What’s happened?
Foreign money is interfering in UK elections again, but I can’t remember it ever being this obvious.
If you’re in the UK and you’ve been on The Site Previously Known as Twitter in the last few days, you’ve probably seen an advertisement featuring an AI depiction of Nigel Farage beating, strangling, mugging, shooting, and having his shoes licked by the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey. These all link through to a fake BBC News page that reports Farage is a big mean tough guy demanding the Bank does what he says.
I wouldn’t for a second suggest that Nigel or Reform are paying to make their weasel look tough, but someone is.
This morning, scrolling through my “Following” tab, I saw around 20 ads on this theme. These were all from foreign-held (India, Saudi, South African, Russian, Uganda, Viet Nam, etc) premium accounts that proclaim themselves “social media influencers”. They all post a couple of nature pictures, and then post these political adverts.
And this has been going on for nearly week.
If you’ve ever wondered what the dangers of a [practically] unmoderated platform in the hands of a billionaire “free-speech absolutist” could possibly be for your day-to-day life, here it is. Elon doesn’t appear to care who says what. Ads don’t appear to be vetted. As long as your bots pay their dues, and pay the ad fare, you can shove your dirty little opinions into the eyeballs of whomever you like.
Just as an echo chamber, X was dangerous, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that it’s now just toxic to any democratic process. With so many bots on the platform, and so many real political campaigners pretending to be somewhere they’re not, the time when you can have an honest discussion has gone.