"Half the Internet Is Bots" – Jeremy Boreing Warns About Foreign Influence

**Jeremy Boreing** (0:00)
The amount of foreign influence money that gets spent in this country right now, I suspect is one of the great, only we're just now beginning to understand stories of the first part of the 21st century, that the nature of social media, the nature of anonymity on social media allows foreign governments to create the illusion of social proof. You know, if the first 20 people who respond to some post that you put up, I put up some post saying something nice about Ben, the first 20 posts call me a Jew and ask me about the USS Liberty, I don't even know if any of those 20 posts are from humans.
Anonymity on the Internet has made it impossible to know what's real and what isn't. But what I do know is that social proof is one of the most powerful forces that exists on the planet. If the first 20 comments are calling me a filthy Jew, it's funny, I interviewed someone yesterday who just assumed I was Jewish. I said, on what basis would you have arrived at the idea that I'm Jewish? They said, well, just everybody on the Internet says you're Jewish. Well, sure, but who is everybody on the Internet? Half of its money being spent by China, half of its money being spent by Russia, the Iranians and the North Koreans spend a ton of money influencing Americans. Well, listen, the second half of the 20th century, the amount of things that Americans think today that were planted in our national conversation by the KGB is enormous. The KGB laundered all kinds of their ideas into America because they understood that within the free speech system that exists in this country is an immune system weakness.
Free speech brings a lot of robustness to a society. Free speech is great, but there is a weakness, and the weakness is that there's very little natural immunity against bad ideas.
The Soviets understood this well because in the First World War, the Germans smuggled linen on a train into Russia because they understood, this guy's got an idea, and that idea can burn across Russia and weaken them fundamentally in a way that gives us advantages in the war. It was information warfare to unleash linen on Russia, and it worked. So that's part of the founding mythology of the Soviet Union. They understood, you've got this open society where college professors can just say whatever they want to kids and they can't even be fired, where Hollywood can say things in movies and essentially no one cares as long as the movie's entertaining. We have Ronald Reagan, essentially because of the SAG Wars against literal Soviet, an attempted Soviet takeover essentially of Hollywood during the SAG Wars, and Ronald Reagan opposed it and became the president of SAG, and became the governor of California and then became the president. So the idea of foreign governments exploiting free speech in America is nothing new. What's new is the ubiquity of social media, the addictivity of social media and the anonymity of social media, and now 50% of the Internet is bots. So it's never been easier.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:11)
You know what's crazy? You just made me think about something. You know who probably knows who's full of shit and not more than anybody else? Elon.
You know why?

**Jeremy Boreing** (3:21)
Because he can tell what's real and what's not.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:22)
All he has to do is tell this guy, say, this guy's getting all these retweets and all these things. Can you check to see how many of the retweets are bots?
If I'm Elon, I would probably be running reports on the top 250 political influencers left, right, center, whatever, far right, woke right, left, right, whatever you want to call it. Take all of them, 250 With a million plus followers, half a million plus followers. These are guys that have carrying weight. And then I would say, track to see how many of the retweet percentages bot to real. And then I would create a leaders bulletin from the highest being bots to the lowest being real, percentage-wise. And I would measure it with the likes. And then you know what else I would do. I would also measure to see what percentage of the retweets are from America versus other countries. And then based on that data, how likely do you think Yalan has done something like this before, to kind of know where the country is at?

**Jeremy Boreing** (4:18)
Yeah, I suspect he has a really good sense of it.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:20)
I think he does.

**Jeremy Boreing** (4:21)
The problem is there's misaligned incentives.
Because why are the social media companies allowing all of these foreign influence operations to exist? Why do they allow bots to post on the platforms?