Yesterday NATO StratCOM released their assessment on "Social Media Manipulation for Sale".

Since 2019 NATO StratCOM has been performing Red Team assessments on the largest social media networks. They're trying to assess how resistant they are to external influence.

In summary, NATO gives nerds money to go to sketchy websites and pay for people to artificially inflate their viewership. Once they begin receiving fake views, comments, likes, etc. They monitor the accounts over the time span of several weeks, months, or years.

NATO StratCOM monitors:
- What the accounts are boosting
- Who they're boosting
- When they're boosting
- When the fake accounts were created
- How long the accounts are active
- How long it takes for social media sites to take action

Additionally, because a lot of these boosting services accept Bitcoin, they track the money.

I'll link the paper in the subsequent post. It is incredibly interesting.

What is more interesting however is that on X they noticed right-leaning content is heavily amplified by botnet farms. Conversely, on BlueSky left-leaning content is heavily amplified by botnet farms.

Additionally, in 2025 a significant spike occurred whereas pro-Chinese content on X was manipulated and artificially boosted. The botnets specifically aimed to boost anything which paints China as having superior technology or military capability.