There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me feels like that window is already slammed shut.
It's hard to distinguish who's a bot, who's a narrative pusher and who's an enthusiast. Which is exactly what you'd want from an astroturfing campaign. There's a clear benefit: people in the industry are reading this, and in doing so they're granting mindshare.
There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support campaigns - personal key signature. But judging by how afraid people, especially in the US, need to be of their government surveilling them, this isn't going to catch on.
This phenomenon appears to be incrementally coming for every single topic and public platform.
Isn't this what exactly you'd expect in a connected world? The best arguments from both sides proliferate, thereby causing "The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread".
You would be surprised at how cheaply opinions can be purchased, especially globally.
Need to double check what is available, though I feel like that angle could work.
I’ve been wondering also if a simple lie & deception detection type system could be a useful angles. It’s complicated in practice; though the human intuition would say it’s figured this out millennia ago- I can’t tell you how many times my body has figured out someone’s toxic negative vibe by feeling. And I think we probably understand this better than we think and can represent it in the computer space with analysis of signals and some follow on questions. Hope I’m not too naive here.
I was surveilled, experimented on and followed by them for being American-Pakistani and speaking out against them from 2022-2023. It was a scary time and I wish I were making this up. I wonder sometimes if they really are the good guys, and I just got things backwards. I also heard when you are kidnapped and in hostile territories for long enough, you fall in love with the kidnappers.
Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious.
[0] e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanit... and the feature piece at https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/
It's against the HN guidelines to insinuate that astroturfing happens on HN.
(It's interesting that conservatives saw it as a partisan cause.)
Every propagandistic argument is going to be like that for 80% of people, and 40% of people are going to be within that 80% about 99% of the time. They think the biggest issue of our time is how much people complain.
their landing page stops short of saying that Doublespeed would be "a good fit for your political campaign." I'd prefer fighting an AI-powered drone over becoming a victim of "Dead Internet-aaS" startup. at least, flying lawnmowers are honest
People are just not ready for being skeptical against this, they've barely gotten used to phone scams and now they have astroturfing and deepfakes to contend with.
I found it amazing that I could not find any organisation that tracks these campaigns. These are often very well funded and those funds go to people.
Part of the problem is a successful public opinion campaign results in something that most people believe, we probably only get to see the failures. Challenging something that is widely held is not well received, whether or not you are right or wrong.
Some things I did find out. Fake news stories don't change people's opinions very much. They enable media to shape narratives because people will reject genuine stories outside the narrative because they know that fake news stories exist. Fake news exists to be seen as fake to establish that the things you disagree with could also be fake.
There are companies that specialise in this.
Reputation management companies might tell you who their clients are or what they do, but never at the same time. I suspect the best ones do neither.
I think everyone would agree with this but is there any formal evidence of how Twitter and TikTok affect elections or legislation?
See for example: https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_s...
User plugs "PracHub" constantly, but their profile page doesn't show those comments. Sometimes they post lazily, just pasting a link. Other times though they post as if they've stumbled upon this service by accident.
