Category: Activism

Post topic: a new (?) social media tactic from denialists/predatory delayers seems to be underway. I call it the “killer pro-bot” technique. Here I explain it, speculate on who is behind it, talk about the consequences of responding/not responding and then lay out what my response will be from now, asking you what your experiences and perspectives are. Five minute read? Ish.

Over the last weeks/months I’ve noticed, especially on the Twitter feed for this site (@our_yesterdays) various new followers or regular commenters who have very little personal info available, a bland photo/bio with an “inoffensive” “positive” strap line. Examples below. What is interesting is they all seem to have been set up in mid-2022, have very few followers and seem to have humans (chained up in a botfarm somewhere, given food in exchange for a certain number of responses per day) doing the responding. The responses are too specific for the current generation of AI, I think.

Here are some examples.

What might be going on?

If I were running “predatory delay” campaigns for an oil major or whoever, I’d be moving away from outright denial. It’s too crude and alienating to the “middle-ground” folks you’re trying to influence. Funders of the predatory denial campaigns eventually wise up to the fact that what they are paying for is not working. If you don’t offer a new strategy, your contract for shit-fuckery doesn’t get renewed. Adapt or die etc.

So I think the new pitch is something like this.

Pitcher: “We are going to continue to try to confuse and demoralise the activists online, obviously. But instead of just abuse, we are going to try to distract them. They’re desperate for affirmation, so we can set up loads of low-maintenance accounts that just churn out bland stuff.

• Some activists will ignore it.
• Some will suspect something but shrug their shoulders
• Others, so desperate for any engagement, especially if it SEEMS positive, or neutral, will engage in long attempts to “educate” our bots. This will take up their time and energy that they might otherwise spend more usefully, and ALSO make them seem condescending and patronising to third parties. If they eventually lose their shit, even better, they look bitter and unhinged.”

Funder: we keep up with the hater stuff, but add this to?

Pitcher: Yup. We’ve been flood the zone with denial, bullshit and hate. For ages. It has worked to keep the haters riled up. But they are ageing, and as the real-world evidence of climate change piles up, it’s becoming harder, even for them, to deny reality. And doing that alienates those who are not quite as indoctrinated. If you want to distract/confuse, you need a more emollient ‘reasonable’ set of stooges/avatars.)

Funder: go ahead. Let me know how you get on.

What happens if we ignore?

Eventually, these accounts might start to gain more followers, albeit semi-passively. Then they can be deployed with more ‘credibility’ as voices of “moderation” at critical junctures (though frankly, everything is a critical juncture these days, has been for decades. Oh well).

Crucially, if your opponents are testing out a new strategy (as I suspect they are), it’s usually a good idea to name that strategy and discuss how to respond, before things get out of hand.

So, what I am going to do.

• Screengrab the account bio
• Add it to this post
• Block these pro-bots until Twitter removes the block function.

Once Twitter removes the block and mute functions (apparently scheduled for December?) reduce Twitter engagement to absolute bare minimum.

What experiences to you have?

What actions have you taken?
What do you think of my analysis, actions? What else would you say?

The United Kingdom has the pleasure of a premature but yet also long-overdue General Election, to be held on Thursday, July 4th.

The incumbent, Rishi Sunak, is trying to turn “net zero” (something he voted for as an MP in 2019) into a culture war battlefront (see my Conversation pieces on this here and here). So, he is only going to mention climate change in the context of “Costs of Taking Action”, not “Benefits of Taking Action”, and definitely not “Costs of Not Taking Action.”

Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is only going to talk in vague terms about this because he has recently had another “oh, that promise I made, well I never made it” bonfire, around the 28 billion per annum of green investment (see my Conversation piece on this, complete with Full Metal Jacket clip). He also doesn’t want to open up a flank where the Tories can repeat the gimmick that he is somehow “in the pocket of Just Stop Oil” (1).

So, is the (relative) silence on climate in the campaign so far merely down to the weakness/tactics of the two leaders? In a trivial way, “yes, of course.” In a deeper way, “yes, of course, but so damned what, and what does the finger pointing allow us not to do?”

I’m glad you I asked: What the finger pointing allows us to do is set up a Morality Tale about the bad Westminster Bubble and FPTP system (2).

And Morality Tales are very satisfying to tell – simple, clear, no shades or Jungian shadows or whatever. And they’re equally satisfying to hear.

But maybe our role – as people with freedom of speech, information and assembly – is to attend to more than our own immediate emotional comfort and intellectual ease? Maybe? Just saying…

Maybe we have to reflect that climate change has been “around” as a public issue since 1988, when it was known as the “Greenhouse Effect.” That means that if you are 53 (to choose a number at random), it’s been there your entire adult life. Even if you’re 78, it’s been around over half your adult life.

And yet here we are, in a shituation where it can be ignored, even as the planet cooks.

There is plenty of blame to spread around: not just the political parties. The media (but honestly – it’s “all the adverts fit to print, all the news printed to fit”). The “education” system (yes, Govey-Gove and the attempt to bin climate, but it’s not like things were healthy before, or have been healthy since).

Finally, I’ll say this. WHAT ABOUT THE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS? We have had 35 years of boom and bust, of chasing issue attention cycles, of learning nothing, of forgetting everything. Of smugospheres and emotacycles.

Yes, I get that climate change is a hard issue to think about, to act on (3). But THIRTY FIVE YEARS OF GROUNDHOG DAY?? Really?

And will “we” pay the price? Really? Yes, but before we pay the price, pretty much every other species is getting screwed, and other far-more-blameless members of our own species (not to mention future generations), they’re getting screwed.

What is to be done? That’s the wrong question, imo. The question is “what might have been done but is now largely moot?” And if you’re really interested, you can check out my answers to that question, I guess. Let me know how you get on.

Footnotes

(1) as per Ed Miliband and Alex Sammond in 2015.

(2) FPTP = First Past the Post – the particularly ridiculous system favoured by duopolies everywhere: the creatures outside looked from man to pig yadder yadder yadder.

(3) I recently tweeted this about denialists. Other people are keeping their heads in the sand for similar fear reasons.

My take: at least some of these grown men know they backed the wrong horse, know that their tribe is wrong, and are terrified of losing face, of losing their tribe, losing their self-image. And the anger & hatred is self-hatred, projected outwards.