394. How We Trolled the Trolls: Putin, Trump, and Musk (with Anthony Scaramucci)

Summary

Episode 394: How We Trolled the Trolls: Putin, Trump, and Musk (with Anthony Scaramucci)
Release Date: April 14, 2025
Host(s): Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart
Guest: Anthony Scaramucci

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Introduction to the Experiment (01:37 - 05:20)

In this episode of The Rest Is Politics, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, along with guest Anthony Scaramucci, delve into an intriguing experiment: deliberately provoking trolls and bots on social media to understand their behavior and impact on political discourse. The trio outlines their strategy of crafting provocative tweets aimed at eliciting strong responses from automated accounts and real-life trolls.

Crafting the Tweets (03:50 - 05:20)

Alastair explains, “We decided to have Rory, Anthony, and I all tweet around the same time, on the same day, at the same time. Rory's new friend, the analyst, was going to track all the responses over the next few days” (03:50). Anthony shares his tweet: “Trump is unwell and his tariffs make no sense. Will the sycophants continue on course or start telling the truth?” (04:11). Rory’s tweet was more extensive: “The Trump Musk Vance alliance isn't just Chaos. It's sabotage, betraying NATO, abandoning Ukraine, hurting our economies, weakening our democracies, undermining alliances...” (04:35). Alastair’s tweet targeted Elon Musk and JD Valance, criticizing them for enabling corrupt autocracies and questioning their competence (05:01).

Analyzing the Responses (05:20 - 08:49)

The responses to these tweets were staggering. Alastair notes his tweet garnered 1.6 million views and over 4,000 replies, while Rory’s and Anthony’s tweets also received significant engagement (05:20). According to analysis by Valant, approximately 15-20% of the responses were bots, with 40-50% identified as trolls—either real individuals or AI-driven content machines (07:14). Rory explains the methodology behind Valant’s analysis: “They’ve got an AI machine and they set up a series of variables and then they mark them against them...” (07:14). This AI-driven approach uses indicators to differentiate between genuine users, bots, and trolls, providing a clearer picture of the nature of online interactions.

The Mechanisms Behind Bots and Trolls (09:14 - 12:48)

Anthony questions how their accounts were targeted: “Is it Rory as an influencer, Alistair as an influencer, or the word search using the word Trump and sycophant?” (08:49). Rory responds by outlining four main strategies used by bots:

1. Algorithmic Amplification: Tweets that quickly gain visibility and engagement are further promoted by social media algorithms.
2. Keyword Monitoring: Bots scan for specific keywords and hashtags to identify and engage with relevant content.
3. Account Targeting: Influential accounts with large followings are continuously monitored to maximize impact.
4. Preset Scripting: Prewritten responses are automatically generated to counter negative or critical tweets (09:14).

Alastair shares personal experiences of receiving hostile replies, including disturbing imagery linked to David Kelly and manipulated posts involving his daily “tree of the day” updates (12:32).

Personal Impacts and Strategies (12:48 - 18:49)

Anthony recounts his experience in the White House, where he was advised to ignore negative notifications to preserve his mental health. Despite warnings, he admits to turning notifications back on after being fired, leading to continuous harassment (12:48). Rory and Anthony discuss the emotional toll of constant online attacks, with Rory emphasizing the importance of resilience: “You don't really want to be bullied out of it... screw them. I'm not going to prepare to let them just kind of shout at me, shut me down” (31:24).

Global Implications of Social Media Manipulation (22:24 - 27:45)

The conversation shifts to the broader geopolitical impact of social media manipulation. Rory cites the disqualification of a Romanian presidential candidate due to Russian-coordinated TikTok accounts, highlighting how social media interference can influence elections and destabilize regions (23:20). Alastair references Oxford University’s research on state-sponsored media campaigns, noting China’s extensive efforts with 2 million individuals engaged in information manipulation compared to Russia’s smaller scale (26:35). Anthony underscores the significant influence these campaigns have had on events like Brexit and the rise of populist movements, asserting, “I think it is incredibly valuable... their misinformation is actually working” (27:45).

Impact on Political Discourse and Public Perception (27:45 - 30:51)

Rory connects the dots between social media manipulation and large-scale societal changes, such as the Arab Spring leading to refugee crises and the rise of far-right movements in Europe (27:45). Alastair emphasizes the diminishing influence of legacy media in countering misinformation, stating that misinformation is now produced on an industrial scale, making it harder for the public to discern truth (29:10). Anthony points out the lack of commercial interest in combating misinformation, noting that social media companies have little financial incentive to improve content accuracy (30:22).

Staying Engaged Despite the Challenges (30:22 - 32:57)

Despite the overwhelming presence of bots and trolls, both Anthony and Rory advocate for maintaining a presence on social media platforms to preserve rational discourse. Anthony believes in the importance of having a recorded voice during tumultuous times for future reflection (30:51), while Rory underscores the value of defending a space for reasonable discourse and persuasion, despite frequent criticisms and low immediate impact (31:24). They discuss strategies for effective engagement, such as Rory’s direct and assertive tweeting style, which has occasionally broken through the noise to generate significant engagement and positive responses (32:14).

Conclusion (32:36 - End)

The episode wraps up with Alastair acknowledging the challenges of engaging with trolls and bots but reaffirming the importance of using social media as a platform for meaningful discourse. The hosts express a commitment to continuing their efforts to foster intelligent and reasoned political discussions online, despite the obstacles posed by automated and malicious users.

Notable Quotes:

• Alastair Campbell: “History will not remember Elon Musk as a genius, but as a sycophantic, unhinged enabler of a failing, deeply corrupt autocracy...” (05:26)

• Rory Stewart: “You don't really want to be bullied out of it... screw them. I'm not going to prepare to let them just kind of shout at me, shut me down.” (31:24)

• Anthony Scaramucci: “I have five children, Alistair. I want them to know, hey, at least I stood up for things that I thought were classically American...” (30:51)

• Rory Stewart: “Persuasion, the center, right? And oddly, as all of us discover, just occasionally, we break through.” (31:24)

Final Thoughts:

The Rest Is Politics offers a compelling exploration of the intricate dynamics between social media, misinformation, and political discourse. By sharing their personal experiment and insights from industry experts, Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, and Anthony Scaramucci highlight the significant challenges and potential strategies for combating online manipulation. This episode serves as a crucial resource for understanding the modern landscape of political communication and the ongoing battle for truth in the digital age.

Transcript

[Alistair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

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[Alistair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

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[Alistair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

Fuse is offering fixed electricity rates well below the April cap, with typical households saving nearly £150 on both 12 and 18 month tariffs as of the time of recording.

[Alistair Campbell]

And fixing your rate now means you're protected from further rises, which is a rare bit of financial certainty in these very uncertain times.

[Rory Stewart]

It's a straightforward way to take control of your bills and receive a few podcast bonuses while you're at it.

[Alistair Campbell]

And one bit of policy we can all agree on cheaper power and podcast perks thrown in. So download the app, sign up with the code politics and visit getfuse.com politics for full terms and more information. Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Rest Is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.

[Rory Stewart]

And me, Rory Stewart.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

And I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

[Alistair Campbell]

I love the way he always says I'm. He doesn't do the with me. He's a very much an I'm kind of guy. We like that now.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

Oh my God, you're implying egocentrism with that statement.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

Which is like look in the mirror pal, look in the mirror.

[Alistair Campbell]

Differentiation.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

Oh my God.

[Alistair Campbell]

Now why are we doing this? Why are we doing this with our friend the Mooch? I'll tell you why. Several weeks ago, Rory mentioned just how many comments he was getting in reply to some of his social media posts and how many, especially if he was being critical of the US Administration or indeed of Russia, would be quite aggressive, quite dismissive, and often quite nasty. He was contacted by someone at a firm called Is it Valant or Vallon who analyzed social media interaction and who said they looked at the responses and concluded that lots of them were from trolls and bots and he shouldn't take it so personally. So before I get on to what we then decided to do. Just tell us who these people are and what they do.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. So this is a man called Amir Khan, who was a Reuters foreign correspondent and governance specialist who worked in Iraq, Sudan, and Syria, where a lot of these methodologies were born. So he started work because actually Sudan and Syria have been real specialists. The different factions in these wars in using social media. You would have seen it recently around the attacks in Latakia, where both sides were immediately on social media, producing an enormous number of fake videos, either to amplify the number of casualties or suggest that thousands of Christians being killed, which wasn't the case, or on the other side to try to downplay the atrocities which were associated with the government. So anyway, he studied all that, set up a company, an AI startup called Valant. But he's now trying to develop a whole bigger plan to detect and respond to disinformation networks, which he thinks might actually be relevant to diplomatic missions abroad. It's oddly not awfully interesting to companies. I mean, it'd be interesting to maybe later in the program talk to Anthony about why, actually people are not commercial. Companies are not very interested in investing in this, and maybe governments are more interested in this. But anyway, back to you, Alistair.

[Alistair Campbell]

So what we decided to do was Rory, Anthony and I would all tweet around about the same time, couple of weeks ago, on the same day, around the same time, we all would tweet something. And then Rory's new friend, the analyst, was going to track all the responses over the next few days. Do you guys want to read out the tweets that you sent or do you want me to do it?

[Anthony Scaramucci]

The tweet that I sent out was pretty obvious. Trump is unwell and his tariffs make no sense. Will the sycophants continue on course or start telling the truth? And so what's interesting about that tweet is Alistair helped me write it, and since he's such a much better comms guy, you know, Rory, he lasted in his comms position about 800 times longer than me. And so I literally plagiarized that from Alistair. But I think the words in there were designed to trigger things, right, Rory? The tariffs are in there. Trump is unwell. Sycophants. And this is something that those bots would catch on to and then fire in a nasty response.

[Rory Stewart]

Very good. And then my Trump was your Trump or your tweet? My tweet was milder. It's a sort of more of a kind of Rory tone. The Trump Musk Vance alliance isn't just Chaos. It's sabotage, betraying NATO, abandoning Ukraine, hurting our economies, weakening our democracies, undermining alliances. This circus boasts about greatness and efficiency while they endanger peace, jobs, and our way of life.

[Alistair Campbell]

It sounds like one of those little speeches that you do at the end of our live shows when you are called to action to take on the world.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

Alistair, I thought that was pretty nasty. That's good. Yeah, it was nasty. I thought it had teeth to it.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay, well, mine went as follows. History will not remember Elon Musk as a genius, but as a sycophantic, unhinged enabler of a failing, deeply corrupt autocracy. A con man who bought his way into the orbit of power, but proved that money cannot by respect or competence. As for JD Valance, the buoy has only just begun. This was the day after he was booed at the Kennedy Center. Now, just in terms of the response, and the report from Valance says something a bit different on this, but it doesn't. I think it's because it was done at different times. So mine had 1.6 million views, 18,000 likes, 3.1 thousand retweets, and my account said 4.2 thousand replies. Valance report said 7,000. The mooch you were about 271,000 views, 11,000 likes, 1700 retweets, 7,000 replies. According to Valant and Rory, 386,000 views, 4.2 thousand likes, thousand retweets, couple of thousand replies. And I think Rory is right that the more you say, I think it was Mooch that made the point. The more that you say things that are likely to trigger people who are going to be against you, the greater the engagement that we're going to get. Anton and I got the highest proportion of engagement from bots with about 15 to 20%. That's, that's sort of, you know, professionally organized electronic responses. And we got somewhere between 40 and 50% of trolls. These are either real people or AI powered content machines. Do you know how they work this out, Roy? How do they actually analyze how. What these numbers are?

[Rory Stewart]

They've got an AI machine and they set up a series of variables and then they mark them against them. So let's say they've got 11 different indicators which are generally associated with a barter or a troll. And effectively this large language model learns by comparing these tweets to these indicators and then it tests and drives down to try to get to the bottom of this. It's not 100%, but it's increasingly accurate. And it allows them to an automated way. And they're perpetually iterating to make sure that their model is as accurate as possible. Just to remind people a little bit, a bot is a robot, right? It's a software program which automates the task of attacking you and Anthony. So just to put that in context, I mean, the numbers there are pretty staggering. You managed to get 15 to 20% bots. That means that at least 1,000 of the replies, as you read down, are written by a Robot. And probably 2000 of the replies are produced by a troll. And they could be either real people or they could be an AI powered content machine and the same, Anthony, in roughly similar proportions to you. So if people are in this game, be very, very conscious that when you're looking at your 4,000 replies of those, you can end up with about 1,000 of them simply being generated by a robot and almost half of them being generated by the trolls.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

I have a question. How do they find you? Is it Rory is an influencer, Alistair's an influencer as a usually successful podcast, or is it the word search using the word Trump and sycophant in the same thing? I mean, in other words, if an obscure person is writing something very nasty about Donald Trump, do the bots attack them or are they just searching for certain people?

[Rory Stewart]

As I understand it, and I'm not an expert on this, there are basically four things going on. The first thing is to do with the velocity and visibility that your tweet achieves. This is called algorithmic amplification, which basically means if the way in which you craft it, you could have very few followers. But if your content really grabs people, there is a natural tendency of people to retweet it like it, and the algorithm picks up on that and begins to reinforce that. The second thing that's happening is the bots are monitoring particular keywords and hashtags. So they'll be out there looking for Anthony using the word tariffs or looking at you using the word Trump or Musk. The third thing they have is they actually focus on particular accounts. So you and Anthony, you've got over a million followers, each will be on preset accounts. They're just monitoring you all the time. The final thing they do is they have preset scripting, which is some of these bots will just respond to almost anybody that says something negative about Musk. They've already written a pro Musk tweet that will just hit pack and so X itself or Facebook itself, or TikTok or Instagram or whichever platform you're using is looking to find content that appears to be appealing. And then, and this is something that Valens pointed out in the case of our tweets, they appear, although nobody's allowed at the moment, by Elon Musk, into the back end of the algorithm used to be the case. They used to be much more open to social media researchers understanding how this works. But it appears from the AI analysis that what's happening is they're taking your tweet, Anthony, or your tweet, Alistair, and deliberately rubbing it in the face of people who disagree with you. They're deliberately trying to provoke it. The way to get the most engagements, replies and retweets is to make sure, Alistair, that people who absolutely hate you are forced to read what you've written.

[Alistair Campbell]

Both of those people in the world who hate me. Yeah.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

But there are two people on this podcast right now that don't hate you, Alistair, but thank you, Douglas. That might. Okay. I just wanted you to know, Anthony.

[Alistair Campbell]

How do you feel about the fact that. Because the other thing that Valance analysis showed is that a lot of the. The trolls that we were getting were real people and they were QAnon people or they were Russian sympathizers. And they went back and checked some of these accounts. Genuine people who consistently promote pro Russian lines and propaganda and quite often make quite clever little video memes about things that we've said. So, for example, every single time that I tweet, there are people who. And I don't know whether they're real or whether they're bots or they're trolls or whatever the difference is. But there are people who will tweet a photograph of David Kelly, the British government scientist who took his own life and who's. I've often been blamed for his death. And likewise, every time I, as I do every day, post my tree of the Day, there are people who will then add a rope to the tree and sometimes put my head inside it. So that happens every single tweet. But you seem to.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

You seem to like it a little bit, though, Alice. Right.

[Alistair Campbell]

I don't know. I don't. I don't like the David Kelly stuff. Unlike Rory, I tend not to read the replies because I think you can get lost in them. But how do you feel about the fact that there's somebody in the Russian ecosystem that thinks it's worth going up to you?

[Anthony Scaramucci]

Well, I'll say a couple of things. The first thing is that my first day in the White House is very Memorable for me. But I was upstairs on the second floor of the West Wing in Kellyanne Conway's office, and I have two phones. I've always had two cell phones. She said, give your phones. I said, okay, sure. And she went into the notification section in Twitter, and she shut off my notifications, and she said, listen to me. Don't ever, and I mean ever, look at these again. And if you look at these, they're going to drive you wild. They're going to drive you crazy. Do not look at them again. And she handed me back both my phones, and she probably helped my mental sanity, because 11 days later, I was blown out of the seat, okay? And so it was absolutely disastrous, as you both know. Stop laughing, Alice. I'm gonna have our producers. I'm gonna have our producers lower down your microphone with your insidious laughter.

[Alistair Campbell]

I'm laughing at the idea of you, but you doing as you were told by Kellyanne Conway, I just can't get my head around.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

Yeah, no, I did. I did because I didn't want to. I didn't want to hear the nonsense. But of course, being a human being, now that I've been fired, guess what I did. I turned the notifications back on. And what Rory's saying is totally true. There was a rhythm to it, okay? So when I started tweeting, the first thing used to be, your 15 minutes of fame are up. And you could see it come over in a very rhythmic cadence. It's now eight years later, I guess my 15 minutes ended, I don't know, eight years ago. But the point I'm making is that you could see the algorithms, you could see the attack, and then I'll just make another point, brief point. HR McMaster, in the middle of COVID sent me a FedEx, and I opened it up, and it was a book from Katherine Belton called Putin's People. Now, Catherine, you guys probably know, and McMaster said to me, General McMaster said to me, please read this book and then give me a call. And in the book is a very long dissertation about what Rory and his. Rory's friend is talking about. Server forms, fake IDs, fake personalities, real people at keyboards clattering nonsense at people like us trying to knock us off our game or try to disfigure us, dehumanize us, ad hominem us, so that we lose our voice in the debate. And you either have to just be up for that, guys, or not, right? I mean, at the end of the day, I'm up for it. I Tell people if I played in the NFL, I would get a concussion. This is part of.

[Rory Stewart]

Is amazing and I think it's, you know, it's something we've talked about a little bit on the podcast, but it's worth bearing in mind because it is central now to the experience of being a politician. So in my case, statements on social media begin as you say, Anthony, Absolutely. With who the hell are you? Your 15 minutes of fame, etc. Then there is everything you say is wrong because you thought Kamala Harris would win and she didn't win. But then increasingly it is, you're weak, you're stupid, you've got a low IQ. That was J.D. vance's thing. You know, I've got an IQ of 110. That's then followed by a lot of people who are like, you wouldn't be able to beat J.D. vance in a press up competition. So it's a lot about physicality. Now, more recently, you know, I'm a supporter of Al Qaeda because we interviewed Ahmad Al Shara. We're part of the global elite. I'm bitter because, you know, Elon Musk did something in my family and I'm just doing this out of pure resentment to try to get back at him. And I'm bankrupt and I can't pay my mortgage and everything I'm doing is a sort of desperate attempt to get attention.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

I got to ask you this question, Rory, because I know these sons of bitches. Why do you think you're being targeted by the JD Vance's? I mean, JD Vance is tweeting at you, so why? Why?

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, why is J.D. vance tweeting me? Elon Musk as well, Donald J. Trump Jr. I really don't know. I met a former governor of a Southern state yesterday who had reached out to Jody Vance after that Twitter exchange. This guy was a very kind of earnest evangelical Christian saying, JD, you know, what are you doing attacking Rory? You should be friends, you should be Christians together. What's happened to all this stuff? And he was sort of generally thrown off balance. But Anthony, kind of tell us what's going on here.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

I think they target you because you are a rational conservative. They target you because you have a very strong, influential following and you're a common sense person. The MAGA people are tied to populism and they're tied to an emotional, impulsive policy directive. You're more and more of a traditional conservatism. And so you've been targeted. Professor Neil Ferguson has been targeted. He's actually ironically was a Trump supporter going into the 2024 election, but they targeted him as well. And, and, and their thing is, who are the people that could potentially sway people in our movement? You know, no offense to Alistair, but because he is a liberal, in their minds, he doesn't have as much influence as you would have. You see what I mean? And they don't come after me, incidentally, because of what Trump did to me. You know, when Trump attacked my wife, Deirdre, on Twitter, his people reached out to me and said, hey, we're sorry about that. Don't come after us. We won't come after you. And so if you notice, the Trump people never attack me, right? Even though I viciously go after Trump, they don't come after me. And because they know, and I'll quote one of them, hey, man, I don't want to be in a fight with everybody. Donald Trump is in. You and I were friends for a long time. He should have never gone after your wife. I don't know why Trump needs to go after people's wives, but I'm not going to attack you. You keep the fight between you and Donald Trump and I'll leave you alone.

[Rory Stewart]

Okay, Anthony, Alistair, quick break and then back for more. This is an advertisement from BetterHelp.

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[Rory Stewart]

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[Alistair Campbell]

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[Alistair Campbell]

The other thing though, that came out of the Valant Report is this thing about grifting money making scams. So across the three of us, somewhere between 5, 10, 15% of the accounts had tip jars activated. So these are people who are encouraging their followers to send them small contributions so that they can basically become full time trolls. And a lot of those, Anthony, are in the crypto world. Now is that just because the crypto world is full of kind of, you know, grifters and scamsters and people who want to make a quick buck? I mean, I don't know any of you in the crypto world, so I wouldn't know what they're like.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

But the commander in Chief of the U.S. military is a grifter and a scammer. I mean, he launched, he launched the meme coin 24. I mean, I mean, so come on, we, we know the thing is loaded with a lot of grifters and scammers, which is ironically slowing down the Adoption of the good stuff. And so, yeah, I listen anytime I tweet that happens to me. The grifter and scammer comes in and says to follow this person or follow that person and this person's Twitter address can make you rich and pay the five dol and we'll give you the advice on what to buy or sell. Yeah, and so that, that, that's persistent. Musk promised people, by the way, when he bought Twitter, now known as X, that he was ending all of that and he was going to have a descaling of bots and descaling of grifters. They've gone up exponentially. You know, the free speech absolutist said he was doing this and never happened.

[Rory Stewart]

Given where our shows are going, just to take it up from the level of Alastair and us deciding to kind of troll the trolls and just have a look at what's going on in these interactions into the biggest story, because this is now central to politics in Romania. Anthony, as you're aware, the guy that was running for president has been disallowed because 150,000 TikTok accounts appear to have been coordinated by the Russian government in order to push him into power. When I was running to be mayor of London, I had political campaign companies coming to me saying, we can work for you. We've got connections to Mossad. One of them said, different intelligence agencies, we've run elections all through the caucuses we can create. And they gave me a number how much money I had to pay them for each fake account in order to be able to attack my opponents. One of them gave an example. They said that they'd sent a sex toy to a prominent running politician so his wife would see it and then film them when it was received. Others of them would. Would say that they could AI generate music and get influencers and pop stars to endorse me. But the whole idea essentially was that if I gave them a million dollars, they could create a huge campaign. And of course, this is partly because people were so interested in the way that Donald Trump had done it, which would take me to prominence. Now. Alistair would say, at this point, I have to remind people that I did not do this. I did not accept these offers and I did not work with these companies.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

I'm sort of jealous. I never got a sex toy in the mail. I feel like I've been left data things.

[Rory Stewart]

But I just. I mean, it's, it's a very. I mean, this will become more and more relevant and valance of course, looks in the ways that Sudan, you get the Egyptian government doing certain kinds of videos, certain kinds of approach, you get the UAE government doing another sort of thing. You get the Russians doing another sort of thing. And the way that this actually plays into civil war in many, many countries, so that people's accounts are explaining with us.

[Alistair Campbell]

I'll tell you something that's really interesting because we, we think obviously about Russia, because we know that Russia does this a lot. And there you remember Prigo. This was how he became, as well as being Putin's chef, he became the guy who was running these big bot farms and troll farms and so forth. There's a team at Oxford University that has sort of tracked this over the last few years. I was reading one of the reports yesterday. A lot of this started with the democracies. We had a bit of a chuckle on the podcast the other day, Anthony, when the response of the American government to the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul was, we do not interfere in the politics of other countries. I think it's fair to say America has interfered in the politics, politics of other countries for a long, long, long time. And so. And the Brits do it. We do it. We've got teams that are involved in social media manipulation in different parts of the world. But China, according to this report, has 2 million people. The Russians is in the thousands. I think we're probably in the hundreds, maybe the thousands. Russia may be now the tens of thousands. Ukraine actually had quite a lot before the war started. But this report suggests that 2 million people in China are engaged in generally what you would call media and information campaigns. Now, do you think that is worth, from a geopolitical standpoint, do you think it is worth that level of investment to do this stuff?

[Anthony Scaramucci]

I do. I think it's incredibly valuable. I think it's influenced the Brexit. I think the yellow jackets have been influenced in France as a result of this. I think it helped Donald Trump so much so particularly in 2016. And the information from our intelligence community was irrefutable. Just reminding everybody that McConnell and Ryan passed sanctions, additional sanctions on the Russian government for meddling in the election. And by the way, Trump wanted to veto those bills. And then we had to point out to him, hey, if you veto that, he's going to call Schumer. He's going to get the necessary votes to override your veto. So Trump reluctantly signed that sanctions bill. But I think it is incredibly influential. And I think that this is something the Russians have been trying to do forever, but now that we have this fragmented media and we have this deployable ability to go into these different social media sites to target people, the gru, KGB like misinformation is actually working.

[Rory Stewart]

There's an amazing example. Martin Gurie, who's an ex CIA analyst, has done these big books on social media. But the big example he focuses on is of course the Arab Spring, which is the first big Facebook revolution. And what happens there, where we suddenly see social media's power is somebody sets themselves alight in this small town in Tunisia. And then we have revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, spreading across Syria, Lebanon, to some extent, Bahrain, Yemen. But the bigger thing that we maybe don't take on board is that you can also draw a line from that to refugees spilling out of Syria and Jordan and Lebanon being destabilized. Turkey changing its relationship with the European Union, million refugees coming into Europe, which then supports the far right in Europe because everybody's really worried about immigration. And so you're seeing social media producing these very unusual third and fourth order impacts. I mean, who would predict that somebody setting themselves alight in a small town in Tunisia in the end contributes to, in the Netherlands, the far right triumphing in the election, or in Austria, the far right triumphing election. And then finally we talked a little bit. So just bring you in for a second. The way in which actually Labour was quite savvy with its use of social media, its use particularly of TikTok during the campaign, how good they were at getting engagements, what they decided to focus on, how their social media spend worked, the way in which they made the conservatives seem a bit leaden footed.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah, I think so. But I think still within our politics, it is likely that if you are telling things in social media campaigns that are reaching a lot of people that are completely untrue, I think there is still the possibility of blowback. I think that what this last Oxford University report shows is actually the misinformation side of social media campaigning is now much more prevalent and much less likely to be rebutted, not least because so called legacy media is less influential. This report basically says that they see this stuff now being produced on what they call an industrial scale. And of course what it's doing is making it harder and harder for people to know who they can believe and what they can believe. And that's being rather than politicians like Trump and people like Musk challenging that, as you would think that both of them might want to, is actually they ventilate the misinformation. The idea that we talk about Social media companies need to step up and do more. Well, you know, we're going to whistle in the wind if we're looking to people like Elon or must improve the debate.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

It's not profitable for them to do more, though. That's the problem. If they. If there was an incentivized structure to get them to make it more accurate, they would.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah. Guess my final question to both of you. Did what Valent center sent us, did it make you feel any more inclined to come off X altogether? Given that it seems that most of the engagement is not with real people, and if it is with real people, there are people who are just trolls, do you think there is still a point and a purpose to be on there and to be kind of, you know, fighting for the things that you believe in?

[Anthony Scaramucci]

Yes. I think the short answer is, even if half of the stuff is robots, I think it's important to have the voice out there. And I think it's also, for me, it's important to have the record out there because I think we're going through a very tumultuous time, particularly here in US History, and I want to be on record about certain things so that I've got five children, Alistair. I want them to know, hey, at least I stood up for things that I thought were classically American and not the nonsense that's pervading the society right now. So the answer is yes.

[Rory Stewart]

I mean, I find it a continual question, right? My friends keep saying, what on earth are you doing? So I tell myself that what I'm doing is I'm trying to defend a space and Twitter for reasonable discourse. Persuasion, the center, right? And everyone's like, you're out of your mind. Right? Nobody. You're not persuading these people. You're not changing anything. You're not defending anything important. So I come back to basically the idea that you don't really want to be bullied out of it. I mean, screw them. I'm not going to prepare to let them just kind of shout at me, shut me down. And I think it's worth keeping making the argument. And oddly, as all of us discover, just occasionally, we break through. I mean, in any week, I'll send out something and it'll get, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand views, and then suddenly I'll say something and it'll get three and a half million views and it'll get thousands of responses, and you begin to think, well, maybe getting through.

[Alistair Campbell]

You sent me one the other day where you basically, you were at ing JD Vance and telling him to keep his nose out of Greenland and it got a huge response. Huge.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. Well, that's because I learned from you because as soon as I stopped doing these kind of lengths, lengthy, pompous things, but just say nobody wants you, you're not welcome, just stop immediately. It's like, whoa, everybody loves it.

[Alistair Campbell]

Very good. We'll keep on learning. Roy? Yeah, I think I'm borderline minded to stay, but I do, I'm with Kellyanne Conway. Other than doing this exercise in the last couple of weeks, I don't look at the replies. I just can't be bothered. And I also don't think you're going to learn anything that much. So just use it as a platform and see where it goes.

[Rory Stewart]

Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you.

[Anthony Scaramucci]

It's a great, great discussion.

[Alistair Campbell]

See you soon.