Britney Spears released a hit memoir. Are bots shaping the conversation?

So in this episode, I want to look at a few recent cultural happenings and how bots did or didn't sway those conversations. We'll be covering a lot of ground and digging into a lot of research, and we're going to start with Britney Spears. So we have talked about Britney Spears on the podcast before, and I just finished

the audiobook of Britney Spears's memoir The Woman in Me. Now, even if you're someone who does not read a lot of celebrity memoirs, I think this book is still worth a read, or you could listen to the audiobook narrated by Michelle Williams. At first, I was like, Oh, I don't need to read this whole thing. I'll just listen to a recap on a podcast. So I listened to the podcast Celebrity Memoir book Club about the memoir, and they ended the episode saying, y'all really need to read

this book for yourselves. So I did, and they were right. Listening to Brittany in her own words was really a different experience. The book is a hit. It sold one point one million copies in its first week alone. It's at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and it is the number two fastest debut of the year, second to Prince Harry's Spare, So it is clear people have been waiting to hear what Britney has to say.

In the memoir, Brittany opens up about some of what we already knew and some that we didn't about her upbringing, her rise to fame, and the horrifying details of her thirteen year long conservatorship. It's one of those memoirs where Britney is pretty gracious and how she reflects on the people in her life who did not treat her well.

She has a lot of grace and compassion for people who treated her like absolute garbage, and unfortunately it sounds like there are a lot of people like that in her life, her own family who financially benefited from her conservatorship, media figures who mocked and belittled her, and of course, her ex, Justin Timberlake. In Britney's memoir, she talks about some of the details of their relationship, including her pregnancy, which she says she terminated after Justin said he was

not ready to be a parent. Brittany said in her memoir that she was actually happy about the unplanned pregnancy, but Justin Timberlake was not ready to be a father. She says, terminating the pregnancy was quote one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life. On realizing that she was pregnant, she said, it was such a surprise for me, but it wasn't a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be

much earlier than I anticipated. But Justine and definitely was not happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren't ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young. I agreed not to have the baby. I don't know if that was the right decision. If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it, And yet Justin was so sure that he did not want to be a father. Now, to be clear, this is only one detail from a life story filled with so much color, pain and insight.

But it's the detail that I feel like a lot of media outlets have really latched onto, probably because it

involves Justin Timberlake. Like, if you've not read the memoir, you probably have seen this one detail about the abortion in headlines about the book, as opposed to all the other details that she shares in the book, like how she recorded and produced her album Blackout during one of the worst years of her life, and she did it in basically one take, or about how she was almost in the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical Chicago Boy.

Did we all miss out on that? Or how she describes her use of Instagram it's just this place to have fun and play.

I just hate that the online conversation has been dominated by what does Justin think? What is Justin's reaction? What did Justin do? But that has been a big part

of the reaction. So after Britney's memoir was published, it renewed criticism of Justin Timberlake's behavior in their romantic relationship and especially during that relationship's aftermass people have been weighing on social media, and Justin Timberlake actually turned off the comments to his Instagram, so did his wife, Jessica Biel. And people on social media notice something else unusual online too.

On Twitter, several social media users suspiciously used identical language to downplay Britney's revelations about Timberlake and the termination of the pregnancy, all repeating the same line, verbatim quote, two consenting adults made a joint decision what was best for them in the period of their lives. I see no issue.

This line was shown to have been posted from a few different social media accounts verbatim, So different social media accounts all defending the behavior of an unpopular, fading celebrity using the exact same language. That's sus suspicious. So this leads to the obvious question, is someone using inauthentic accounts sometimes more commonly referred to as social media bots to

manipulate public sentiment around Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. Oh So, in case you're curious why I'm switching up using the term bots and inauthentic accounts in this conversation, Well, it's because social media researchers sometimes use the phrase inauthentic account rather than bots, because bots brings to mind like automated accounts not being run by humans. But sometimes these accounts are actually real people trying to inauthentically coordinate to manipulate

public sentiment, hence inauthentic accounts. Okay, but back to Justin and Brittany. So the obvious answer here is that Justin Timberlake's PR team has organized inauthentic accounts to sway the

public to be on his side. Right, Well, maybe not the daily Dot looked into it and found that of the nine accounts on Twitter that repeated the two consenting adults line since October seventeenth, at least one of them appeared to have made the comment as a joke, like a joking use of what is called copy pasta content that is copied, pasted and repeated online as a joke or a troll. The Daily Dot actually talked to people

behind two of the accounts that posted the line. One of them seems to be a clear self identified troll who said, I copy pasted it it seemed funny. Another person they spoke to who repeated the two consenting adults line on Twitter is a Justin Timberlake fan account, but they claim to be genuinely copying and pasting the line because they'd seen other Timberlake fan accounts post the same thing, telling the Daily Dot there is no bot campaign, I assure you. The issue is Britney's fan base is ten

times the size of Justin's on social media. They're twisting narratives to make things worse for Justin. So to be super clear, there is no evidence that Justin Timberlake or anyone connected to him is directing inauthentic accounts to post and support of him. Also, just a side note, did you know that last summer Justin Timberlake danced so badly during a performance at a music festival here in DC that he had to issue an apology to the entire city.

But I digress. So maybe Justin's team is not behind this social media behavior. But it is curious, you know, other than having a laugh, why would a handful of disparate people on social media all be using the exact same language to talk about Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. Social media users noticed something similar earlier this summer, when actor Jonah Hill was being scrutinized after his ex surfer Sarah Brady, published text messages that he had set during

their relationship. The texts, to many, including myself, seemed to be using therapy language to manipulate her behavior in some pretty controlling ways that Brady herself categorized as emotionally abusive. The conversation exploded online, with people talking about how their exes tried to manipulate and control them. We even made

an episode about it. And while all of that was going down, social media users found that accounts were doing the same thing as what we're seeing in the Justin Timberlake Britney Spears situation, repeating a pro Jonah Hill message on posts about the situation verbatim the message in question read quote. It sounds like Jonah Hill is communicating what works for him in a clear way. He literally said he supports her if that brings her happiness, it's just

not for him. I actually see nothing wrong with this. So is it just me or is there something strangely similar about the Timberlake tweets and the Jonah Hill tweets? The way they kind of implore us to see the perspective of the man accused of bad behavior, The way they both end with some version of I see nothing wrong with this or I see no issue. They just

seem awfully similar. Now, obviously, neither Justin Timberlake or Jonah Hill have said anything about this, And this is where I kind of need to give you a heads up that if you're hoping that there's going to be some kind of like big reveal of some smoking gun in this episode, sadly there will not be. Even after all the research I did for this episode, I don't feel any closer to knowing what is actually going on with

these specific accounts repeating this specific line. You know, did a handful of people all just decide to post the same message for a joke or to create confusion? Is something else going on? I don't know. But the question that I am really curious about is are we going to see more and more inauthentic social media activity and accounts as a way to shape our opinions? And what does that mean for all of us and for our digital media landscape more broadly. Now, obviously PR is nothing new.

There's an entire lucrative industry built around making us the public think about people, brands, and campaigns in specific ways. But coordinating people or bots to hijack conversations on social media to inauthentically manipulate public opinion is a very different thing. And if it becomes just another plank of normal ways to do PR and sway public opinion, I think it would be a pretty big sign of this ongoing rot

in our digital landscape. So is coordinating the use of inauthentic accounts going to be a more viable and commonplace strategy for brands and companies looking to engage with the public and do you remember when you could go to the Internet to get information to help you understand something without having to worry if some corporate or pr interest was actually just secretly trying to push you towards having their brand friendly opinion? Like is everything online just bots, fakes and scams?

their shows. On Twitter. According to Variety, there were at least six different text message exchanges between the two executives that involved floating the idea of using a fake Twitter account to harshly respond to TV critics who gave negative reviews to HBO shows. All of this came to light thanks to a laid off staffer who used to work on the HBO show The Idol. You remember that show?

It was like this terrible troubled show about the dark side of Hollywood, starring and produced by the Weekend that was canceled after one short season. The laidoff staffer who worked on that show is suing HBO. The HBO executives, HBO's head of Drama and The Weekend himself, and two other producers of the show the idol for wrongful termination.

So the staffer says that HBO executives asked her to set up fake social media accounts to counter the tweets from professional TV critics, And it kind of looks like that's exactly what might have happened, because in April twenty twenty one, a newly created Twitter account from a quote Texas Mom and herbalist Kelly Shepherd tweeted in response to Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Steppenwall's negative review of the

HBO series The Nevers. This quote, Texas Mom wrote, Alan is always predictably safe and scared in his opinions, and the language from that tweet matches the directions that the HBO executive allegedly texts to the laidoff HBO staffer, and the account's profile picture is just some stock image that is found used on several business websites. That same account was also defending HBO's shows in the comments of entertainment

trade publications like Deadline. So a coordinated campaign of inauthentic social media activity to defend bad TV shows from criticism like? Is this the future of discourse online?

are toying with using that more. Really, and for a great template for how successful this kind of online coordination can be, just look at what happened during the Amber heard Johnny Depp defamation trial that stemmed from Herd's op ed about domestic violence. Bot Sentinel, a research firm that uses data science and artificial intelligence to track and detect bots, trolls, and suspect accounts on Twitter and elsewhere, released a report after the trial focused on how Herd was treated during

the trial. The report called the targeting of Herd on social media quote one of the worst cases of platform manipulation and flagrant abuse from a group of Twitter accounts. So the La Times spoke to Christopher Bouose, CEO of Bot Sentinel, who said, we immediately observed dozens of newly created accounts subamming negative anti Amber Herd's cashtags. Many accounts were replying to tweets with hashtags unrelated to the tweet

they were responding to. Some accounts encouraged others to get the hashtags trending, and the trolls were successful on multiple occasions. So in putting together this report, Bot Sentinel looked at more than fourteen thousand tweets that included the hashtags, and it determined that twenty four point four percent of the account sending those tweets had been created in the past seven months. So this is where I have to say, I totally got taken by what sounds like some inauthentic

social media activity about that trial. You know, I didn't really pay a ton of attention to the trial at first, So then when I decided I wanted to dip in and sort of like get a sense of what was going on. I of course went to social media, and the social media content that I saw was so overwhelmingly negative toward Amber Heard that it was really easy for me to think, like, Wow, the Internet is all collectively against Amber Herd, so she must be in the wrong here.

It's really shocking to me how effective it was at shaping my opinion. And yep, Goot Sentinels report says that copy pasta was indeed used in this media manipulation campaign. To the report reads, one manipulative technique that was employed was copy pasta or copying and pasting duplicative content to game Twitter's trends and propagate a positive view of depth

and a negative view of Heard. One such message read quote people turned against Amber Heard not because Johnny Depp is a powerful man or a famous actor, but because we watched the trial and saw who was telling the truth and who wasn't. And again, doesn't this kind of sound similar to the Jonah Hill and justin Timberlake's tweets Again, we're being asked to negate any of the quote he said, she said and focus on the perspective of the man

accused of bad behavior. I just can't shake how these copy pasted defenses seem to be inviting us to disregard structures that we know exist, like power dynamics and gender dynamics, to focus on how the man didn't do anything wrong. And they're also framed in this way to look so logical. You know, it's logical to see that Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake were just two consenting adults making the best

decisions for themselves. He didn't do anything wrong. It's logical to see that Jonah Hill was just being clear about its boundaries for a partner. He didn't do anything wrong. It's logical to not get blindsided by celebrity or gender dynamics and see that Johnny Depp was simply telling the truth in court. He didn't do anything wrong. It's like they're all framed to invite us to completely disregard everything we spent the last ten years of me too talking about.

But again, the question is why, you know, other than someone working on Johnny Depp or Justin Timberlake's PR team, why would anyone want to control our feelings around celebrities or popular culture? Like what is there to gain. Well, maybe Star Wars can give us a little bit of a clue. Morton Bay, a research fellow about the usc Aberg School for Communications and Journalism Center for the Digital Future, looked into what appeared to be a massive backlash against

the twenty seventeen Star Wars movie The Last Jedi. If you don't remember or you're not a Star Wars person, The Last Jedi was the first Star Wars movie to feature a woman of color in a lead role, Kelly Marie Trand as Rose Tico, and a small but very vocal minority of people didn't like that. They accused the franchise of like forcing diversity and wokeness down their throats

or some such nonsense. Rotten Tomatoes confirmed that the film's score was seriously targeted by a coordinated campaign to tank it. Tran faced a slew of gendered and racialized harassment online and eventually left social media, and Morton Bay's research showed that some of that conversation online was driven by Russian

bot campaigns and inauthentic accounts. But more interestingly is that, according to Vox's Emily Saint, James, Ay's study further concludes that much of the backlash was driven by political opportunism from the American alt right, particularly members of that movement who were deeply involved in twenty fourteen's anti feminist and proto alright gamer Gate movement in the video game community. In Saint James Peace called Russian trolls us Star Wars

to sow discord online. The fact that it worked is telling, Saint James writes, quote, what bays study really got me thinking about was how strange it was that Russian agents would focus on Star Wars of all things, and what seemed to be a campaign to spread dissension throughout America

dating back to before the twenty sixteen election. Whether or not a Star Wars movie is good or bad has little bearing on the overall twists and turns of global geopolitics, and yet here was evidence that somebody in Russia sure disagreed. Maybe the Russian bucks that they identified are all extra governmental, built by trolls with spare time on their hands and

a grudge against Lucasfilms. Or maybe Bay's findings are yet another example of how thoroughly Russian intelligence has zeroed in on the idea that white nationalism is central to driving a wedge in American society. If the latter is true, then what's most unnerving about Russia's intelligence strategy and its connection to Star Wars isn't what the strategy says about Russia, but what it says about us. So what does it say about us?

manipulate people. So to be super clear, I am not suggesting that there is a foreign campaign to get us to think favorably about a fading pop star like justin Timberlake. It's concerning not to mention really telling that popular culture, you know, the music we like, the celebrities we follow, the films we identify with, is becoming just another domain to spread chaos and division. But it also kind of makes sense because the content we consume is so often

tied with our identities. But I do think that if identity based conversations online like these are artificially manipulated, it does leave us more polarized and more susceptible to being manipulated along highly charged tension points for more in a fair political causes where the stakes are a whole lot higher.

bot run pro Trump campaign. The bot farm was created within the last eleven months solely to heat praise on Trump while ridiculing his potential political opponents, especially those likely to challenge him in twenty twenty four. According to Siabra researchers, a regular conversation on sites like Facebook or Twitter will usually track between four percent and eight percent of fake accounts in many of these conversations surrounding Trump. That was

up to between twenty percent and forty percent. Over a quarter of the interactions for pro Trump officials like ReBs, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gates on Twitter came from bots. According to this report, it is far far more than left wing accounts experience, like Senator Warren or Representative Alexandria Ocazio Cortez. And importantly, for all the talk we do about Russian assets and Russian run bot campaigns, this bot farm was likely created and being run from right here

in the United States. The company of Researchers found that there were three massive bot farms established in April, October, and November of last year. These interconnected bot farms were likely created in the United States. What's more, all these fake accounts were extremely proch Trump and attacked anybody who made negative mention of the former president.

According to research from Dahudzeman, Associate Professor of Operations Management at MIT, even a small handful of bots can have an impact on shaping public opinion. His research found that a small number of highly active bots can significantly change people's political opinions. The main factor was not how many bots were used, but rather how many tweets each set of bots issued. But there is some research to suggest that the concern about bots's impact on our behavior is overblown.

Despite the presence of Russian bots trying to disrupt the twenty sixteen election, there is some research suggesting that maybe it wasn't all that effective in actually changing American voting behavior. But here's the interesting thing. When inauthentic accounts and bots are used to shape discourse in these clandestine ways at all, it has an impact whether we're doing the thing the bot campaign is trying to get us to do or not.

That's because the knowledge that there could be bots out there manipulating conversations online is enough to make us change our behavior and shape the way that we do discourse online. According to a study by Adam Waits, a professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School, people are more likely to assume that posts that they don't agree with

are from bots, not from real people. So if they are bots being deployed in discourse online at all, it kind of doesn't matter if the content that we're seeing is being driven by bots or not. When people believe they are interacting with a bot, they trust online discourse

less and show less willingness to engage with it. One of the reports researchers said, viewed alongside earlier studies which show that people perceive opposing views as more bot like, the results of this experiment suggest that the political bias may contribute to markers of political polarization. One of the researchers on this study says that the research suggests does how deep American partisan divides go, saying I was surprised

by how consistently this bias emerged. People are very quick to dismiss other viewpoints as not only incorrect, but also as not even human, and our current conversation around bots might not actually even be helpful weights. The author of the study said that belief that bot accounts are widespread may have the effect of poisoning the well and making

all online content seem suspect. The research, he says, does make me wonder whether all the hype around bots might actually have a more damaging effect or more biasing effects

than the bots themselves. So it's kind of like a double edged sword, because people should be aware of the reality that there are bots out there trying to hijack conversations online, but that reality could also shape the way people see and engage in discourse in ways that make us all more polarized and less informed, and that is an outcome that could have very big impacts on our democracy, which is probably why the hbos of the world should

maybe think twice before using inauthentic accounts just to make their bad TV shows look more well liked, because they might think they're just making it seem like people like our Texas herbalist mom Kelly Shepherd are just really going to bed and defending their programming, But in actuality, they're making all of us trust online discourse and in turn each other less And I'm sad to say that none of this shows any signs of slowing down anytime soon.

In fact, kind of the opposite. And even though Elon Musk pledged to crack down on bots on Twitter, you might remember that he even tried to use the prevalence of bots to weavel out of the sale way back when, and is now even floating the idea of having people paid to use Twitter to curb bots. The problem has actually gotten worse under his tenure as the owner of Twitter, and it really does not sound like his team is

doing a whole lot to fix it. A team of researchers at Queensland University of Technology who track misinformation and bought activity and social media for several years, including until Musk took over, found that automated inauthentic social media accounts so like really botspots remained active on the platform long after their research had discovered them, showing that Twitter has

just not really been effective at suspending bought accounts. And with the rise of technology like AI, this is all poised to get a lot worse because AI powered bots can look and sound more and more like authentic humans. So what's at stake with all this? Like why does

any of this matter? Well, I think the reason I get so up in arms about this is that at the most basic level, people ought to be able to trust that the conversation they're having online are authentic, whether they're about celebrities like Britney Spears and the failed actors like Justin Timber like they end up having relationships with, or about who you should be voting for and what We should be able to turn to our biggest social

media platforms to get accurate, thoughtful content and information from humans. Otherwise, what is point when you get on social media, especially if you're trying to form an opinion about something that is complicated or complex or nuanced. You should be able to do that without interference by bots secretly trying to

push you to think a certain way. And I think it is related to this overall feeling that more and more of the Internet is just a landscape or a marketplace for scams and bots, Like what happened to an Internet that is actually based on community building and accurate information sharing? And I think increasingly the ultimate why of inauthentic accounts and bot campaigns might not necessarily just to be to change our behavior and sway our opinions, but

to keep us fearful and distrustful of one another. You know, if we're all accusing each other of not just being misinformed or wrong, but not even being human. It's like I don't have to listen to what you think, or engage you or try to understand your perspective if you're just a bot. I think it's another way to keep us divided, us easier to manipulate, and ultimately we all lose out if the Internet becomes just another place to

manipulate us, divide us, and keep us polarized. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can read us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tenggody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed. Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Almado is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.