They might end up being right. Of course to race they have perhaps added sexual orientation and gender.
One thing I find massively suspicious is how Reddit is utterly awash in anti-natalism, relationship cynicism, and general gender war shit. It’s not just right wing incel or Tate type stuff, though there is some of that. It’s also a kind of lefty coded “femcel” thing too, an obvious antithesis. There’s tons and tons of posts and comments about how awful the other gender is (by ostensibly both male and female posters) and tons of horrible relationship stories.
I glance at this stuff every now and then and a lot of it seems “LLMey” in its writing style. The big “ask” and “AITA” and similar popular engagement bait subs are full of this stuff. Subs designated for men or for women are full of misogyny or misandry, respectively.
So is Reddit crawling with bots programmed to break society along gender lines and ruin relationships and suppress fertility?
I don’t know but I give it nonzero odds. I would like to know.
The idea is just to divide, confuse, "flood the zone with shit" as Bannon likes to say.
It seems like people are actually not bad at noticing likely bots arguing against their favorite positions, but are blind to the possibility that there could be bots pretending to be on their side. The most corrosive might be bots pretending to be on your side but advocating subtilely wrong or unnecessarily divisive formulations of your ideas, which in turn are more likely to influence you because they seem to be on your side.
Phrases come to mind like "vandalism of the discourse" and "intellectual terrorism" where the goal is not to promote one specific idea but to destroy the discourse as a whole.
That certainly looks like the world we're living in.