To See the Future of Disinformation, You Build Robo-Trolls

Jason Blazaikis's automated far-right propagandist knows the hits. Asked to complete the phrase "The greatest danger facing the world today," the software declared it to be "Islamo-Nazism," which it said will cause "a Holocaust on the population of Europe." The paragraph of text that followed also slurred Jews and admonished that "nations who value their peoples [sic] legends need to recognize the magnitude of the Islamic threat." Blazaikis is director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counter-Terrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where researchers are attempting to preview the future of online information warfare. The text came from machine learning software they had fed a collection of manifestos from right-wing terrorists and mass-murderers such as Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik.