Researchers have stumbled upon a massive MAGA botnet of hundreds of accounts on Elon Musk's social media platform and right-wing echo chamber X-formerly-Twitter.
As NBC News reports, the accounts use AI to automatically generate responses that flatter people sharing common conservative talking points that support president Donald Trump and his inner circle, giving a false impression that they have more popular support than they actually do.
But the Trump administration's perplexing handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files has proven too much for the AI powering the botnet to handle, causing the automated accounts to make contradictory statements.
Depending on your perspective, it's either a hilarious glitch or a surreal mirror of the situation playing out in the actual political sphere, in which immense chaos is unfolding among the president's human supporters as they grapple with his dismissal of an issue they care deeply about.
The situation blew up earlier this month when president Trump repeatedly tried to downplay the purported "client list" of the late sex criminal, an extensive backpedaling effort that severely strained relations with his most ardent MAGA supporters.
The enormous degree of cognitive dissonance is anything but coincidental. After all, Trump officials had spent years fueling conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein's crimes and death. Trump himself ran on the promise of releasing the "Epstein files."
Trump has even gone as far as calling his supporters "stupid" and "foolish" for believing in what he's now calling a "SCAM" by Democrats.
The botnet tracked by researchers for NBC was similarly caught on the wrong foot. Following attorney general Pam Bondi's announcement that there was no "client list" — despite previously claiming that it was "sitting on my desk right now" — some bots called for her to be held accountable.
However, other bots in the net sang a totally different tune, with one bot insisting that Bondi "comes out clean as the DOJ confirms no Epstein client list found, while reaffirming his death by suicide."
To experts, the tribulations of the botnet are echoing a growing divide among Trump's supporters.
"This split reaction mimics the organic reaction among supporters of Trump’s second administration," social media analytics company Alethea head of investigations Shawn Eib told NBC. "It’s possible that the behavior of these automated accounts is influenced by content posted from prominent influencers, and this shift is reflective of the general change in tenor among many of Trump’s supporters."
Put simply, confusion leads to chaos, whether you're a right-wing pundit with a human brain or an AI trained on their missives.
How effective the cabal of AI-powered bots on X is remains unclear at best. For one, their largely pro-Trump posts don't get many views.
"They’re not really there to get engagement," Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub director Darren Linvill told NBC News. "They’re there to just be occasionally seen in those replies."
At the same time, these bots essentially seem to have been caught because their incompetent creators made sloppy mistakes; it seems likely that more competent bad actors are running better-designed AI-powered botnets that are evading detection.
Besides demonstrating how the Epstein crisis is driving a massive wedge in Trump's supporters, the investigation also highlights how X-formerly-Twitter has quickly turned into a bot-infested swamp of disinformation — and how deeply AI slop has penetrated the political process.
Trump himself even posted an obviously AI-generated video last week: of former president Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, a fate that he's presumably trying to avoid himself.
More on the Epstein crisis: The Trump Administration Reportedly Has Extensive Logs of Epstein Money Transfers, Refuses to Release Them
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