The Manufactured Roar: How Bot Farms and AI Are Rigging the Conversation

Look, we need to talk about something that’s been quietly reshaping our democracy whilst most of us scroll through our feeds, oblivious. That overwhelming tide of right-wing rhetoric flooding social media? The seemingly endless stream of outrage about immigration, the climate “hoax”, or whatever moral panic is trending this week? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a significant chunk of it isn’t real people at all.

It’s manufactured noise, amplified by bot farms, artificial intelligence, and eye-watering amounts of money from people who gain from keeping us angry and divided.

The voices shouting the loudest online often aren’t real people having genuine conversations. They’re weapons in an information war designed to make fringe positions look mainstream and extreme views appear perfectly reasonable.

Welcome to the Bot Factory

Right, so here’s where it gets properly dystopian. In 2024, for the first time in a decade, automated bot traffic made up 51% of all web activity. Let that sink in—more than half of what you see online is generated by bots, not humans. These aren’t the clunky, obvious spam accounts from years ago. Modern bot farms use sophisticated software or even physical racks of smartphones (yes, really) to mimic human behaviour across X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

The scale is staggering. Before our 2024 election, just 45 bot-like accounts on X posted about 440,000 times, racking up over 3 billion views. Then after the election, they kept going—another 170,000 posts and 1.3 billion views. And here’s the kicker: when researchers ask people to spot bots in political discussions, they get it wrong 58% of the time. We literally cannot tell what’s real anymore.

The U.S. Department of Justice disrupted a Russian government-backed operation that created nearly 1,000 fake social media accounts posing as Americans. The scheme was run by RT (Russia’s state propaganda outlet), funded by the Kremlin, and controlled by an FSB intelligence officer. They used AI to generate believable American personas spreading pro-Russian talking points and undermining support for Ukraine.

And that’s just one operation we know about. How many others are running right now, shaping what appears in your feed?

Brexit: The Cambridge Analytica Playbook

Let’s rewind to 2016—a year that fundamentally changed British politics. The Brexit referendum wasn’t just won through persuasive arguments and passionate debate. Behind the scenes, something far more sinister was happening: the weaponisation of your personal data on an industrial scale.

Cambridge Analytica, funded primarily by American billionaire Robert Mercer (one of Trump’s biggest donors), harvested data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles without consent. Think about that—87 million people’s private information, their likes, their friends, their psychological profiles, all hoovered up and used to manipulate them.

Vote Leave breached election spending limits by funnelling money to Cambridge Analytica’s affiliated firm, Aggregate IQ, to run targeted political adverts on Facebook. They spent 98% of their marketing budget—nearly a billion targeted digital ads—on psychological manipulation rather than traditional campaigning. The official Brexit campaign director later boasted this data science was their “winning recipe”.

But it gets worse. According to former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele, Vladimir Putin made a strategic decision in late 2013 to target the U.S. presidential election and fund far-right parties pushing for countries to leave the EU. Russia invested heavily in the St. Petersburg troll farm starting in 2014, hiring dozens of English-language speakers specifically for this purpose.

Twitter identified 3,841 Russian accounts affiliated with the Internet Research Agency and 770 potentially from Iran that collectively sent over 10 million tweets spreading disinformation during the Brexit referendum period. Nearly a third of Brexit-related tweets came from just 1% of accounts, with pro-Leave bots tweeting more than three times as often as pro-Remain ones.

The money trail is damning. Robert Mercer owned Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Trump’s campaign and had connections to Brexit efforts. The DOJ revealed Russia funnelled $10 million through RT employees working with an American content company, paying U.S. social media influencers to spread pro-Russian content whilst hiding the Kremlin connection.

Brexit wasn’t just won at the ballot box. It was won through a sophisticated, well-funded campaign of data exploitation and bot-amplified propaganda—and most voters had no idea they were being manipulated.

Elon Musk’s Propaganda Playground

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, he claimed he was rescuing “free speech”. What he actually did was turn the platform into a right-wing echo chamber and disinformation megaphone.

Science Feedback found that 490 misinformation “superspreader” accounts saw a 44% increase in engagement under Musk’s ownership. Four of the five accounts that gained the most influence had received replies from Musk himself. Far-right accounts saw a 70% increase in retweets and 14% increase in likes—massively outpacing any gains by normal users.

Musk, with nearly 200 million followers, has become one of the primary spreaders of false information on his own platform. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate identified 50 posts by Musk containing debunked election claims that racked up 1.2 billion views. Not one displayed a “Community Note”—you know, X’s supposedly brilliant crowd-sourced fact-checking system. When election officials tried correcting Musk’s lies, their posts got over 200 times less engagement. One rule for billionaires, another for everyone else.

Under Musk’s leadership, X removed labels from state-controlled media outlets—suddenly Russian and Chinese propaganda accounts were treated the same as legitimate news sources. He reinstated 62,000 banned accounts, including 75 with over a million followers each, many of whom had been kicked off for hate speech, harassment, or abuse. Russian and Chinese state media began gaining followers again after years of decline.

RT’s Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan—a notorious Kremlin propagandist who’s called for Ukraine to be obliterated—personally thanked Musk “from the heart” for removing her state affiliation label.

Musk constantly amplifies posts from accounts like “Catturd” (pro-Trump propaganda), “Libs of TikTok” (anti-LGBTQ content), and ZeroHedge (conspiracy theories). He’s even ordered his engineers to make his posts show up more frequently in everyone’s feeds, whether they follow him or not.

Think about that power. The world’s richest man purchased one of the most influential communication platforms and transformed it into his personal propaganda network, algorithmically forcing his political views onto hundreds of millions of users.

Donald Trump: Flooding the Zone with Nonsense

Trump didn’t invent political lying, but he perfected the art of drowning truth in a tsunami of bullshit. His strategy is simple: make so many false claims, so quickly, that fact-checkers can’t keep up and the public stops knowing what to believe.

His social media platform Truth Social (the irony of that name is almost painful) has become a primary channel for distributing AI-generated propaganda. Trump shares AI images portraying opponents as communists, fake celebrity endorsements, and obviously fabricated content—sometimes with just a laughing emoji as the only hint it’s not real.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump claimed Haitian migrants were “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio. It was completely false, obviously racist, and he said it during a presidential debate watched by millions. His running mate JD Vance actually defended making up stories: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do”.

Read that again. A candidate for Vice President of the United States explicitly said he’ll lie to manipulate media coverage. And it worked.

Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon explained their media strategy with brutal honesty: “flood the zone with shit”. Create so much chaos and confusion that people stop trusting anything. Researchers call the result “the fog of unknowability”—a state where truth becomes negotiable and people believe nothing.

The approach isn’t accidental; it’s calculated information warfare designed to undermine the very concept of shared reality.

Nigel Farage: Britain’s Discount Trump

Here in the UK, Nigel Farage has been taking notes. Reform UK’s social media dominance during the 2024 election was staggering—and deeply suspicious.

Despite polling around 18% of the vote, Farage and Reform generated six times more reactions and shares on Facebook than Labour or the Conservatives combined. The BBC’s disinformation correspondent identified over 50 suspicious accounts posting hundreds of messages supporting Reform UK across X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. One account, “GenZbloomer”, posted “Vote Reform UK” every couple of hours before being suspended.

Security experts analysed Facebook networks pushing pro-Reform content and concluded they had “the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation”. These pages were deleted just hours before journalists could download more of their content, but what they found was chilling—posts normalising racism, spreading Islamophobic conspiracy theories, and portraying Farage and defected Tory Lee Anderson as heroes fighting an “invasion”.

Farage has completely adopted Trump’s playbook, accusing media outlets of “election interference”, calling votes “rigged”, and launching his campaign with a promise to “make Britain great again”. After a Channel 4 investigation caught a Reform canvasser on camera using racist language and saying the army should “shoot” asylum seekers, Farage claimed it was all a “stitch-up” with paid actors.

Following the Southport knife attack, Farage amplified conspiracy theories to his millions of followers, speculating that “the truth is being withheld from us”. It helped spark some of the worst riots Britain has seen in years, with attempts to burn down hotels housing migrants and racist mobs setting up “race checkpoints” to check drivers’ ethnicity.

Research from the University of Bath shows how far-right narratives in anonymous X networks have migrated into Reform UK’s mainstream policies. The party now supports mass deportations it previously called a “political impossibility”—driven by what researchers describe as a “right-wing arms race” of social media users pushing for increasingly extreme positions.

This transformation wouldn’t be possible without Musk’s X, where far-right figures have been welcomed back and algorithms actively promote extreme content. The platform is normalising views that would have been relegated to society’s fringes just a decade ago.

Who’s Paying for All This?

These operations don’t run on enthusiasm and good intentions. They require serious money, technical expertise, and infrastructure. So who’s funding the noise?

Russia: The Kremlin directly approved and funded the AI-powered bot farm run by RT and the FSB. Russia, China, and Iran are the three governments most active in spreading disinformation in the United States and beyond, with operations ramping up before elections.

Conservative Billionaires: Cambridge Analytica was owned by several of the Conservative Party’s largest donors, with Robert Mercer’s family playing a central role. These aren’t grassroots movements—they’re astroturfed campaigns funded by people who benefit from particular political outcomes.

Tech Platform Owners: Elon Musk represents a new and terrifying model—a billionaire who bought a major communication platform and uses it to amplify his preferred ideology. Researchers now describe his $44 billion Twitter purchase as “an explicitly political act to advance this specific ideology”. He’s not just funding propaganda; he owns the megaphone.

The Illusion of Consensus

Here’s what all this manipulation achieves: it makes fringe positions look mainstream and extreme views appear reasonable. When bots make hashtags trend, it creates the impression that everyone’s talking about something, that extreme positions have broad support.

This creates what researchers call “the liar’s dividend”—where even authentic content gets questioned because everyone knows fakes are abundant. If any critical voice can be dismissed as “just a bot” and any evidence as a “deepfake”, democratic debate collapses.

The average person scrolling through social media faces an impossible task: distinguishing genuine public opinion from manufactured narratives. When bot traffic exceeds human activity and we can’t spot AI-generated content even when we’re actively trying, how can we have informed democratic participation?

What Can We Actually Do About This?

Look, I’ll be honest—this is terrifying, and it’s not going away. But we’re not powerless. Here’s what needs to happen:

Social media platforms need proper content moderation. Right now, many of these platforms are, in researchers’ words, “cesspools of rumours, false information, and outright lies”. Companies need to take responsibility for the poison they’re allowing to spread.

We need transparency in political advertising and funding. The loopholes that allowed Cambridge Analytica and Brexit dark money must be closed. If foreign governments or dodgy billionaires are funding campaigns, we deserve to know.

Platform owners must be held accountable. When someone like Musk uses his platform to spread disinformation for political gain, there should be consequences. Regulators need to grow a spine and enforce meaningful penalties.

Digital literacy education is essential. People need to understand how they’re being manipulated. Schools should teach critical thinking about online information. We need to equip people to recognise propaganda tactics.

International cooperation is crucial. These operations cross borders, so responses must as well. Democracies need to work together to counter state-sponsored disinformation.

The Bottom Line

That overwhelming tide of right-wing rhetoric dominating your feed? The endless outrage, the conspiracy theories, the normalisation of views that would’ve been considered extreme just years ago?

Much of it is manufactured, amplified by bots, bankrolled by billionaires, and designed to manipulate you.

The manufactured roar isn’t democracy in action—it’s democracy under attack. Every time an algorithm amplifies a bot’s message over a human’s voice, every time a billionaire uses their platform to spread lies, every time dark money shapes political campaigns in secret, we lose a bit more of the shared reality necessary for democratic society to function.

The first step to fighting back is recognising what’s happening. The voices dominating online discourse aren’t representative of public opinion—they’re often not even real. Don’t let the volume fool you into thinking it represents genuine support.

Stay sceptical. Question what you see. Check sources.

And remember: in the battle for your attention and your beliefs, the truth matters even when it’s being drowned out by manufactured noise.