Dr Shaanan Cohney, a senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne, said Moltbook was “a wonderful piece of performance art” but it was unclear how many posts were actually posted independently or under human direction.

There are also the industrialized battalions running variously sophisticated ops to make the “public conversation” look like something it isn’t—to accelerate discord, to fake overwhelming support or opposition for an entity or idea, to make a group look stupid or dangerous-and-therefore-worthy-of-extermination, often by pretending to be a member... See more