394. How We Trolled the Trolls: Putin, Trump, and Musk (with Anthony Scaramucci)

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1:28Welcome to a special bonus episode of the RESTIS Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And I may have to do scaremotry. I love the way he always says, I'm, he doesn't do the wit me, he's very much an I'm kind of guy, we like that. Now, oh my god, you're implying ego centros and with that stable. Which is like looking at the mirror of hell, looking at the mirror. Differentially. Oh my god. Now, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this with our friend, The Mooch? I'll tell you why. Several weeks ago, Rory mentioned just how many comments he was getting and reply to some of his social media posts.

2:03And how many, especially if he was being critical of the US administration or indeed a Russia, would be quite aggressive, quite dismissive and often quite nasty. He was contacted by someone at a firm call, is it valent or valent who analyzed social media interaction and who said they looked at the responses and concluded that lots of them were from trolls and bots and he shouldn't take it so personally. So before I get on to what we then decided to do, Rory, just tell us who these people are and what they do. Yeah, so this is a man called Amir Khan, who was a writer's foreign correspondent and government specialist who worked in Iraq, Sudan and Syria, where a lot of these methodologies were born.

2:47So he started work because actually Sudan and Syria have been real specialists, the different factions in these wars in using social media. You would have seen it recently around the attacks in Latakia, where both sides were immediately on social media producing an enormous number of fake videos either to amplify the number of casualties or suggest that thousands of Christians being killed, which was in the case or on the other side to try to downplay the atrocities which were associated with the government. So anyway, he studied all that. Set up a company, an AI startup called Valent, but he's now trying to develop a whole bigger plan to detect and respond to disinformation networks, which he thinks might actually be relevant to diplomatic missions abroad.

3:38It's oddly not awfully interesting to companies. I mean, it'd be interesting to maybe later on in the program to talk to Anthony about why actually people are not, commercial companies are very interested in investing in this and maybe governments are more interested in this, but anyway, back to you, Arster. So what we decided to do was, Rory, Anthony and I would all tweet around about the same time, a couple of weeks ago and the same day around the same time, we all would tweet something and then Rory's new friend, the analyst, was going to track all the responses over the next few days. Do you guys want to read out the tweets that you sent or do you want me to do it?

4:11The tweet that I sent out was pretty obvious. Trump is unwell and his tariffs make no sense. Will the sick of fans continue on course or start telling the truth? And so what's interesting about that tweet is, Alistair helped me write it and since he's such a much better coms, that you know, Rory, he lasted in his comms position about 800 times longer than me. And so I literally plagiarized that from Alistair, but I think the words in there were designed to trigger things, right? Rory or it was the tariffs are in there. Trump is unwell, sick of fans. And this is something that those bots would catch onto and then fire in a nasty response.

4:51Very good. And then my Trump was, you're trying to tweet. My tweet was milder. It's a sort of more of a kind of Rory tone. The Trump mask violence alliance isn't just chaos, it's sabotage, betraying NATO, abandoning Ukraine, hurting our economies, weakening our democracies, undermining alliances. This circus boasts about greatness and efficiency while they endanger peace jobs and our way of life. It sounds like one of those little speeches that you do at the end of our live shows with your call to action is taken the well. I thought that was pretty nasty. It was good. Yeah, it was nasty. I thought I had teeth to it.

5:31Okay. Well, mine went as follows. History will not remember Elon Musk as a genius, but as a sick of fantic, unhinged enabler of a failing, deeply corrupt autocracy, a con man who bought his way into the orbit of power, but proved that money cannot buy respect or competence. As for JD Vance, the buoy has only just begun. This was the day after he was booed at the Kennedy Center. Now, just in terms of the response, and the report from Valence says something a bit different on this, but it doesn't, I think it was because it was done at different times. So mine had 1 .6 million views, 18 ,000 likes, 3 .1000 retweets.

6:12And I said my accounts at 4 .2000 replies, Valence reports said 7 ,000. The MOOCH, you were about 271 ,000 views, 11 ,000 likes, 17 ,000 retweets, 7 ,000 replies according to Valent, and Rory 386 ,000 views, 4 .2000 likes, 1000 retweets, a couple of thousand replies. And I think Rory is right. The more you say, I think it was Mochely made the point, the more that you say things that are likely to trigger people who are going to be against you, the greater the engagement that we're going to get. Antin and I got the highest proportion of engagement from bots with about 15 to 20%. That's sort of, you know, professionally organized electronic responses.

7:02And we've got somewhere between 40 and 50 % of trolls. These are either real people or AI powered content machines. Do you know how they work this out Rory? How do they actually analyze how what these numbers are? They've got an AI machine and they set up a series of variables, and then they mark them against them. So let's say they've got 11 different indicators, which are generally associated with a botter of troll. And effectively, this large language model learns by comparing these tweets to these indicators. And then it tests and drives down to try to get to the bottom of this. It's not 100%, but it's increasingly accurate and it allows them to an automated way.

7:46And they're perpetually iterating to make sure that their model is as accurate as possible. Just to remind people a little bit about is a robot, right? It's a software program which automates the task of attacking you and Anthony. So just to put that in context, I mean, the numbers, they're a pretty staggering. You manage to get 15 to 20 % bots. That means that at least a thousand of the replies, as you read down, are written by a robot. And probably 2000 of the replies are produced by a troll. And they could be either real people or they could be an AI -powered content machine. And the same Anthony in roughly similar proportions to you.

8:33So if people are in this game, be very, very conscious that when you're looking at your 4 ,000 replies, of those you can end up with about 1000 of them simply being generated by a robot. And almost half of them being generated by the trolls. I have a question. How do they find you? Is it Rory? Is it influencer? Allysher is an influencer as a usually successful podcast? Or is it the word search using the word Trump and Sikafant in the same thing? I mean, in other words, if an obscure person is writing something very nasty about Donald Trump, do the bots attack them or are they just searching for certain people?

9:14As I understand it, and I'm not an expert on this, there are basically four things going on. The first thing is to do with the velocity and visibility that your tweet achieves. This is called algorithmic amplification, which basically means if the way in which you craft it, you could have very few followers. But if your content really grabs people, there is a natural tendency of people to retweet it, like it, and the algorithm picks up on that and begins to reinforce that. The second thing that's happening is the bots are monitoring particular keywords and hashtags. So they'll be out there looking for Anthony using the word tariffs or looking at you using the word Trump or Musk.

9:56The third thing they have is they actually focus on particular accounts. So you and Anthony, you've got over a million followers each, will be on preset accounts. They're just monitoring you all the time. And the final thing they do is they have a preset scripting, which is some of these bots will just respond to almost anybody that says something negative about Musk. They've already written a pro -musk tweet that will just hit pack. And so ex itself or Facebook itself or TikTok or Instagram or whichever platform you're using is looking to find content that appears to be appealing. And then, and this is something that Valence pointed out, in the case of our tweets, they appear, although nobody's allowed at the moment by Elon Musk into the back end of the algorithm, used to be the case.

10:52They used to be much more open to social media researchers understanding how this works. But it appears from the AI analysis that what's happening is they're taking your tweet, Anthony or your tweet, and deliberately rubbing it in the face of people who disagree with you. They're deliberately trying to provoke it. The way to get the most engagements replies and retweet is to make sure, I'll say, that people who absolutely hate you are forced to read what you've written. Both of those people in the world who hate me. Yeah. But there are two people on this podcast where they don't hate you, Aleister.

11:26But they are a little bit might. Okay, I just wanted you to know. Anthony, how do you feel about the fact that, because the other thing that Valence analysis showed is that a lot of the trolls that we were getting were real people. And they were queuing on people, all they were Russian sympathizers. And they went back and checked some of these accounts, genuine people who consistently promote pro -Russian lines and propaganda. And quite often make quite clever little video memes about things that we've said. So, for example, every single time that I tweet, there are people who, and I don't know whether they're real or whether they're bots or they're trolls or whatever the difference is, but there are people who will tweet a photograph of David Kelly, the British government scientist who took his own life and often been blamed for his death.

12:19And likewise, every time I do every day post my tree of the day, there are people who will then add a rope to the tree and sometimes put my head inside it. So, that happens every single tweet. But you seem to like it a little bit, though, Aleister. I don't mind. I don't like the David Kelly stuff. Unlike Rory, I tend not to read the replies, because I think you can get lost in them. But how do you feel about the fact that there's somebody in the Russian ecosystem that thinks it's worth going up to you? Well, I'll say a couple things. The first thing is that my first day in the White House is very memorable for me, but I was upstairs on the second floor of the West Wing in Kellyanne Conway's office.

13:00And I have two phones. I've always had two cell phones. She said, give me your phones. I said, okay, sure. And she went into the notifications section in Twitter. And she shut off my notifications. And she said, listen to me. Don't ever. And I mean, ever look at these again. And if you look at these, they're going to drive you wild. They're going to drive you crazy. Do not look at them again. And she handed me back both my phones. And she probably helped my mental sanity because 11 days later, I was blown out of the seat. Okay. And so it was absolutely disastrous as you both know. Stop laughing, you know, I'm going to have our producers.

13:41I'm your microphone with your insidious laughter. I'm loving it. I do you, but you do it as you are told by Kellyanne Conway. I just caught a bad breath. Yeah. No, I did. I did because I didn't want to, I didn't want to hear the nonsense. But of course, being a human being now that I've been fired, guess what I did. I turned the notifications back on. And what Rory saying is totally true, there was a rhythm to it. Okay. So when I started tweeting, the first thing used to be your 15 minutes of fame are up. And you could see it come over in a very rhythmic cadence. It's now eight years later. I guess my 15 minutes ended.

14:17I don't know, eight years ago, but, but the point I'm making is that you could see the algorithm. You could see the attack. And then I'll just make another brief point, HR McMaster in the middle of COVID sent me a FedEx. And I opened it up and it was a book from Catherine Belton called Putin's People. Now Catherine, you guys probably know. And McMaster said to me, General McMaster said to me, please read this book and then give me a call. And in the book is a very long dissertation about what Rory and his Rory's friend is talking about. Server forms, fake IDs, fake personalities, real people at keyboards clattering nonsense at people like us, trying to knock us off our game or try to disfigure us, dehumanize us and hominem us so that we lose our voice in the debate.

15:12And you either have to just be up for that guys or not, right? I mean, at the end of the day, I'm up for it. I tell people if I played in the NFL, I would get a concussion. This is part of it. It is amazing. And I think it's, you know, it's something we've talked about a little bit on the podcast, but it's worth bearing in mind because it is central now to the experience of being a politician. So in my case, statements on social media, beginners, you say Anthony, absolutely with who the hell are you? You're 15 minutes of famous that for. Then there is everything you say is wrong because you thought Kamal Harris would win as you didn't win.

15:51But then increasingly, it is your week, your stupid. You've got a low IQ. That was JD Vance's thing. You know, I've got an IQ of 110. That's then followed by a lot of people who are like, you wouldn't be able to beat JD Vance in a press up competition. So there's a lot about physicality. So now more recently, you know, I'm a supporter of Al Qaeda because we interviewed Ahmed Al -Shara.

16:19We're part of the matter because, you know, Elon Musk did something in my family and I'm just doing this out of pure resentment to try to get back at him and I'm bankrupt and I can't pay my mortgage. And everything I'm doing is the sort of desperate attempt to get attention. I've got to ask you this question, Rory, because I know these sons of bitches. Why do you think you're being targeted? By the JD Vance's, I mean, JD Vance is tweeting at you. So why is JD Vance tweeting me? Elon Musk as well. Donald J Trump Jr. I really don't know. I met a former governor of a Southern state yesterday who had reached out to JD Vance after that Twitter exchange.

16:57This guy was a very kind of Ernest Yvangelico Christian saying, JD, you know, what are you doing attacking Rory? You know, you should be friends. You should be Christians together, what's happened to all this stuff. And he was sort of generally thrown off balance. But I'm going to tell us what's going on here. I think they they target you because you are a rational conservative. They target you because you have a very strong influential following and you're a common sense person. The mega people are tied to populism and they're tied to an emotional impulse of policy directive. You're more and more of a traditional conservatism.

17:36And so you've been targeted. Professor Neil Ferguson has been targeted. He's actually ironically was a Trump supporter going into the 2024 election. But they targeted him as well. And and and their thing is who are the people that could potentially sway people in our movement? You know, no offense to Alistair, but because he is a liberal in their minds, he doesn't have as much influence as you would have. You see what I mean? And they don't come after me incidentally because of what Trump did to me. You know, when Trump attacked my wife, Deer Drop on Twitter, his people reached out to me and said, hey, we're sorry about that.

18:18Don't come after us. We won't come after you. And so if you notice, the Trump people never attack me, right? Even though I viciously go after Trump, they don't come after me. And because they know and I'll quote one of them, Hey, man, I don't want to be in a fight with everybody. Donald Trump is in you and I were friends for a long time. He should have never gone after your wife. I don't know why Trump needs to go after people's wives. But I'm not going to attack you. You keep the fight between you and Donald Trump. And I'll leave you alone.

18:58Okay. Anthony let me help you. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges. Could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as the therapist to work through these ideas, calmly, objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, better help can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise.

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20:33The other thing though that came out of the Valent Report is this thing about grifting, money making scams. So between across the three of us, somewhere between 5, 10, 15 % of the accounts had tip jars, activators. These are people who are encouraging their followers to send them small contributions so that they can basically become full -time trolls. And a lot of those Anthony are in the crypto world. Now is that just because the crypto world is full of grifters and scams, people who want to make a quick buck. I don't know if he'd be the crypto world, so I wouldn't know what they're like. The commander -in -chief of the US military is a grifter in the scammer.

21:15You've launched the meme coin 24. I mean, so come on. We know the thing is loaded with a lot of grifters and scammers, which is ironically slowing down the adoption of the good stuff. So yeah, I listen anytime I tweet, that happens to me. The grifter and scamer comes in and says to follow this person or follow that person. This person's Twitter address can make you rich and pay the $5 and we'll give you the advice on what to buy or sell. So that's persistent. Musk promised people, by the way, when he bought Twitter, now known as X, that he was ending all of that. And he was going to have a descaling of bots and descaling of grifters.

21:59They've gone up exponentially. The free speech absolutist said he was doing this and never happened. Given where our shows are going, just to take it up from the level of Alistair and us deciding to troll the trolls and just have a look at what's going on in these interactions into the biggest story. Because this is now central to politics. In Romania, Anthony is your where. The guy that was running for president has been disallowed because 150 ,000 TikTok accounts appeared to have been coordinated by the Russian government in order to push him into power. When I was running to be Mayor of London, I had political campaign companies coming to me saying, we can work for you.

22:39We've got connections to Mossad, one of them said, different intelligence agencies. We've run elections all through the caucuses. We can create and they gave me a number. Now, how much money I had to pay them for each fake account? In order to be able to attack my opponents, one of them gave an example. They said that they'd sent a sex toy to a prominent running politician. So his wife would see it and then film them when it was received. Others of them would say that they could AI generate music and get influencers and pop stars to endorse me. But the whole idea essentially was that if I gave them a million dollars, they could create a huge campaign.

23:17And of course, this was partly because people were so interested in the way Donald Trump had done it, which would take me to prominence. Now, at a certain point, I have to remind people that I did not do this. I did not accept these offers and I did not work with these companies. I'm sort of jealous. I never got a sex toy in the meal. I feel like I've lived out of things. But I just, I mean, it's a very, I mean, this will become more and more relevant. And the balance, of course, looks in the ways that Sudan, you get the Egyptian government doing certain kinds of videos, certain kinds of approach, you get the UAE government doing another sort of thing, you get the Russians doing another sort of thing.

23:53And the way that it actually plays into civil war in many, many countries so that people's accounts are explaining this. Two of something is really interesting though, because we think obviously about Russia, because we know that Russia does this a lot. And there you remember, Gregorian, this was how he, because, as well as being Putin's chef, he became the guy who was running these big bot farms and troll farms and so forth. There's a team of Oxford University that has sort of tracked this over the last few years. I was really one of the reports yesterday that a lot of this started with the democracies.

24:22It's not, well, we had a bit of a chuckle on the podcast the other day, Anthony, when the response of the American government to the the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul was we do not interfere in the politics of other countries. I think it's fair to say America is interfered in the politics of other countries for a long, long, long, long time. And so, and the press do it, we do it. We've got teams that are involved in social media manipulation in different parts of the world, but China, according to this report, has two million people. The Russians is in the thousands. I think we're probably in the hundreds, maybe the thousands.

24:57Russia may be now the tens of thousands. Ukraine actually had quite a lot before the war started, but this report suggests that two million people in China are engaged in generally what you would call media and information campaigns. Now, do you think that is worth from a geopolitical standpoint? Do you think it is worth that level of investment to do this stuff? I do. I think it's incredibly valuable. I think it's influenced the Brexit. I think the yellow jackets have been influenced in France as a result of this. I think it helped Donald Trump so much. So, particularly in 2016 and the the information from our intelligence community was irrefutable, just reminding everybody that McConnell and Ryan passed sanctions, additional sanctions on the Russian government for meddling in the election.

25:54And by the way, Trump wanted to veto those bills. And then we had a point out to him, hey, if you veto that, he's going to call Schumer and he's going to get the necessary votes to override your veto. So, Trump reluctantly signed that sanctions bill. But I think it is incredibly influential. And I think that this is something the Russians have been trying to do forever, but now that we have this fragmented media and we have this deployable ability to go into these different social media sites to target people, the GRU, KGB -like misinformation is actually working. There's an amazing example. Amazin Guri, who's an ex -CIA analyst, has done these big books on social media.