would be limping along like a hollowed out
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: husk of its former self, endlessly aggregating pointless stories that
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: nobody cares about anymore. And nobody thought that 30 years later,
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: with more websites and podcasts available than ever before, Most
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: people would go back to relying on just one or
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: two sources for their daily news and information. Now, whatever
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: you call this phenomenon, dead internet theory, as the term
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: that's used now, or anything else, it's obviously real. And
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: over in Ukraine, Zelensky has clearly concluded that any politician
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: who promises to bomb our way out of it, even
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: if he's lying, is going to be immensely popular as
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: a result. He's determined that military action in the form
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: of drone warfare is a palatable solution to the dead internet.
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: Is he right about that?
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Well, it's really not clear at the moment, but until
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: someone provides a viable alternative, it's the solution that a
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: lot of people are going to support. Many more bombs
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: will fall. Many more data centers will inevitably be destroyed.
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: Many more bot farms incinerated. We'll continue our march backwards
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: through what they used to call the information age, but
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: on the bright side, You know, a random guy talking
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: to a camera in his car will have a much
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: better chance of finding an audience, earning a living. That's
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: a trade that many young men would happily make at
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: this point. And as someone who knows a lot about
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: broadcasting from a car, I can't blame them.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed.