Ep. 1855 - How Scammers Make Money By Infesting The Internet With Bots

Matt Walsh (0:00)

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Tax relief advocates, real solutions for real people. In terms of sheer size, the internet is bigger than ever by any objective metric. There are more than a billion websites in existence right now. I think like 1.5 billion. In 2010, there were just 250 million. And yet for all the growth, the internet for most people feels much smaller and more restrictive than you probably remember it. Personally, if you go back a decade, I was probably checking something like 20 different websites on a regular basis, you know, 10 or 15 years ago. There was a thing called surfing the web, which is a phrase that you don't hear much anymore, but kids, that's what your parents would do.

And today I checked maybe two or three websites. And I think most people have had a similar experience. We've been bombarded with so many different apps and so many different websites for more than a decade. And now we've decided that we don't need most of them. So instead of following a dozen, you know, different independent bloggers or websites, people are just on social media. They're scrolling Instagram or X, the endless feed that just brings everything to one place. They're talking to AI. And if they want to spend some money, maybe they're subscribing to The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or maybe a premium sub stack or two. Our information is coming from a very concentrated handful of sources and therefore we are extremely easy to manipulate in ways that many people don't realize. This is the exact opposite of the original promise of the Internet, but that's where we are. So how exactly did this happen? And how significant is the problem really? Well, to answer those questions, we'll begin in Russia, which is still waging some kind of war in Ukraine, a war that simply based on the fact that it's still going on. We can assume that Russia must be losing.

Russia has 10 times the economy of Ukraine, nearly four times the population, and yet they've apparently been on the defensive for quite some time now. In fact, as we've previously discussed, Ukraine has been striking targets deep in Russian territory with total impunity. They've been ignoring the Trump administration, which doesn't want Ukraine to escalate the conflict. For a very small, notoriously corrupt country, Ukraine is punching well above its weight. For our purposes, what's worth talking about is that when they're not bombarding refineries and spiking the price of diesel, Ukrainian drones are now going after Russian data centers, which handle a significant amount of automated online activity. In the past few days, Ukraine has bombed at least three data centers belonging to a technology company called Yandex, which is Russia's equivalent to Google, in the sense that in Russia, it handles much more traffic than Google does. The data centers were located within about 100 to 200 miles of Moscow, so these were aggressive strikes. The leader of Ukraine, Zelensky, claimed that swarms of Russian bots had been taken offline because of the attacks. In fact, he said that so many bots have been disabled that, quote, a lot of people noticed as they were just sort of casually browsing the Internet.

This was his victory lap from an event in Warsaw Watch.

SPEAKER_2 (4:02)

When we started responding to Russia's operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breeze on many social media platforms.

A lot of people, a lot of people noticed it. And there was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations, because there were fewer bots. And it's pretty clear where those bots were coming from.

Matt Walsh (4:46)

So I don't know if you happen to notice less hate, less division, and fewer provocations online. I can't say I did. I mean, all the same, basically the same amount of provocation and hate as I've become accustomed to. But according to Zelensky, that's because Ukraine has been conducting bombing runs deep into Russian territory. Now, even by the standards of wartime propaganda, this is pretty shameless, ridiculous stuff. On its face, it's the kind of claim that no one should really take seriously. He's claiming that if you just keep giving Ukraine more money and more bombs, then he can fix the Internet by blowing up stuff in Russian.