It’s bots all the way down
Not quite all the way down. But bots seem to be a major part of the traffic of certain people:
Following Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers:
Tucker Carlson’s views dropped 71%
Douglas Macgregor’s views dropped 62%
TCN views dropped 34% https://t.co/ekkReqo33O— Matt Tardio (@angertab) October 13, 2026
Of course Russia would do everything it can to drive the traffic up for Carlson and MacGregor, who have been supporting Russia for years. Carlson is more well-known, but MacGregor is a font of Russian disinformation and I’ve written about him before, in this post from April of 2022.
How much of internet traffic is smoke and mirrors? It depends who you are and what you support. My traffic is pretty real, I believe, but then my traffic is relatively modest. It’s also been rather stable for many years
This doesn’t really surprise me a lot. I’ve never thought that internet traffic should be taken as a reliable measure of actual support.
So just maybe Tucker isn’t as influential as some believe. Just a Russian Tool (in both meanings)
I would aver I’m not a bot, but isn’t that precisely what a bot would type?
Rufus T. Firefly:
Bors are getting much more sophisticated than that. 🙂
Yeah. Predictable. But still shocking, because it simply exposes how much the digital world of discourse and opinion is being shaped by our enemies. And therefore how diminished our trust in these fora must be slammed down, about half is the rule.
Not “class dismissed,” but half the weight claimed dismissed.
We’re still waiting to see similar perfidy exposed by China, Soros, and Roy Singham.
We need investigative reporting on facts like this set.
I have believed for a while that TC and some others of his ilk have less audience and less influence than they (and the lefty media) want us to think. Their faction of support is loud, but not necessarily as big as all that.
But it’s not just TC.
As an election approaches, you can take for granted that a substantial amount of Internet traffic, videos, tweets, etc. are bots or paid posters, trying to spin (and this is true on both sides, by the way).
Right now, there is an ongoing effort to ‘spin’ a blue wave. It might happen. But the polls are much closer than the press is implying in most cases where there’s any doubt at all. But they want to spread an impression that the election is already over.
This is an old phenomenon. Thirty years ago, Rush Limbaugh observed that you could spot a ‘trained caller’ to his show, someone who had been given a set of talking points and ways to present them by a Dem/liberal group, in the first line or two. They’ve gotten more sophisticated since then but it’s the same phenomenon.
(I remember myself one, not long after Saddam Hussein was captured, listening to both Limbaugh and Hannity on the same day. The same caller (I recognized the voice) called each show at different times that day, presenting the exact same spiel in the exact same words (to the effect that Hussein’s fall made America worse off). I wouldn’t be surprised if he called other right-wing talk shows that day with it, either.)
If the bots don’t get you, the pneumonic plague will! 🙂
I do worry about the latter.
Spambots can be entertaining, our host has shown that in the past. Maybe she set her control dials too restrictive during the latest reconfig and no longer gets them?
The magnificent Mr. Musk has gone to some lengths to call out foreign accounts on his X platform. He’s even shared stats and it appears he is driving X developers to come up with even better ways to catch foreign impersonators. It seems nearly impossible, but Elon has a great track history of accomplishing the nearly impossible*. It will be great if this can be done, and soon. And it will also be great if other social media platforms like Meta adopt his methods as well as media outlets flagging commenters.
* To quote the prose of a poet who lived somewhat contemporaneously with Wordsworth:
huxley, are you in France, or did I misunderstand something you wrote recently?
I checked out those reports when they first started coming out. It seems they are not true/accurate. Sad, but until better evidence comes out, I’m filing them under propaganda BS.
Our local county government web site ,sherifs email and other stuff all crashed same day and still down. I’m sure it’s just a ko inky dink.
Oh the plague what not to like. If it’s not the rats and fleas, it is then the snot and sneeze. Either way it gets you.
Gain of function?
Extreme unction.
Cloud-based calls BS on this claim.
@Rufus T. Firefly: huxley, are you in France, or did I misunderstand something you wrote recently?
Oui. I’ve had a rocky start. I can read well, but I can’t hear full-speed native French at all. I’ve transferred to their beginner’s course, which is easier, and it is filling in some of my gaps.
I knew the risks of my read-first approach, which is a big part of why I’ve come to France. I have succeeded with the reading. I can read a French paperback without computer assistance and get 90% of it. I submitted my Books Read list to Chat and was told I’ve read more than twice as much as a college grad with a French major.
The other difficulty is Montpellier is very difficult to navigate. I’ve spent a lot of time walking the largely unmarked streets lost. The inhabitants are little help. They know their way by landmarks. They often don’t know the street they are on.
Google Maps is similarly baffled. It loses its place easily, changes its mind often and sends me off in the wrong direction. And when one gets lost in those windy little streets, one is truly lost. I’m lucky I haven’t gotten into real trouble.
But the French are mostly a friendly people and I try not to annoy them. I also try to speak French but since just about all the young people know English, it’s easy to get by.
My teacher dresses in a black t-shirt and black sweats. He puts on a mime show but with words, along with the exaggerated expressions and humor. I believe is teaching us like French schoolchildren.
Anyway. I think I’ve worked through my jet lag, gotten my routines in order, and the rest of the trip will be smoother.
PS There is another protest going on not far from where I’m eating my burger right now.
When can we expect Tucker “The Emperor Has No Actual Viewers” Carlson to comment on this? My guess is sometime around the 12th of Never.
The bar graphs do not match the tweet text. For example, if Tucker Carlson’s views dropped by 71%, over two-thirds, the “after” bar should be less than one-third the height of the “before” bar. What the graph shows is a drop of 29%, resulting in an “after” bar that is 71% of the height of the “before.” We should be happy about evidence that Carlson and the others are not as popular as their follower counts suggest, but we need to be accurate about interpreting our observations.
Those graphs are misleading about how bad it really is.
They are log scaled and start at 10,000 (10^4) rather than zero.