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This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops


Massive Blue is helping cops deploy AI-powered social media bots to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protesters.”

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications that 404 Media obtained via public records requests. Our reporting shows that cops are paying a company to help them deploy AI-powered bots across social media and the internet to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protestors” with the hopes of generating evidence that can be used against them. In a two-and-a-half-hour interview with podcaster Theo Von, Clem said, “My company Massive Blue, we basically use deep tech to identify the habits and process of you know, look, I worked on a physical wall, now we’ve created a cyberwall,” adding that he believed it would “save lives.”

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