A Robot Political Future

January 2015

After reading an interesting blog article from Scott Adams, who expects the future to be decided by software robots, he put the idea in my head about how we could achieve this for political ends. Good or Bad.

I’m fairly sure everything I’ve written in this article can be done either today or within 2 years with the right motivation.

Things we know:

• Facebook and Twitter are littered with fake accounts run by Software Robots.
• There are hackers and scammers running software Robots to try and steal any information not secured or from people who don’t understand the risks of the Internet and email links.
• Democratic Politics is all about the numbers, how many people will support a decision.
• People are easily influenced by other people, especially when the majority appears to believe an idea.

Lets bring this all together and get political. Say the author want to convince a Politician or Party to make a certain decision. Without the use of any illegal activities eg bribing. The Politician and Party are active on social media, including the local newspapers.

Firstly to push an agenda, the author needs to be backed by the people. The Democratic way. Majority rules.  Firstly we need “the people”, luckily a “person” isn’t what it used to be, a physical human that meets people and communicates face 2 face. Now its simply a Twitter account or a Facebook profile. To do this we start the People Creator Tool.

People Creator Tool is a Software Robot that monitors millions of Facebook and Twitter accounts. It groups accounts based on key words and monitors those groups to see what is being posted. Based on what everyone is posting, the People Creator Tool posts on millions of fake accounts with similar information, keeping the content posted similar to the real group of accounts the tool has been monitoring. This keeps the profiles and twitter accounts active and real. When a HashTag starts getting traction, the People Creator Tool will make sure the fake accounts also mention the HashTag to keep the fake accounts relevant.

To push an agenda, keywords are entered into People Creator Tool to match the agenda to as many fake groups as possible.  Once the match is complete, the fake accounts start to make posts referencing the agenda. Small posts to start with, using a few key words, then as time moves on, more content is intermixed with the fake postings. Within a short amount of time, anyone doing political research will see a trend when they run their analysis. This is the key.

The next step is the media. Information about the Agenda is written and posted to a few uninteresting websites. Then the fake accounts are told to reference these websites and post to other website comment systems and message boards. Soon news generating websites will pickup trend and start reporting on the number of people talking about [insert Agenda topic].  After a short while, the websites that originally posted the Agenda will be lost in a flood of more notable websites regurgitating what the Software Bots are saying.

There have been many stories sweeping the Internet, that, once the referencing has been completed, the original article is not trustworthy. Yet the internet is not about truth, its about who can get the most traffic to their website for advert income. Which is why websites will post about anything topical for click traffic.

Back to the Media, once the automated news websites start mentioning the Agenda, and the fake accounts continue to reference the more official news websites. Then the Fake accounts can start contacting Media Outlets and commenting on any post regarding the Agenda, this makes the Media Outlet think this is something newsworthy, since anytime they post about it on the Internet, thousands of people (fake) like the post and comment on it.

The Final step is the politicians and letters to the Editor. This requires a little planning and thought. The fake accounts need to start emailing Letters to the Editor and contacting Political Parties via their social media portals and email. Luckily these days political parties expect template letters. Where someone will add their name and address, then send the same letter content. This makes pushing an Agenda easy, as the template only needs to be written a handful of times, then all the software bots will fill it out and send it.

Why wouldn’t a politician respond publically and make a decision in favour for an Agenda when a large number of people (fake) want it and websites are all talking about it.

Easy… As long as you have enough capital to pay for the infrastructure on popular cloud computing providers to host the software bots.

Additional points:

How do we get thousands of Software robots to not sound alike when pushing an Agenda? Luckily the Internet is home to many different cultures who don’t all speak the same language. Run key lines through online translators and then back to the original language will produce interesting results. The key is not to be realistic, but to overwhelm. An example is Facebook public posts. How many people look past the first 10 comments? Where there is 3000 comments, 90% could be almost the same and the chances someone noticing who has any influence are slim.

Anyway, just a thought. Would love to use this idea for Good and environmental agendas. Save the reef, that sort of thing. Quickly mobilize a large group to fight for good. This kind of agenda is easy to push, as the software robots will push with real people, making the issue appear major instead of being pushed by the minority.