I GOT PLAYED
How Influence Operations EASILY Engineer Your Outrage — And How I Know Because It Worked On Me
A few years ago — ten, to be precise — I spent some time online calling out the bigotry of my friends and even family. Not only did I do that, but I also rallied for support through DMs — the goal was to create a tactical alliance, attack with surgical precision, coming from multiple angles and playing off each other, as we maintained a constant huddle in our DMs. We would annihilate them with reason, wit, and smugness. And then we would celebrate behind the scenes.
How diabolical.
That was full-on bullying. Something I would have never thought of doing ten years prior to that. But in this case, I believed I was protecting my so-called people — and I believed that if I wasn’t doing it, I was part of the problem. The shame of not speaking up felt worse than the discomfort of speaking. Also, I was part of a tribe, and that solidarity felt good. And the fact that I alone could rally some troops — wow.
So I spoke up. Called out. Ferally. Repeatedly. At people I loved.
I’m not entirely sure how much of what drove me there was real — and how much of it was engineered.
How did I get to be so cruel? Let me tell you about influence operations.
Not All of These Operations Are the Same
First — a distinction worth knowing. Because I didn’t notice this until researching for this article.
A bot farm uses automated software — no humans required. It runs at scale, around the clock, for almost no cost. Today many are powered by artificial intelligence — large language models that generate convincing human-sounding content automatically. This is an example of AI being weaponized against humanity by the most powerful people. It’s already happening. And we can only defeat it if we have clarity. That is the point of this article and entire platform. Clarity. It’s hard to battle your enemy in a house of mirrors.
A troll farm uses actual people. Sitting at desks. Clocking in. Hitting quotas. Answering to supervisors. And going home at the end of the day.
Both exist. Both are being used against us. And increasingly they work together.
These operations are built for different purposes.
Some are built for money — fake ad clicks, scalped concert tickets, manufactured Amazon reviews. Annoying and predatory, sometimes costly, but relatively contained.
Some are built for access — harvesting your data, testing stolen passwords, getting inside systems that should be closed to them.
And some are built for shepherding minds.
This is the category I want to address. There are several types within it, but today I want to narrow in on one specific kind — because it’s both fascinating and personally convicting. It’s called a wedge operation. It’s not designed to change the way you think. It’s designed to change your behavior. To turn up the volume of your feelings until you are so outraged you can’t think at all.
It takes our most beautiful human traits — our need for belonging, our solidarity, our loyalty — and concentrates them into a weapon of mass distortion.
And it social proofs pretty uncivilized behavior.
How It Works
Here’s the detail I cannot stop thinking about.
The same operation — same funding, same team — runs accounts on both sides of the fight.
The conservative account and the progressive account hurling accusations at each other in a comment section? Possibly run by the same people, sitting right next to each other.
We know this happened. The Senate Intelligence Committee documented it. Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a troll farm, actual humans with actual paychecks — ran content simultaneously targeting Black Americans through accounts that mimicked Black Lives Matter activism, while also running pro-police and anti-BLM content targeting the right. Both sides. Same operation. Same source.
And those troll farm workers? They found the job on a regular employment website. The listing said “copywriter.” The interview was in an unmarked office in a residential apartment building. The interviewer didn’t ask about experience or qualifications — just invited the candidate to start immediately. Researchers who later interviewed troll farm workers found that most of them felt deeply ashamed of what they were doing — but they needed the money.
When an account got banned — they opened another one.
Now here’s where it gets complicated. And closer to home.
Full human troll farms — offices, supervisors, quotas — are largely impractical in America because of labor costs. So domestic influence operations took a different shape. American political money funds automated bot networks that run around the clock for almost nothing. It funds AI-generated content that can produce thousands of posts with no human labor at all. It funds consulting and marketing firms running influence operations under perfectly legitimate-sounding contracts — “digital strategy,” “audience engagement,” “content amplification.” And when human labor is needed at scale — it goes offshore, where the work is cheap enough to be worth it.
Intelligence officials confirmed that in the 2020 election, influence operations targeting American audiences were outsourced to workers in Ghana, Nigeria, and Mexico. Foreign workers. American targets.
There is also a documented domestic version — scrappier, smaller scale. In 2020, the Washington Post investigated a campaign in which Phoenix-based Turning Point Action reportedly recruited teenagers — some of them minors — to post coordinated political content from their own social media accounts without disclosing they were being paid. They were given bonuses for posts that generated the most reaction. Facebook and Twitter opened investigations. Turning Point Action did not respond to requests for comment.
It is not a troll farm in the Russian sense. But the intent was the same.
The machinery just looks different depending on what you can afford. Bots where labor is expensive. Humans where labor is cheap. AI where neither is necessary.
And here’s where it gets truly diabolical.
The cheap labor markets being used to manufacture your outrage — in Ghana, Nigeria, Mexico, the Philippines — didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They were built by decades of American trade policy. NAFTA. The WTO agreements. The great outsourcing era that gutted manufacturing and moved production to places where workers had fewer rights and lower wages. We called it globalization. We called it efficiency. We called it progress.
What we actually built were the conditions for workers desperate enough to take any job available.
And some of those jobs turned out to be this one.
The full circle looks like this — American economic policy hollows out labor markets abroad, creates workers who need income badly enough to take a content manager job that turns out to be a troll farm, and those workers end up being hired — by foreign governments or by American political interests — to manufacture division in the very country whose policies put them there.
That’s not just irony. That’s the human industrial complex operating at a geopolitical scale.
And we — the outraged, the activated, the tribal — we’re the product.
Meanwhile there is currently no federal law requiring a bot to identify itself as a bot. A super PAC could hire a firm to run one of these operations tomorrow and it wouldn’t show up on any disclosure form.
This is happening here. Now. Operations are running out of Russia, the Philippines, China, North Macedonia, Kosovo, India, and beyond. Some are purely commercial — chasing ad revenue, because outrage produces clicks and clicks produce money. Others are geopolitical — foreign governments or their proxies trying to shape American behavior and belief. And some are domestic — running in service of a politician, a corporation, or an ideology. Often you can’t tell which is which. That’s also by design.
This is probably why — right after No Kings Day — there was suddenly a surge of content from leftists saying they went to the protest but turned around when they saw how joyful everyone was. Too many people who seemed oblivious to the gravity of the situation. Same talking points. Almost word for word. Moving from automated account to influencer at the speed of a neuron. And at the same time — coming from the right — “if Trump was a king you wouldn’t have the right to protest.” From automated accounts to influencers to pundits in seconds flat. The trolls and bots were deployed to flood the zone, creating chaos, distraction, and division.
And it becomes interactive theater — it only works when we take on our roles, which we have practiced and perfected within our silos.
Wedge operations don’t invent division. That’s the important thing to understand. They find fault lines that already exist — race, immigration, religion, guns — and they press on them with precision, like pressing a finger into the seam of your canned cinnamon rolls. They’re not lying exactly. They’re cheerleaders. Party mascots. They find the most inflammatory content, the most activated voices, and they amplify them until the conflict feels total and urgent and everywhere. And everyone is exhausted from fighting windmills in a way that doesn’t even develop any fighting skills. In fact our ability to discern, think critically, and exercise emotional intelligence is in measurable decline. We are a society that has been maneuvered into spending its outrage on shadows. We get weaker, while the actual architecture of power goes largely undisturbed.
Then they infiltrate both sides — not to win either argument, but to make sure neither side can hear the other. Think about every sports game you’ve ever attended. The point is not to inform, but to emote — to get the crowd roaring — a strong, clear sense of mission with a ton of energy behind two teams that are relatively the same.
And this is how the Overton window gets stretched. Simultaneously. In both directions. A little further left. A little further right. Over and over — like a slow tug of war with an elastic rope that never returns to its original length — until positions that would have seemed extreme ten years ago now feel like the reasonable middle of their respective camps. This is the goal of extremism — not to convert the majority, but to move the center. You don’t need everyone to become a radical. You just need the goalposts to shift far enough that radicalism starts to look reasonable. And it’s working.
What we are living through right now — the full normalization of behavior that would have been unthinkable a decade ago — is at least in part the accumulated result of this stretching.
We didn’t get here by accident
The bot doesn’t come for you directly. It goes for the person with the strongest identity attachment — the true believer, the highly activated, the person whose sense of self is most fused with the cause. That person is the most susceptible and the most powerful amplifier. They take the signal and they run with it authentically. With real emotion. With real conviction. And then it spreads through their network — person to person to person — losing its bot origins entirely by the time it reaches someone like you.
So the infection pathway is:
Bot → highly identity-attached person → their authentic network → eventually you
By the time it gets to you it doesn’t look like a bot at all. It looks like your thoughtful friend who you trust. Who was influenced by their passionate friend. Who was influenced by the bot.
That’s why even nuanced people get played. Not because they fell for a bot. Because they fell for a human who fell for a human who fell for a bot.
Researchers at Clemson University documented a domestic American AI-powered bot network on X — at least 686 accounts posting over 130,000 times — targeting Senate and House races across multiple states. The accounts used large language models — the same technology behind ChatGPT — to automatically reply to real users’ posts, inserting themselves into existing conversations.
The goal wasn’t a massive audience. According to Darren Linvill, director of Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub, their effectiveness was in contributing to a partisan echo chamber — en masse massaging perceptions. One or two replies from what looks like a real person, repeated across thousands of conversations, adds up.
You probably wouldn’t have known. That’s the whole design. By the time the signal reaches you — it’s been laundered through real people.
The most extreme voices get boosted until they seem representative. Moderates get mocked. Nuance gets framed as weakness or betrayal. And then real people — sincere, genuinely concerned people — show up and do the rest of the work for free.
As of 2024, more than half of all internet traffic was automated. Not human. Over 51 percent.
More than half of what moves across the internet is not a person.
How To Recognize It
I want to be honest with you about something. My goal here is not to hand you a checklist. It’s to invoke some humility. Because our thoughts and our fervor don’t always come from a benevolent source. And that’s uncomfortable to sit with.
It’s why I think practices like centering prayer — or any practice that genuinely slows you down — matter so much right now. You need enough interior space for real discernment to happen. The machine is counting on you being too activated for that.
That said — here are the tells that you are directly or indirectly being influenced by a content amplification campaign.
The content makes you feel like this is the most important thing happening right now and anyone who doesn’t see it is either stupid or evil. The emotional ramp is very fast. The opposing side is presented at its absolute worst — not a reasonable person with a different view, but a monster. I mean — how on earth did “Baby It’s Cold Outside” become the most villainous song ever recorded? More villainous than anything Kanye or Eminem ever put out?
If mere persuasion is rape culture then the entire system is f*cking us far harder without our consent.
And when you look for people arguing for nuance, complexity, or clarity — they’re there. But somehow they get no traction. They get sidelined. Mocked. Suppressed by the algorithm. Because the nuanced voice is not useful to the operation.
Which — incidentally — is exactly what this publication is trying to be. A voice of clarity. If that’s useful to you, the most direct way to support it is to like and subscribe. It’s how the algorithm knows this kind of conversation is worth having, and it’s how I keep showing up to have it.
The other tell is exhaustion. Wedge operations don’t just make you angry — they make you tired. Because the conflict never resolves. There’s always a new outrage. The machine needs fuel and you are the fuel and the pipeline.
Notice also the tribe formation. The in-group solidarity. The private channels where you celebrate victories together. That’s not incidental — that’s load-bearing architecture. The operation needs you to feel belonging, because belonging makes the script feel like conviction. It makes bullying feel like loyalty.
I Got Played
I know which one got me.
It was the call-out culture moment — the years when I was convinced that naming and shaming the people in my life was a form of heroism. The cultural moment was real. The fault lines were real. Racism is real. The operation did not invent the wound — it just turned the dial to eleven and handed me a role to play.
The role was this: either you are maximally activated, or you are the enemy. There was no third option. Purity or else. Nuance was playing both sides, implying cowardice or betrayal. Complexity was cover. And the shame mechanism — the fear that not calling people out made you one of the bad ones — that’s not by accident. That’s the architecture of a game being run somewhere, by someone, for reasons that had nothing to do with the people I loved and was busy destroying.
I can’t prove which accounts were automated and which were human operators. But I know what the machine needed me to feel. And I felt it. And I took it into my real relationships, with real people I loved, and I did damage there.
That’s a pretty humbling thing to sit with.
What This Is Actually About
Simone Weil wrote — in a letter in 1942 — that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. I believe that. Which means that having your attention harvested and redirected toward manufactured conflict is a genuine spiritual harm. It’s not just a political problem. It’s a formation problem. Every hour spent in an engineered outrage loop is an hour not spent in the kind of attention that actually sees people — the real people in front of you, with their real complexity, who deserved better than the script you’d been handed.
The machine doesn’t want you to see three-dimensional people. It wants you living in a simplified simulation of humanity. A binary — ones and zeroes, us and them — easily codified, easily weaponized.
It wants you activated and exhausted and too depleted to do the slow, unglamorous work of actual relationship. It wants you speaking the language of emotion.
What To Do With This
I’m not going to tell you to log off, though sometimes that’s right — and seriously, consider reducing consumption of short form content, it’s especially corrosive and even the informative stuff is a poor replacement for long-form content because it doesn’t help formation or attention. And if it replaces it completely, you will be flabby in those areas.
It drives me crazy that Substack makes their notes front and center and that I have to play the short form game to be in the game — which I am not. But Substack isn’t doing this by accident. Short form is more engaging. More engaging means more time on platform. More time on platform means more revenue. Human flourishing is an enemy to late stage capitalism — but we can still resist.
I’m going to suggest something harder: practice the pause before the share. Ask not just is this true but who benefits from me being this activated right now? And when you see the same script coming at you from several different people, consider that it might be manufactured — even if it’s coming from your side. Especially if it’s coming from your side.
Cultivate some affection for complexity, for people who hold a different view without being cartoons of it. This is best done offline, because our neurochemistry will offer some harmonizing notes when you’re actually in the room with someone.
And hold some humility about your own history. You were probably in one of these. I was. Most of us were. That doesn’t make us stupid. It makes us human — which is exactly what the machine was counting on.
The most subversive thing we can do is refuse to be predictable in our outrage. To reserve our attention for what’s actually in front of us. To be harder to farm.
And of course — love your neighbor. Cherish your family and friends.
A Few Receipts
As of 2024, automated bot traffic made up 51% of all web traffic — the first time in a decade it surpassed human activity online. That’s wild.
The IRA / 2016 — Russia’s Internet Research Agency ran both Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter pages simultaneously, along with hundreds of other accounts targeting American social divisions. This was documented by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Clemson University / 2024 — Researchers at Clemson identified a domestic American bot network of at least 686 accounts that posted over 130,000 times, targeting specific Senate races in Ohio and Pennsylvania and North Carolina’s voter ID law. Likely a PAC-funded operation. Currently not illegal.
China / 2024 — A Chinese-linked operation specifically targeted down-ballot races in Alabama, Texas, and Tennessee, spreading disinformation designed to erode trust in candidates and institutions.
The Law — There is currently no federal law requiring a bot to identify itself as a bot. Domestic political operations can run these campaigns without it appearing on any disclosure form.