When The Bots Came to #IdahoTwitter
Editor’s note: Terminator 2 kicks ass.
While mired in my own teenage alienation 25 years ago, I found understanding and solace in the absolute rage and self loathing of Nine Inch Nails and in the bleakness of the dystopian movie franchise Terminator. Both the exploration of the NIN song “Hurt” on the Netflix show, Song Explorer, and the newest addition to the Terminator series, Terminator: Dark Fate (my official review: meh), reminded me of the significance of these teenage security blankets to me.
As usual, I watched those while doom scrolling through Twitter (gotta multi-task!). And as usual, #IdahoTwitter (not a widely used hashtag used, but it should be) impressed me with all the awesome people living in Idaho and disappointed me with all the garbage comments from trolls. By “disappointed”, I mean annoyed, enraged, and ultimately, exhausted by the sheer extent of lies, misinformation, and cruelty. The initial temptation is to respond to these trolls, either with equal vitriol, or with a logical takedown. But, anyone who has spent time on Twitter knows how useless both efforts are. Sometimes, I will investigate a particularly abusive commenter, checking to see how long their account has existed and the number of followers. Often new users with few followers are either ‘bots’ or people creating throwaway accounts to act abusive on Twitter with no consequences. The ultimate tool for assessing this is the Botometer, which is rather effective in differentiating real user actions from the automated behavior of Twitter bots.
Which brings me to a bleak truth of these trolls: they are sometimes only bots specifically designed to drive sincere users crazy. Sadly, they are remarkably effective. The development of high-performance natural language generators like BERT, GPT, GPT-2 (considered so powerful and convincing the developers did not publish the full version of their tool), and most recently, GPT-3, has put tools that can generate tweets that convincingly mimic human-generated sentiments into the reach of many folks. And “human-generated sentiments” includes the helpful ones (resulting in Siri) and the discriminatory, hateful ones (resulting in Tay). The power of these natural language generation bots has been democratized, at least to those who can afford the hardware requirements to power the bots.
Anecdotally, I see many users goaded and/or manipulated by bots (myself included), resulting in frustration or on the other end of the continuum, unintentionally spreading misinformation. Interacting with a bot can be humiliating (if you ever figure it out), futile and exhausting. It drives us to disengage from political discourse. Lately, it has occurred to me that I ought to build a bot to respond to the army of trolls that make everyday Twitter engagements unpleasant. What better way to fight trolls and bots than with another Twitter troll bot? Wasn’t it Captain Sisko of Deep Space Nine who told us “in the long run, the only people who can really handle the Klingons are Klingons”? He was referring to the famously cantankerous and pugnacious Klingon race from the Star Trek universe. While internet trolls lack the deep sense of honor embedded in Klingon culture, they certainly possess the pugnacity of Klingons. Morever, it turns out that bots are widely used among both the right and the left of American political culture. So it seems that I am far from being the only person to have this inspiration.
The irony of this idea, building bots to fight other bots and bot-inspired real trolls, is that this is almost the exact plot of the Terminator franchise. If you’re unfamiliar with the shared plot line of the movies, it is this: a bleak future awaits humanity when “the machines” -- that is, deadly robots controlled by artificial intelligence -- become sentient and decide to destroy humanity. The movie franchise features the famous Arnold Schwarzenger line “I’ll be back”, and I will never forget Linda Hamiliton’s ripped physique in Terminator 2 as she completed multiple pull-ups while not wearing a push-up bra (or presenting cleavage of any sort, now that I think about it). Anyways….while twitter bots aren’t killing people like the Terminator machines do, they are nevertheless so very destructive to civil society.
This reminds me of another relic from my teenage years mentioned earlier: the emotionally-searing music of Nine Inch Nails (NIN), largely the brainchild of Trent Reznor. NIN music from that time expresses the loneliness, self hatred and general bleakness that many people, including me, have felt. While I have largely recovered from those self-defeating fears and developed a more positive sense of myself, interacting with trolls on social media can bring all of those feelings back. Mr. Reznor recently expressed how hopeless he finds the toxicity of online worlds, and by extension, the prospect for humanity: “We aren’t these enlightened beings, here to take care of each other and think about our benevolent role in the universe as protectors and creators….the internet has eroded the fabric of decency in our civilisation.” I suspect that individuals across the political and philosophical spectrum share this opinion. And why shouldn’t they? The daily barrage of toxic social media comments provides overwhelming evidence to support this view.
Those of us living in the cities, states and regions where violent, racist, and extremist militias thrive are feeling a growing sense of alarm for the future of the country, our local institutions, and at times, our personal safety. The actions of these militias are lived IRL and on social media. Our local government and national governments continue to underestimate the threat of these groups. Moreover, the actions of armed citizenry have succeeded in intimidating elected or appointed officials when they are making decisions for the well being of Idaho’s residents in the state capitol, along city streets and during a district public health meeting (among many other incidents across Idaho). I won’t pretend that I don’t find it terrifying. It is. That is why these folks show up in public with assault rifles; they know how scary and intimidating these weapons are. In an impulse smacking of settler colonialism, I recently contemplated immigrating to Canada to escape the growing insanity in a place where social services are still valued, decency abounds, and brandishing a gun at people is not welcome (or so my fantasy goes). Other folks I know ponder hiding out in an isolated plot of land they own far away until these militia brewings and related troubles blow over (no telling when that will happen). I am sorry to sound over-dramatic and cliched, but here it is: for the sane folks living in red states or regions that have gone bananas, our sense of trust in our neighbors and community is slowly yet steadily giving way to fear and despair.
But, back to the Terminator franchise. In these movies, the humans beat the machines, not with superior weaponry or technology (they are completely outmatched), but by banding together to organize a resistance, and in the most recent installation, explicitly embracing cooperation. They choose to work together (under a charismatic leader, of course) to protect and save themselves from the terrible fate wrought by their own ancestors. I know Terminator is a piece of crap fiction, but that truth still holds: cooperative action is how we can support each other and bring about a better life for everyone. Running away to assure my safety but abandoning everyone else to the actions of the crazies and all the havoc they wreak in local governments is not the answer.
In some ways, this is the same lesson Black Americans have been trying to teach all of America through mutual aid networks: we need to help each other, not abandon one another. Mutual aid societies and networks have a long history in the United States, often coming about as a result of government neglect. The amount of money that passes through mutual aid tools like “Go Fund Me” is evidence of both the large amount of need and the vast amount of support people want to give. It is also indicative of the government’s failure to support its people, but that will take another blog post a doctoral dissertation entire careers of multiple civil servants to fully explain.
Mutual aid, in its simplest form, is about solidarity, not charity. The Big Door Brigade provides a clear description:
Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW! Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.
I’m not entirely certain what this means for me, my friends, family, and neighbors. But, I cannot and I will not give up on my home, Idaho. While we struggle with COVID-19, schooling, food security, employment and the accompanying mental health challenges brought on by these things, we can find ways to support each other. Clearly, mutual aid networks won’t solve the militia problem we are facing. I suspect militia sympathizers need mutual aid networks themselves, but are too caught up in ideology to participate in any action that sounds even vaguely “socialist”. But, it is a positive outlet to help the rest of us feel less alone and frightened. The alternative -- the bots, the fear, the rage, the helplessness -- is not the future I want to embrace. In the face of the State of Idaho’s failure to take meaningful action during a deadly pandemic, with rising poverty and hunger and an increasingly bold and violent militia movement, what we have left is each other and our own willingness to cooperate and help one another.
“I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”
--James Baldwin
P.S. Here are some useful resources for implementing a mutual aid network.
The Maamdalorian is a long-time Idaho resident and Frank Church stan.