It’s bad enough we have to worry about conservatives spewing hateful garbage daily, but now it seems that they have decided to automate the process. In Oregon, right-wing AI robocalls denouncing Jews, complaining that black people can vote, and more, interrupted a recent Beaverton city council meeting.
Who wants to go through the trouble of grabbing a Tiki torch and marching through the streets chanting “The Jews will not replace us” like conservatives did in Charlottesville? Modern technology has given The Right new and terrifying options when it comes to publicizing their views that some people just aren’t worth as much as others. Bots flooding social media with hate speech and attacks on people one doesn’t like isn’t new anymore but in 2016, such a threat changed the landscape of political discussion. This enabled fake stories to spread faster, hateful ideas to reach more people, and generally made nearly everything suspect without verification. Bots are annoying and can do a lot of harm. Now imagine them with a human voice. The Beaverton City Council is dealing with this exact hate speech problem right now.
Beaverton City Council Bombed With Hate Speech-Spewing AI Bots
A Beaverton City Council meeting earlier this month was inundated with racist, antisemitic, and otherwise hateful calls. The city council allows people not present for the meeting to call in and share their concerns. And unfortunately, this gave the worst people in our country the opportunity to be themselves.
After in-person comments concluded, virtual comments via Zoom began. One caller told Mayor Lacey Beaty she will “never be a woman,” an apparent insinuation that she is trans. One caller, “Zeke Heil” (har har, get it? It’s funny because it’s antisemitic!), told the Mayor he wanted to “address the fact that you’re a f*cking tran–” before he was cut off. Another caller, “Tom,” explained that “all your names are on a list and a race war’s coming soon k*kes. F*ck you.” He was then cut off. Every single call they received was exactly what one would expect from conservative “comedy” — it wasn’t funny; it was just stupid and offensive on every level. Most calls began with a phrase most will recognize from robocalls: “Hello, can you hear me?”
The mayor had to deal with the problem
“At first, I just kind of felt like, ‘Oh, that’s weird, we have a lot of online comments that were almost proportional to what was in the room.’ And as soon as they started naming names, the first speaker out of the gate started naming members of the Jewish community and leadership, I knew instantly where the direction it was going to go,” Beaty says. “I was looking at the rest of the names trying to calculate if this was a one-off or everyone in the Zoom line was going to be espousing similar sentiments and so as soon as it went from naming names to something atrocious, I just cut them off.”
The mayor says numerous kids attended and were forced to sit through this heavy dose of MAGA. After watching their shocked reactions, she began cutting people off. She says that the virtual testimony option has boosted public participation and she does not wish to do away with it despite this recent problem. “This has really expanded public participation and so I’m not going to allow, as the mayor, bad actors to persuade us to do something differently,” Beaty says. After calling around, she discovered this sort of thing is happening elsewhere — particularly in places with female Jewish mayors. The city posted a statement condemning the hate speech on Facebook:
The next Beaverton City Council meeting will allow Virtual participation. But Beaty says they will be looking into legal options to ensure that conservatives don’t get to disrupt the next one with hate speech. Unfortunately, this behavior will likely become more common as the craze catches on with the Right.
You can watch the full meeting below. Skip to around 1:45 to hear the calls for yourself.