Want to build a bot farm? Amazon can help; And ChatGPT can now read your iMessages. Let’s go Off Script

Hey everyone, I'm Simone Del Rosario. Welcome to Unbiased Updates Offscript

We spend all day reporting the news. Now we get to talk about it

Coming up today on the show, you know all those bots clogging up your social media feeds

Turns out you can buy the hardware to build your own bot farm on Amazon for just a few hundred bucks

We'll show you what our reporter found and just how easy it is to fake online influence

Then would you want someone else giving ChatGPT access to your private text messages without asking you

That's the concern over a new ChatGPT integration with Apple iMessages. I'll speak to our digital influence reporter about what it could mean for your privacy

And presidents have been renovating the White House for generations. So what makes Trump's ballroom different

A viewer asked, and we've got the answer. Let's start where we always do, with what matters

Then we'll go a step further. We used to say you can't believe everything you read on the internet

With AI, it's kind of like you can't believe everything you see on the internet

But now it's increasingly you can't believe what you sense on the internet

And here's what I mean by that. Is everyone on your feed really all talking about this one issue or pushing the same agenda

Is viral really viral? Or is it all fake? Now, bot farms go back more than a decade

But what was once reserved for government-sanctioned influence campaigns is now available for the masses on Amazon, sometimes for less than $200 a pop

That's what our media bias and algorithms reporter, Mark Kyer Lieber, found in his latest story

Want to manipulate hearts and minds online? Amazon sells just the bot farm you need

Mark, thanks for joining us on Offscript. Hey, thanks for having me. I want to read a passage from your piece because it just kind of made me laugh

For people looking to buy online clout, look no further than Amazon

The globe's largest online retailer sells just about everything. Funky socks, kangaroo meat, and yes, bot farms

How did you come across this story? Yeah, well, so as part of my job, I'm really looking at the infrastructure of the internet, right

How the platforms are manipulated, right? And how influencers basically get in front of our eyeballs, how different people gain our attention

And in an attention economy, there's a lot of room for manipulation, right

And bot farms are a key mechanism that influencers and, you know, small business owners, perhaps, and basically at this point, everybody on the Internet is seemingly using to, you know, ultimately get their content in front of an audience

And in my research trying to track down some of the operators of these farms, I did a simple Google search like anybody else would and was quite surprised to see that one of the very top Google search results was actually for a listing on Amazon saying, hey, this is a bot farm rack with 20 motherboards for Android phones

and that really sent me down the rabbit hole. I kind of liken them to homemade bot farms. I know

they're not homemade. You're just buying them off the internet, but it really is like in your house

188 bucks in some cases. How do they work? Right. So the devices, they kind of look like

an old school PC computer. You know, it's just like a big black box

And they have like a few of like the glowing fans, right

And ultimately, you plug these devices into a single computer. And depending on which model you get

they either come with like a rack of 20 phone hard drives

or you can procure 20 phones, however you do that yourself. And you plug all of those phones or those internals of phones into this device, and you use a software, a bot farm software, to essentially operate all of these 20 different devices through one device

And they can also be linked together or that's how they're advertised, that you can ultimately use these to create like thousands of social media accounts

You kind of touched on this in the beginning, small businesses, certain people, but really what would someone use this for

Why would someone go onto Amazon, buy this technology, bring it home and, you know, put their message out online

I mean, it's a great question about why these even exist on Amazon. I spoke with Renee D'Arista, who studies, you know, inauthentic behavior on social media and digital influence campaigns

and she was kind of surprised to see that you could even buy this on Amazon

and said something to the effect of, you know, this isn't really, you know

typically where you're going to, you know, go to get your bot farm services

Perhaps a dark web marketplace might be a better place to procure those kinds of services

In fact, you don't even necessarily need to buy the physical hardware yourself

You can go on some of these illicit marketplaces and buy server space, essentially, for these bot farms to run these kind of campaigns for you

There was an interesting story that I read from Vice's motherboard several years back that was profiling the people who were literally running bot farms out of their garages And I feel like that probably the closest we going to get to why you know

Amazon might, you know, be a good place for some people to buy these things because, you know

they're just everyday people who are, you know, throwing up, you know, website manipulation

schemes. There are services that will pay you a few cents of you if you watch all of these

advertisements. And if you set up a bot farm in your garage that has a thousand different

inauthentic accounts all watching that video at the same time, a few cents here and there can

really add up in the end. Now, you mentioned the dark web, and so it makes me curious

Is there anything wrong with Amazon selling these? Is it illegal to market bot farm technology or is this totally above board

Oh, yeah, this is this is totally above above board. I will note that the Amazon didn't respond to my requests for comments about this

So perhaps they're not particularly worried about the idea that they're selling bot farms through a third party operator, of course

and we can discuss that a little bit more. But I spoke with one researcher who noted that

there are some legitimate purposes behind using a bot farm. If you're developing an app

you might want to send a bunch of traffic and authentic traffic to that app

before it is actually released to the public in order to test it and identify bugs

and researchers themselves use bots to study, you know, bot forms like this to study the internet

and social media. But yeah, ultimately, it's also, I should note, not necessarily, you know, a crime

if I wanted to go on to TikTok, create an account of, you know

me talking about my favorite sports team and then pay it or set up a bot farm to like disseminate, you know, information to the masses

about my favorite sports team. Though it does certainly violate like TikTok's terms of service

And if you're caught doing that, you know, then you can get banned from the service

So that is actually, I should note, one of the purposes behind these bot farms as well is

By using all of these individual phones, they have like all of those

This activity has like individual signatures, right? Different origins. And so they're designed, frankly, to get around detection by social media platforms

I'm just curious to end this all, Mark. What does this tell us about the Internet today

Well, as one of the sources in my story said to me, the entire internet is fake. And, you know, anybody who spends any time on social media is probably not terribly surprised to learn that there are robots out there just spewing mis and disinformation and, you know, flooding feeds with garbage, right

But the fact that you can buy these devices on the globe's largest online marketplace shows just how pervasive this is

For people listening, if you want to read Mark's story, it's called Want to Manipulate Hearts and Minds Online

Amazon sells just the bot farm you need. That's at san.com and our Straight Arrow app

Mark, we're so lucky to have you navigating the internet for us. Thanks for coming on. Thank you

The comment section can be a pretty loud place. So every week we pick questions or comments worth a closer look and see where the facts take us

We reported this week on the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll

It's the Army's top civilian leader after months of reported friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

And Ewan on YouTube had a pretty straightforward question about our coverage. Why is someone I've never heard of before resigning without giving a reason the top story

And I actually think that's a fair question, because Dan Driscoll isn't exactly a household name, but the job he left is a big one

The Army Secretary is the top civilian leader of the U.S. Army, and Driscoll resigned in the middle of the war with Iran after months of reported clashes with Hegseth

His departure leaves the Army without either of its two top Senate-confirmed leaders

Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George earlier this year, and a permanent replacement still hasn't been confirmed

So for us, the story wasn't really that Dan Driscoll quit. It was that the top civilian leader of the U.S. Army quit

with reported friction inside the Pentagon at a pretty consequential time for the U.S. military

So that's why we thought it deserved the lead. Okay, let's go to the next one. We also told you this week about the Supreme Court allowing construction

on President Trump's White House ballroom to continue, even as Chief Justice John Roberts said the project is likely illegal

And Kevin on YouTube responded with this. How many presidents asked approval from Congress before making changes to the White House

At least the ballroom is paid by donations instead of taxpayer money

And Kevin, you're right about one part of that. Presidents have been changing the White House for a long time

Theodore Roosevelt expanded it. Taft added the first Oval Office. Truman added his famous balcony and later oversaw a massive reconstruction

But here's the important distinction. The legal fight over Trump's ballroom isn't really about whether a president can renovate the White House

This project demolished the East Wing and is adding a new 90 square foot structure on federal property And by the way when Truman did his massive reconstruction Congress authorized and funded it That also why private donations don really settle the legal question

Robert's argument is that Congress still has authority over construction on federal property, regardless of who writes the check

So the question isn't really, can presidents change the White House? They clearly can

It's how far a president can go without Congress. We love hearing from you, so keep those comments coming in

You can leave them on our YouTube page, let us sift through them, or you can email us directly at offscript at san.com

Okay, let's go inside the story now. It's where we go beyond reporting the news and talk directly to the Straight Arrow reporters behind the story about the details that didn't fit

the questions that came up, and the journalism that shaped their articles. This week, we're joined by Rosie Thomas, Straight Arrow's digital influence reporter

And this headline of hers certainly caught my attention. It starts with a quote

I can't think of anything worse than this. Well, now you're wondering, what is this

Well, chat GPT can now connect to your iMessages. The feature rolled out by OpenAI in August is pitched in this way

Let chat GPT help you get organized in your messages. What do you need to respond to

Have chat suggest a response. But what's pitched almost like a helpful AI assistant has a pretty important privacy

component, as Rosie found. The people in your messages don't get a say in whether AI gets a peek at your encrypted chats

And what will OpenAI do with that information? Rosie, thanks for joining us

What sparked you to dig into this new feature? Hi. Well, so when I originally saw the product announcement online, it was very interesting that there were two main groups in the comment section

and the first was you know fans of open ai who are following open ai on on x uh who were supportive

and excited and then there was another kind of team in the comments who basically were like oh

my god no thank you um and so any time that there's that kind of two groups uh means that there might

be a deeper story. Yeah. So it seems like in the comment section, people were either like, I love it

or I hate it. And I want to be clear about the current limitations of this feature

It's only available to people using iMessages on Mac computers, which to be fair, if you have an

iPhone and a MacBook, they link up pretty quick. But aside from how you can get ChatGPT into your

iMessage is, how widespread could this get, even if only one side is consenting

So what's interesting is that MacBooks account for about a quarter of all computer use in

the US and the UK. And so, but pretty, something like 60% of Americans use iMessage as their

primary messaging service. And that basically means if you're texting 10 people, six of them

are probably using iMessage. Now, you don't know how many of those have a MacBook, but maybe it's

you know, two or three. So what it means is that if you've ever interacted with somebody who

then opens this integration in their MacBook, that person can now give your name and phone

number data to chat GPT. So the implications could be quite wide. And it also makes me think Rosie of

like six degrees of separation, where you never really know, like who you know, and how you could

get wrapped up in this. Do we know if Apple is consenting to this? Um, so Apple didn't respond

to my request for comment and there is I mean Apple has built an incredibly strong reputation

for user privacy. Its iMessage platform is end-to-end encrypted and that encryption is so

strong that even the FBI historically has not been able to access Apple's messages and one of

the experts that I spoke to Paul Walsh said that he doubted that Apple would be particularly

happy with the integration of a product that, while it doesn't break end-to-end encryption

because messages are still not able to be read by Apple, it does add a kind of listening

end or listening capacity on an Apple computer that then makes messages available to a third

party. One of the things that this story made me think of was recording laws that happen in

different states around the country. You know, sometimes there's a two-party consent rule

where you can't record someone without their consent. Sometimes it's one-party consent rule

This feature is clearly a one-party consent. If one person wants to give Chachupiti access to

their conversation history, there's not just no way for the other person to decline it. There's

no way for them to even know uh absolutely yeah what could be wrapped up in this what are the

implications well it's funny because I had the same thought about the the two-party one-party

consent laws and um I think that it is you know it's an uncharted territory for this sounds very

grandiose but for society because historically LLMs have not existed when we were texting

10 years ago or even with our first iPhones almost 20 years ago

And you're right that there is no opportunity for people to opt out

So that means that 20 years of texts of photos of personal interactions on iMessage can now be exposed to OpenAI or any

third party that integrates with the Messages app on that book. What could OpenAI gain from having this information

Well, so a couple of things. Firstly, obviously, AI companies love having data

They love having conversational data, especially because it's very rich and it gives you information about how people are, what they think

It gives you information about their speaking patterns. It has a lot of slang in it

And that, you know, enables their chatbots and their LLMs to grow more powerful

um and the other thing that they could gain from this data is what is known as a social graph which

is basically a map of who knows who and uh and having that map who knows who how do people um

how strongly are people connected as uh kind of individuals in a constellation um as you say the

kind of six degrees of separation thing is in itself very valuable for a whole range of things

including targeting ads and also understanding, you know, social movements. It can be very, very

it can be very powerful information. Rosie, is there anything that users can do

at this point? Say someone's listening and they're like, oh, I don't want my information

involved in any of this? Is there anything to be done? So one of the experts that I spoke to essentially said that he would no longer be using

iMessage to communicate with anybody, you know, unless he was 100% sure that they weren't

using ChatGPT. Obviously, that's a really hard thing. That's a very high standard to try to

encourage people to reach. And I think that that's why he said this was the worst thing he

could think of in in about three decades because it's actually a a really difficult thing to

to counteract well and even changing your habits now doesn't change years and years and years of

past history with these messaging apps this has been great Rosie thank you so much for detailing

all of this for our listeners who want to read Rosie's story it's on straight arrows website

ISAN.com. It's also on our app. It's called I Can't Think of Anything Worse Than This

Privacy at Risk as ChatGPT now connects to iMessage. Rosie, thank you

Thank you so much. We cover a lot every morning, but there are always stories we just can't fit in

So here are some that are also worth your time. President Trump says nine more drug makers have agreed to lower prices as part of his push to bring U.S. drug costs closer to what people pay in other developed countries

The new agreements announced this week include discounted prices for state Medicaid programs

and bring the total number of participating drug companies now to 26

The White House says those companies now represent about 90 percent of the domestic pharmaceutical market

Here's Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Today brings to the total of 26 companies that have now made agreements with us

These agreements cover nine out of the ten drugs that are used by Americans

This is going to have a dramatic impact on medical pricing and on public health in our country

Probably the biggest change in public health prior to this and is dwarfed by this announcement

The deals are part of Trump's most favored nation pricing policy, which pushes drug makers to offer Americans prices comparable to those in other developed countries

The administration also says the nine companies have committed nearly $20 billion to manufacturing in the U.S

Here's another story. The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to let the military remove 29 transgender plaintiffs from service

before their challenge to the Pentagon's policy goes to trial in January

So last year, the justices allowed the administration to move forward more broadly with its ban on service members with a history of gender dysphoria

But in this separate case, federal judges blocked the military from discharging the individuals who are suing over the policy

The group includes active duty service members, reservists, National Guard members, and one person seeking to enlist

Now, the Supreme Court is expected to consider this fall whether to take up the case before there's even a final ruling from a lower court

The administration says the question of who can serve in the military is a matter of, quote, exceptional importance

For now, the 29 plaintiffs remain protected from removal while the legal fight continues

And finally, today, here's the kicker, a story we thought was worth ending on

Here one day, gone the next, and now back again. A small floating island in Canada has reappeared after officials lost track of it just weeks after it was first discovered

So boaters first spotted it last month in the middle of British Columbia's Williston Reservoir

and video of the little island quickly went viral. It's about the size of one and a half American football fields

and satellite images confirmed it was there in late July. But a few weeks later, poof, it was gone

Officials managed to find it again this week, but they still don't know exactly where it came from

BC Hydro, which operates the reservoir, says record high water levels likely caused the island to break away from somewhere along the shoreline

By the way, if you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and want to see this island for yourself

head to the Straight Arrow website or app and click on Offscript

Okay, that's it for us this week. Thanks for listening to Unbiased Updates Offscript

for all of us here at Straight Arrow. I'm Simone Del Rosario. We'll see you right back here next week