Valuetainment - June 19, 2026


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

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Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

176.98

Word count

1,069

Sentence count

52

People

Also mentioned:
Ronald Reagan Lenin Tuscanyer

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Alex Blumberg to talk about the dangers of foreign influence on social media, and why we should be worried about it. Alex is a writer, journalist, and all-around brilliant human being. He's been around for a long time, and I think he's one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. He has a unique perspective on the world, and it's one that I think a lot of us can learn from.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 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,
00:00:15.120 that the nature of social media, the nature of anonymity on social media, allows foreign governments to create the illusion of social proof.
00:00:27.720 you know if the first 20 people who respond to some post that you put up I put up some post
00:00:34.380 saying something nice about Ben the first 20 posts call me a Jew and ask me about the USS Liberty
00:00:40.880 I don't even know if any of those 20 posts are from humans anonymity on the internet has made
00:00:46.520 it impossible to know what's real and what isn't but what I do know is that social proof is one of
00:00:50.480 the most powerful forces that exists on the planet if the first 20 comments are calling me a filthy 0.92
00:00:56.380 Jew. It's funny, I interviewed someone yesterday who just assumed I was Jewish. I said, on what 0.93
00:01:00.820 basis would you have arrived at the idea that I'm Jewish? And they said, well, just everybody on the
00:01:04.080 internet says you're Jewish. Well, sure, but who is everybody on the internet? Half of its money
00:01:09.120 being spent by China, half of its money being spent by Russia, the Iranians and the North Koreans
00:01:12.800 spend a ton of money influencing Americans. Well, listen, the second half of the 20th century,
00:01:19.740 the amount of things that Americans think today that were planted in our national conversation
00:01:27.160 by the KGB is enormous. The KGB laundered all kinds of their ideas into America because they
00:01:33.540 understood that within the free speech system that exists in this country is an immune system
00:01:39.780 weakness. Free speech brings a lot of robustness to a society. Free speech is great, but there is
00:01:46.240 a weakness, and the weakness is that there's very little natural immunity against bad ideas. 0.52
00:01:53.680 You know, the Soviets understood this well, because in the First World War, the Germans
00:01:57.720 smuggled Lenin on a train into Russia, because they understood this guy's got an idea,
00:02:06.340 and that idea can burn across Russia and weaken them fundamentally in a way that gives us
00:02:13.820 advantages in the war. It was information warfare to unleash Lenin on Russia, and it worked. So
00:02:20.560 that's part of the founding mythology of the Soviet Union. They understood you've got this
00:02:24.420 open society where college professors can just say whatever they want to kids and they can't
00:02:28.780 even be fired, where Hollywood can say things in movies and essentially no one cares as long as the
00:02:33.880 movie's entertaining. We have Ronald Reagan essentially because of the SAG wars against
00:02:39.340 literal Soviet, an attempted Soviet takeover, essentially, of Hollywood during the SAG wars.
00:02:45.040 And Ronald Reagan opposed it and became the president of SAG and then became the governor
00:02:48.600 of California and then became the president. So the idea of foreign governments exploiting
00:02:53.580 free speech in America is nothing new. What's new is the ubiquity of social media, the addictivity
00:03:01.040 of social media, and the anonymity of social media. And now 50% of the internet is bots.
00:03:07.280 so it's it's never been you know what's crazy you know i just you just made me think about 0.99
00:03:13.120 something you know who probably knows who's full of shit and not more than anybody else 0.98
00:03:17.980 elan yeah you know why because he can tell what's real and what's not all he has to do is tell this 0.99
00:03:24.200 guy say this guy's getting all these retweets and all these things can you check to see how
00:03:27.880 many the retweets are bots yeah i would if i'm elan i would probably be running reports
00:03:33.000 on the top 250 political influencers, left, right, center,
00:03:41.040 whatever, far right, woke right, left, right, whatever you want to call it.
00:03:43.480 Take all of them, 250, with a million-plus followers,
00:03:46.340 half a million-plus followers.
00:03:47.460 These are guys that have carrying weight.
00:03:49.440 And then I would say, track to see how many the retweet percentages
00:03:52.880 bot to real.
00:03:54.340 And then I would create a leader's bulletin from the highest being bots
00:03:57.860 to the lowest being real, percentage-wise.
00:04:01.880 And I would measure it with the likes.
00:04:04.020 And then you know what else I would do?
00:04:05.060 I would also measure to see what percentage of the retweets are from America versus other countries.
00:04:11.240 And then based on that data, how likely do you think Yolanda has done something like this before to kind of know where the country is at?
00:04:18.980 Yeah, I suspect he has a really good sense of it.
00:04:20.480 I think he does.
00:04:21.400 The problem is there's misaligned incentives because why are the social media companies allowing all of these foreign influence operations to exist?
00:04:29.140 Why did they allow bots to post on the platforms at all?
00:04:32.500 No, that's a different question, though.
00:04:33.740 That's profit.
00:04:34.360 That's a different question.
00:04:35.200 That's optics.
00:04:35.900 That's, hey, mine is bigger than yours.
00:04:38.480 That's a different story.
00:04:39.700 But that's part of what's being exploited.
00:04:41.160 Yeah, but to me, if he were to—
00:04:45.800 The guy's a trillionaire now.
00:04:46.740 Maybe he can afford to do it.
00:04:47.640 No, no, he can't afford to do it.
00:04:49.020 But to me, I also think Twitter's going to be—it won't even be in the top three most valuable companies that he owns.
00:04:57.500 Because, you know, it's not like you imagine like you got three stocks and one of the stock you put so much attention to, but it's not the one that's making you wealthy.
00:05:05.660 It's just kind of a lot of noise and you have to call your stockbroker and go through your advisor.
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