You and your wife are fucking dumbass people. Leave the country please..you stupid fuck. Thinking about driving to Florida to kick your stupid ass
Well, as they say, that ain’t gonna happen. To find out why, read on.
The Free America Walkout was a protest action held on January 20, 2026, organized by the Women’s March. It urged people to boycott school and work for a day to protest the current administration’s actions since January 2025. And to not shop.
People came out for many reasons: Some participated. because they hated Trump and his policies. Others protested the administration’s stance on immigration, outraged at the recent ICE killing of an unarmed woman in Minneapolis.
Participation figures for this action are unavailable. They may be difficult to determine, because many people did not demonstrate publicly nor sign petitions. They merely stayed out of work or school and refrained from purchasing.
One day before the event, my wife Cheryl felt that citizens in our retirement community should have a public demonstration on the side of a state road. She made a few calls and we showed up the next day with our sign. Over 50 people joined us to demonstrate for over an hour. (Their signs were better than ours.)
I brought my trusty Osmo Pocket 3 video camera to film the scene, and to interview people. When we returned home, I published my first video, a 23-second reel on Facebook, showing people holding their signs (but neither speaking nor chanting).
The response was incredible. Within half a day we had over 200,000 views and over 10,000 reactions. There were several thousand comments, too. Clearly, it was going viral.
Unfortunately, the reactions weren’t all positive. Many were threatening, like the one above. Some mocked the elderly for participating in politics. (This is odd, considering that President Donald Trump is 79.) Most showed their ignorance of the issues and extolled the actions of ICE. And they didn’t stop with us. They attacked our positive commenters. A friend received 750 negative remarks when he defended our free speech rights. (One remark even claimed he had a gay lover, a complete fabrication.)
What’s going on here? The 85% negative reactions seemed wildly out of proportion to a group of 50 senior citizens appearing in a 23-second reel. Friends became frightened, so I deleted the post. Then I put up the extended video version on Youtube, consisting of five minutes of interviews I collected during the demonstration. There were some views, but no threats. This is odd, considering it’s a far more substantive video.
Then it dawned on me. Could these negative responses be coming from bots? Now why would I think that?
- Disproportionate Response: A 23-second video with minimal engagement on YouTube generating 200,000+ views and 9,000+ comments on Facebook in a matter of hours. This is highly unusual. It suggests artificial amplification.
- Uniform Hostility: Most comments were not just negative, but specifically ageist. This could indicate a coordinated approach targeting seniors from a retirement community.
- Dizzying Response: The speed of the reaction (within hours) is characteristic of automated systems that can detect and respond to content much faster than ordinary human engagement.
Don’t take my word for it. It has been documented:
- The Oxford Computational Propaganda Report (2021) found evidence of coordinated bot networks targeting demographic-specific content to suppress political organizing, particularly content from older adults.
- Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (2022) documented how political actors deploy “ageist bot farms” that specifically target content from older activists, with age-based harassment to discourage participation.
- During the 2022 midterm elections, the Election Integrity Partnership identified numerous instances where small demonstrations by senior groups were targeted with disproportionate hostile responses designed to create the impression of widespread community opposition.
- The “Firehose of Falsehood” model described by the RAND Corporation (2020) mentions how bot networks can rapidly flood comment sections with negative responses to create a false impression of public sentiment.
Specifically, how does this work? Far more intricately than you think. It involves profile creation, content recognition, comment generation, amplification, and detection avoidance.
Quick! We Need a Profile!
Bots use instant profiles that appear authentic but have “tells”: generic profile pictures, limited post history, recently created accounts, or strange naming conventions.
Some sophisticated operations maintain sleeper accounts created months or years in advance, even posting benign content to appear legitimate before being activated for specific campaigns.
For many commenters, I couldn’t find any profiles at all. This suggests those accounts were either deleted after commenting or techniques were used to render them unsearchable.
We Know What You’re Saying
Bots are programmed to recognize certain keywords like “demonstration,” “protest,” “walkout,” “march,” and other political terms. More advanced systems use semantic analysis to identify content even when those exact keywords aren’t used, by recognizing related concepts and contexts.
They can recognize any content in pictures. They use computer vision systems trained to recognize:
- Protest signs and banners
- Crowds gathered in public spaces
- Specific symbols associated with movements
- Facial recognition to identify demographics (like age groups)
They can even analyze video. My little reel was low-hanging fruit to them.
We Know What to Say
What about the content of these bots? The snarky remarks and threats?
Many bots use pre-programmed templates with variable elements. For ageist comments, they might say stuff like:
- Who’s supplying their Depends?
- Somebody let the grannies out of the nursing home!
- Go home or we’ll come looking for you.
One AI chatbot told me that some sophisticated operations “use language models that can generate unique-seeming responses while maintaining consistent messaging.”
These systems are scary shapeshifters. They can be trained on datasets of existing hostile comments to mimic authentic human trolls. And they’re organized. They can deploy thousands of accounts simultaneously whenever they detect certain triggered content. They can coordinate their timing to give the impression that they’re groundswells of public opinion, just concerned citizens reacting to threats from “damned agitators.”
We Pump up the Volume
Once initial bot comments are posted, other accounts can like, share, and reply to those comments, pushing them higher in Facebook’s visibility algorithms. These accounts don’t even have to be bots. They can just be paid human trolls who sold their souls.
This snowball effect makes it seem the hostile comments are more popular (and representative) than they actually are.
You Can’t Find Us
Think that’s scary? It gets worse.
Like cockroaches, bot developers continuously update their techniques to avoid detection. They vary the timing of their comments to appear more human. They use “warm-up” periods, where new accounts first engage with benign content, like hobbies or sports.
Don’t Whine to the Government
While direct proof of the U.S. government using bots against domestic protests is scarce, there is circumstantial evidence.
The U.S. military has openly contracted firms like “HBGary Federal” for “online personal management.”
Former intelligence contractors (e.g., the whistleblower Edward Snowden) have revealed how governments manipulate online discourse. Agencies like the FBI and DHS have monitored social media for “extremism” or “misinformation.” If you look for it, you’ll find ample evidence they’ve surveilled Black Lives Matter and most anti-war protests.
Bots are here to stay. It’s time we learn more about them.
Where does that leave the entity called “Suzanne Furr Smith,” mentioned in the opening quote? No doubt, her profile’s complete absence on Facebook is suspicious. As a venal commenter, she may not exist.
Or worse. She could be a sweet and caring person whose photo and name were hijacked by a bot, without her even knowing it. Happens all the time.
I still can’t get over that quote though. I wonder what it would feel like, getting my ass kicked by a line of computer code.
