the global business of destroying societies with social media

Grifters and trolls around the world are making bank destabilizing nations with lies.

In perhaps one of his biggest unforced errors, Elon Musk — who I’m constantly told is a super duper genius whose every idea should be awarded a Nobel Prize — made was to show the real location of accounts on The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter. In a matter of hours, the world learned something many of us suspected. Top accounts in the online MAGAverse were about as American as beans on toast.

Yes, that’s right, all those Trump-loving “MAGA Mommas from Texas” were logging on from India, Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria, Iran, and Morocco, among others. Which made a lot of sense, as looking at when the accounts were first created and the total number of posts they made on the platform, it was clear that these were either bots set to troll on autopilot, or professionally online grifters for whom posting was a full time job.

There were also hints of this as a major internet outage in Pakistan suddenly silenced hundreds of very active accounts claiming to red-blooded American patriots singing praises to Trump and the GOP. Now, similar users with over a million followers apiece had to head for the exits after being so publicly exposed, and further digging shows a thriving industry which taught foreigners how to monetize on vicious American culture wars on YouTube and social media.

The picture this paints is truly bleak. Your feeds, which you’ve been trained to accept as passively as possible, are being clogged with rage bait by foreign grifters earning a decent chunk of change for fanning the flames of division, all of it boosted by AI. This is the functional equivalent of greedy strangers getting paid to passionately offer the most unhinged ideas and justifications to one side of a couple stuck in a dysfunctional marriage teetering on divorce, all while the couple pretends that the strangers on their side are genuine friends who care about them.

If you are an American, you should be infuriated by the fact that your country is being kept enraged, divided, and constantly teetering on the edge of crisis because a bunch of professional trolls in places like Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Macedonia need it to be like this, so they can fund a lavish lifestyle by their nations’ standards.

Oh, and because a GOP operative was infuriated that Nixon was forced to resign for breaking laws while in office, and teamed up with an Australian billionaire owner of a bunch of far right tabloids to create a mainstream propaganda vehicle to make sure that would never happen again. The same mainstream propaganda machine that now amplifies rage bait whipped up or boosted by foreign trolls around the clock.

Before any Europeans or Canadians reading this point and laugh at the stupid, naive Americans, I have a word of caution. Similar grifts are happening in French, Spanish, German, and Canadian politics, with foreign bots hijacking political debates to plant similar seeds of chaos and conspiracy. It’s just not as often discussed because most global social platforms are American built and owned, keeping the focus on the U.S. to a fault as similar disinfo and propaganda campaigns gather steam worldwide.

You see, it’s hard to grift, embezzle, and exploit in a high trust society with functional institutions and the rule of law. And so, it has to be broken by pitting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, and family against family. Then, you can do anything you want because a deeply suspicious society in survival mode can’t enforce its own rules, too busy being at each others’ throats.

And all that brings us to the question of why Elon Musk decided to launch this feature and unmask that MAGA is social media’s most lucrative and underhanded grift. While we can pursue all sorts of conspiratorial ideas, I think the simplest explanation is that he was either ignorant or delusional, and given his childlike impulsiveness, mandated this feature to be implemented without thinking it through. In the process, he provided hard proof for many long-held concerns, and hopefully given us a much needed jolt to take this problem as seriously as we should.