Meet the 24-yr-old software engineer who runs a MAGA bot waging an online battle against progressive politicians

[vanessa_ca]

Meet the 24-year-old Ottawa software engineer who runs a MAGA bot
Saihajpreet Singh's bots are waging an online battle against progressive politicians in the U.S.

By Matteo Cimellaro
Published Aug 06, 2025

If you’ve been on the social media site X recently to wade into the debate over the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, you may have come across CityDeskNYC.

The account, which is run by an artificial intelligence bot, spits out more than 1,000 posts a day, responding to mentions of the Democratic nominee for mayor. The posts disparage Mamdani and his proposed policies while praising some of his political opponents.

-snip-

Last year, Singh, who has been coding since he was seven years old, built an AI bot called DOGEai that posts around 2,000 times a day on X, with a right-wing MAGA flair and an output no human could match. DOGEai, which has amassed more than 127,000 followers, has criticized Democrats and applauded Donald Trump and his supporters, attracting retweets by the American president and his former ally Elon Musk.

For Singh, CityDeskNYC is a proof of concept AI bot that he hopes to monetize by eventually selling it to Mamdani’s political opponents.

-snip-

Singh’s accounts are part of an army of AI bots that have created an information ecosystem in support of Trump and the Republican Party on X. In the lead-up to last year’s presidential election, researchers at Clemson University identified a network of more than 680 AI-generated bot accounts on X that were pushing Trump’s agenda.

-snip-

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-man-ai-bot-maga?taid=6893bdb049f2eb0001a29f18

[UTUSN]

1. K&R

[MaineBlueBear]

2. Another reason to stay off xitter

Engage with bots? No thanks

[crimycarny]

3. There is always a pattern

It's so obvious when it's bots because there will be a ton of replies that use similar retorts. And always with blue check marks. Knowing MAGA, there is no way that real MAGA users are paying for blue checks. They aren't the type who'd want to dole out money every month.

Twitter has become a cesspool of bots arguing with bots.

[FakeNoose]

4. These bots have been around for longer than we realize

I'm certain I ran into some early versions of these hard-core conservative bots back in 2016 or maybe even 2015.

Back then I wasn't on DU yet, but I was active on other forums like DU (but not as nice) including a busy Yahoo message board. I was also pretty active on Gawker - before they got taken down, but that's another story. So these bots were hard to spot ... except I noticed some tell-tale signs.

Forum members with oddball names (like names you wouldn't remember) would go on Yahoo or Gawker and type stuff that was totally pro-Chump and totally insulting to Hillary Clinton. Well OK no surprise there, but there would be misspelled words or some mistakes in grammar etc. Then I or someone else would reply to them and they would never respond ... they had already moved on.

The weird thing that I noticed is that on other forums, other strangely named people would type the EXACT SAME THING - including the same spelling errors and bad grammar - on places that weren't moderated. Their goal was to say something controversial to get the "libs" all hot and bothered, and then disappear.

After seeing these same posts in several places, I finally decided the posters were not speaking English, since they couldn't formulate much of a response to anyone who called them out. They had maybe 9 or 10 different things they'd post on Yahoo just to stir up trouble, always pro-Chump and anti-Democratic Party (and especially anti-Hillary. I decided that they must have gotten their trouble-maker insults out of some archive and thrown them into unmoderated forums to cause trouble.

It was so upsetting to me that these people were allowed to post their garbage and NOBODY was removing them or even correcting them. It was enough to make me quit Yahoo and Gawker (they shut down anyway) and a short time later I discovered Democratic Underground. It was already starting 10 years ago or maybe longer than that. From what I've learned since then, they were probably Russians and they hadn't figured it all out yet.

[vanessa_ca]

5. Yes!

I noticed is that on other forums, other strangely named people would type the EXACT SAME THING - including the same spelling errors and bad grammar - on places that weren't moderated. Their goal was to say something controversial to get the "libs" all hot and bothered, and then disappear.

[mopinko]

10. i used to b a mod here, and did a couple terms on mirt. these fools used to b pretty easy to spot

once u know what to look for. they also tend to post in the middle of the night here- work hours in st petersburg.
it’s getting a bit harder w ai. no doubt xitter cd pick them off if it didnt like them. but they do.

[aggiesal]

6. I'm betting he also has a bot that ...

pumps out fake liberal statements about Zohran Mamdani for his Dog-EAi to respond.

[Unca Jim]

7. So sad...

He's so young to be so evil.

[writerJT]

8. Thanks for posting this.

Going to read in-depth.

[Martin68]

9. Scary stuff. But getting swamped by partisan rhetoric isn't always the best way to be persuaded.

[TommyT139]

14. I wonder whether

...the intent is not so much to persuade, as to chip away at what is perceived as "normal" or acceptable to believe, think, say, write, and post publicly, whether anonymously or not. If there was a self-critical or self-reflective voice, that gets eroded.

[ReRe]

12. C R E E P Y

[Crowman2009]

13. Singh is going to wear out his welcome on X when he tries to get chummy with the Nazis which are all over that platform.