Disinformation For Profit
A medical student in India needing to pay his tuition asked Google’s Gemini for help making additional money and turned the responses into a lucrative fake AI-generated MAGA influencer he dubbed “Emily Hart” preying on the right’s chronic inability to think critically.
It speaks to the naive gullibility of MAGA supporters and their ilk. According to reports, the student who invented this highly profitable identity also tried to create an equivalent liberal influencer — which flopped.
If this for-profit astroturfing sounds unreasonable or unbelievable, or that Canadians would not fall for such fake and politically charged AI slop, consider what is happening in Alberta with the ostensibly rising separatist movement there.
Or not there. Just a little further east.
Well, quite a bit further east.
The Alberta separatist movement’s social media epicentre, as CBC exposed this week, is in the Netherlands. Videos made with voice actors and racking up tens of millions of views are being produced by around 20 YouTube channels in that country.
It is not hard to connect the dots between who would pay for such an oddly specific social media campaign, and who wants to break up Canada to get out resources. Funding foreign astroturf media campaigns serves the purposes of the same people who take advantage of naive MAGA support in the United States to profit.
While the American government systematically dismantles what’s left of the middle class and its senior officials — or unofficials, in some cases — accept foreign bribes by the billions of dollars in the guise of negotiating internationally, the world’s billionaires are getting richer by leaps and bounds. Right wing supporters are simply too easily fooled to catch on, as “Emily Hart” once again demonstrated.
While “Emily” was a project for a student to make money to pay his bills, Alberta separatism is an American project to steal Canada’s natural resources at firesale prices while convincing us that it is in our own interests.
While Alberta premier Danielle Smith appears to being falling for it, it is hard not to wonder what she sees in it for herself. Given her association with shining Conservative lights like Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, and Conrad Black and her efforts to bring about a referendum on Alberta separation, it is far more on-brand to consider that she may not be falling for anything, does not actually care about Alberta’s future, and is pursuing her traitorous work to undermine Canada for personal reasons.
Her close friend and ally Pierre Poilievre has made bread-and-butter issues like our rising grocery prices the mainstay of his messaging, but this week, when presented with an opportunity to address truth in grocery pricing and accountability in the industry, his entire party voted with the grocers.
BC Liberal MP Gurbux Saini introduced a simple private member’s bill entitled “An Act to establish a national framework to improve food price transparency” whose summary reads:
This enactment provides for the development of a national framework respecting grocery pricing and unit price display practices. It also sets out reporting requirements in relation to the framework.
The bill does exactly what it says. It is simple and to the point. But if you listen to the Conservatives tell it, holding grocery chains accountable for the price gouging and deceptive practices many use will simply add red tape and hurt the consumer.
What do “Emily Hart”, Danielle Smith, Pierre Poilievre have in common?
They all prey on people who react emotionally and accept easy-to-swallow sound-bites that have little to do with reality, who don’t take the time or effort to consider whether what they are seeing or hearing is logical, coherent, or in any way truthful.
For many on the right, the very term “thinking critically” is taken with the emphasis on the wrong word. For them, it is built around the verb ‘to criticise’ rather than ‘to think’.
The real world consequences of this gullible naivety, though, are critical. The Americans get unnecessary wars, Canada’s unity, sovereignty, and resources are threatened, and our grocery prices bound out of control — all to the profit of the oligarchs, who most assuredly do not have our best interests at heart.
What a confusing world. The Netherlands????