How the Epstein Files Blew Up a Pro-Trump AI Bot Network on X

Earlier DU thread: A MAGA bot network on X is divided over the Trump-Epstein backlash

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Source: Rolling Stone

How the Epstein Files Blew Up a Pro-Trump AI Bot Network on X

Miles Klee
Tue, August 5, 2025 at 8:00 PM EDT
7 min read

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, a network of hundreds of bots created by anonymous persons shared posts on X that sowed distrust in Kamala Harris and called for Republicans to unite behind Donald Trump. After Trump’s victory and return to office, the bots began to lavish praise on figures in his administration, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

A MAGA influence campaign made up of fake social media accounts is not particularly unusual, nor are concerns about inauthentic digital activity in general. (One recent analysis from the cybersecurity company Imperva claimed that automated traffic now accounts for half of all web traffic.) But this bot network had one important distinction. Whoever built it was using AI — large language models — to generate its content. On the one hand, that made it both more efficient and less obvious. On the other, it raised problems down the line. When Trumpworld was thrown into turmoil over the president’s handling of classified files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, for instance, the bots suddenly took sides, with some attacking Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi as others defended the administration.

That remarkable schism between automated X accounts is described in a new report from Alethea, an analytics firm that specializes in online risk mitigation technology. Its AI platform, Artemis, uncovered at least 400 bogus X profiles involved in the campaign, which relied on what the company’s researchers termed “PromptPasta.” As opposed to so-called “copypasta,” where phrases are copied verbatim from one account to the next and therefore more noticeable, the LLMs respond to user inputs with a range of similar though differentiated answers. “The outputs of PromptPasta are nuanced, with variations in phrasing among the posts that correspond to each LLM prompt, making them harder to detect than identical posts shared via copypasta tactics,” the Aletha report explains. “The network’s scale, speed, and narrative discipline illustrate how generative AI is lowering the barrier to sophisticated influence operations.” The identity of the actor or actors behind the network remains unknown.

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Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/epstein-files-blew-pro-trump-000000353.html