You’re not always arguing with a bot.
Sometimes you’re arguing with a 24 year old from Myanmar who was trafficked to Cambodia on the promise a decent job only to be held hostage and forced to produce and monetise click bait. And what drives the most traffic on these sites? Racism and misogyny.

Kenyans were amongst the 1500 people arrested in a cyber scam compound in Myanmar in October. Many of these are young people held under duress who are being used to drive traffic to scam websites but also to drive engagement to specific sites to monetise them.

www.independent.co.uk/asia/southea...

A hot spot for this stuff is Cambodia where refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh are often trafficked and held under violent conditions and used to monetise platforms like x or to perpetrate online fraud. In July y 2025 1000 people were arrested there at “cyber scam compounds”.

aje.io/sahw9w

This isn’t to say that the far right isn’t real but that a lot of the illusion of its popularity stems from these scam compounds and their ability to rig specific parts of the online architecture - young men in search of affirmation and community, monetisation and advertising, and misogyny.

When talking to a person that just got laid off when no one is hiring, that just got an eviction notice for failure to pay rent and can't afford anywhere else to live in their city, and that can't afford insulin... you can't point to charts of GDP and the S&P, and tell them that the economy is good.

Shout out to Mr Daugherty. And he did it every year so you could be like "oh you're in Daugherty's class? Did you do the pbj lesson yet"

Bc the repetition turned it into shared context