> As of May 2024, these campaigns do not appear to have meaningfully increased their audience engagement or reach as a result of our services.
Just like I've predicted many times on HN.
Text generation is low on the list of things needed to successfully engage in automated spam. Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest. And funny enough the ex-OpenAI people (mostly Helen) calling for gov regulation said GPT should not have been released to the public because of this risk.
In a way, I find your comment unintentionally hilarious. Sure, this may actually be true. Consider the source, however. Congratulating yourself by quoting the tobacco company's own research of (the lack of) adverse effects of tobacco seems a tad ill-conceived. The talk of reputation makes it doubly so, since on this topic Sam Altman or any official OpenAI post has no credibility whatsoever.
> Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest.
This is not the whole picture at all. I’d even say mostly incorrect. You can definitely influence public opinion with a social media consisting entirely of bots, provided the public aren’t aware of it.
A lot of social consensus is often made when huge threads on twitter or Instagram have a massive number of supporters behind a topic. So when bots get better at all saying the same thing in seemingly human voices, it trains us to believe that is popular, and likely that that is right
The wild part about this, at least to me, is the wholesale incompetence demonstrated by Israel in this regard. If I couldn't google the talking points the bots make and see Israeli officials saying the same things, one would think these bots were Iranians acting with the intent to make Israel look bad.
What's the incompetence? Having talking points? If you have a group of people trying to advocate for something, isn't "talking points" something you expect would arise organically? I'm sure YIMBYs have "talking points" as well (eg. how it'll reduce housing costs or whatever), but nobody would say that's "wholesale incompetence" for having them. Or maybe it's having it easily searchable? I'm sure if you search around you can find YIMBY bloggers on substack or whatever saying how good YIMBYism is. Aren't those basically "talking points"?
It's a very interesting thing, it demonstrates something uncomfortable & scary to me as a goy Zionist, who hangs out in a private, predominantly Jewish, space.
Note the biggest word in the cloud: UNRWA. All my confirmation bias was in one direction in October. The oddly dissonant and desperate messaging you'd see made things extremely difficult to maintain that, like, you have to be of a very specific mindset to see message after message about the evil UN and not say, "uh, did we go off the rails somewhere?"
(n.b. this was in a lefty Jewish space, broadly denigrating governmental institutions isn't a usual virtue signal)
Going back to the beginning, there's an uncomfortable willingness/ignorance of Overton window widening, in a way that reduces sympathy rather than engenders it, and all of a sudden, otherwise kind people are engaging in rank racism*, glorification of destruction, and extreme conspiracies**.
* lots of "no such thing as innocent Palestineans", "Palestineans love redacted", when questioned, turns into "it's not racist if they're not a race, and they aren't because bla bla bla"
** Day after day after day of the bailey, "World Central Kitchen was trying to smuggle terrorists", coupled to the motte "Jose Andres held a barbecue buffet! Lol!"
Out of idle curiosity, how did you arrive at Zionism from a non-jewish and leftist background? That has to be one of the rarest identities to simultaneously associate with.
> like, you have to be of a very specific mindset to see message after message about the evil UN and not say, "uh, did we go off the rails somewhere?"
I think saying "evil" anything is wrong. But the UN is still a body made up of people, and like everything has its flaws. Its done some things that have turned out great and truly made the world a better place. Its done other things that haven't worked out so well. I certainly don't think it is above criticism.
It's amusing you can self identify this way without much hesitation. My personal experience with colleagues and family on both sides of the regional, religious, lijguistic, and cultural debate is that if you talked about being a non-Muslim supporter of political Islamists or up to including Hamas or similar groups, so anywhere in that continuum inclusive, few in Western or Israeli media will hesistate in labelling you in a way common with these talking points: a terrorist.
So good luck to you, but I'm not surprised you'd stay private
But my anecdata (or some may call life experience) tell me you'd be fine and fare well where a similarly extreme position on the opposite end of the spectrum would cost you a lot personally and professionally. I wish we all reflected in the West or in tje region or conflict area, well, why is that?
For the record since I inevitably get routinely called an anti-Semite anyway: I think Hamas and groups like them are vile, but many in the region opposing them don't take the high road by comparison either. Im nkt sure if its recent or monitoring that become easier and more economical, but that means their opponents with this crap and other tactics have really screwed up. This HN post further supports my cynicism and disappointment.
* Assuming the comments came from Israelis/Jews.
All the left and right-wing channels are infiltrated with Iranian agents(plenty of news on that topic in Haaretz/Walla). They are causing rift and radicalization in society.
That's a solvable tech problem to shut it down. Unfortunately, it's not a priority on a state level because everyone is doing it.
So Israel does the exact thing all the politicians try to scare us into believing Russia does every election in the US. I guess the difference is AIPAC.
What do you mean "try to scare us into believing Russia does"? Do you have any doubt that Russia has been interfering in US politics for well over a decade?
The total amount of direct evidence (evidence, not assertions of secret evidence by the US government, unproven and unsubstantiated allegations of hacking or superman Bernie memes by click farms based somewhere in Russia) that Russia has "interfered" with US politics that has been released by the US government in the last 10 years adds up to less than the evidence in this article on Israel alone.
Evidence aside, I personally think it is extremely likely that Russia, China and most other countries active on the world stage have tried to "interfere" in US politics to some degree, but nowhere near the amount that we interfere in the politics of other countries or that Israel interferes in ours.
This seems like a remnant opinion resultant from old propaganda campaigns promoted by politicians Russia was supporting with its interference in US politics.
These campaigns were multifaceted and included calling proven basic facts into question, going so far as to suggest Russia wasn't interfering at all.
Convincing people to disbelieve this basic fact precluded them from any possible consideration of whether Russia was supporting specific candidates, how Russia might benefit from such a candidate taking power, and why Russia might consider interference to be worth the effort, money, and risk.
This disbelief would also preclude any consideration about why the politician might:
- support such Russian meddling by pretending it did not exist
- make unsupported claims implicating their political opponents which completely ignored known facts
- play dumb whenever the subject came up
It was a playbook, followed to incredible success in conjunction with other propaganda efforts.
This all served to enable the politician to completely avoid addressing core questions about why Russia would support the candidate to the point of interfering with US elections to begin with.
All major nations interfere with each other’s elections and/or politics and political stability. That said, the narratives around election interference are political rather than objective.
> last decade
well over a century..
The thing is that it’s a Constant. It’s not a new or surprising thing like fake news presents it as.
> Do you have any doubt that Russia has been interfering in US politics for well over a decade?
You mean through completely accepted and legal campaign donations to pretty much every major politician? Oh no wait that’s AIPAC and Israel and “just fine”. You mean through bots that post shit on FB right?
I don’t care for conspiracies, but I do wonder why American politicians don’t try to stop donations from foreign government institutions to politicians in general. JFK was on track to do just that before he was murdered.
Not a comment about who's right or wrong in this war, but it is fascinating that we have entered the age of the Internet being a place where warfare is fought. There have always been people posting web content about conflicts but now with Gaza and Ukraine, it seems that the nations fighting are actively looking at the internet as the fourth field of battle.
Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
"Manufacturing Consent" was written in the 80s mostly in response to newspapers, but the ideas have been adapted to the Internet for some time (and talk radio, and cable news, etc.). I'm old enough to remember this from the Iraq war. Yeah, we didn't have microblogging back then, but there were Email campaigns, blogs, message boards, chat rooms, etc.
And let's keep in mind that the term "Public Relations" was explicitly chosen as a Newspeak-term because Edward Bernays realised that the actual term for a war time methodology, "propaganda", was too loaded.[0] And honest.
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
Yes, they’re not new. But it is ridiculously easy and cheap today to do propaganda than even 30 years ago. We’re connected to the outrage machine 24/7 now because of internet/social media/smartphones, vs say 1980.
God knows what % of the population has mental issues because we watch too much Twitter and Facebook and other crap
Indeed and one reason i don't watch or pay attention to news media(TV, online, etc) especially political news. What to believe is real / the truth and with the advent of AI, Deep fake voices and deep fake videos the Internet becomes an even worse place for deciphering truth.
I do think the economy is different. You've always been able to just hire a bunch of thugs to stage an event to shape the narrative, like old-school cold war style. That takes money and effort and a modicum of skill and the risk of being caught with your pants down is not negligible.
Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).
Go to the Wikipedia pages of these events and click on "Talk" at the top or see the history of those pages. The amount of people fighting over this information war is mindblowing.
If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.
My understanding is, historians know that the source material is 90% bullshit (texts written to appease an ego of some lord, chronicles of war against "subhuman" enemies, religious scriptures), they just know how to find the remaining 10%.
That's much more oriented to network security, spectrum and hardware, stuff like that. For an American military organisation engaged in internet influence operations you'd want to look at the signature reduction program. Something like 50,000 people strong at this point, insane amounts of resources going into that.
The internet created a whole stratum of people who don’t use tv, radio and newspaper anymore. It’s not that we entered internet warfare, we just exited absolute control of large mass media. Now every TLA has to deal with it somehow.
Why internet is the battlefield? Because everything in our world is based on an opinion. You can sell a lot of bs to your “client” if he has “correct” opinion.
Bad news, our opinion system was designed for groups and villages, not for the internet.
The Internet as we think of it is already a military project. Why do you think so much emphasis is put on countries that assert sovereignty over their own information space?
I think we’ve been here for a while, and I don’t think you make an overt branch to fight covert wars, you just roll it into the NSA or ops for some (all?) other branches of the military.
> Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
Cyber Force!
They have cyber marines, cyber carriers, cyber destroyers, cyber bombers, cyber jets, and cyber drones. They even have their own sister agency called Veterans Affairs where veterans can go to get virtual healthcare treatment.
My first semester of college in Fall of 1999, I wrote a paper about cyber warfare and the summary was that the superpowers were already doing it, and the only thing expected to change in the future was the resources that were online and susceptible would increase the scale of cyber war.
Wasn't there something with the Canadian military fighting (what they called) misinformation on social media during the pandemic? Seems like it's already ongoing.
Canadian government was the source of misinformation on social media during the pandemic! Literal curfews were in place with propaganda machine saying how good idea it was.
Well their enemies used social accounts to garner support from US citizens so you've got to start somewhere!
It's not like we haven't done this either. I worked for a company in 2005 which was doing this paid for by politicians. Moment I worked this out, I quit.
100% agree (hence my point about quitting) but the problem is it's a difficult position to be in when everything is narrative driven and misreporting and propaganda are rife.
You can sit there and do nothing and wait for your enemy to paint you in a bad light and the next thing you know your usual political allies are throwing money and aid at your enemy. Or you protect your citizens as best as possible by entering the game. The moral high ground may have a higher body count.
This point applies to both sides for ref. And because it's a war, the rules of fair play go out of the window until people are on trial afterwards.
>Well their enemies used social accounts to garner support from US citizens so you've got to start somewhere!
I mean, if Israel started bombing me, I'd try to garner support from US citizens too? There is a world of difference between that and faking social media accounts
Posts on all sides of this topic get flagged quickly (by users), and mods turn off the flags on limited occasions—mostly when some significant new information arises and there's at least some chance of a substantive discussion about it.
It's pretty important that most stories about this conflict and similar current affairs get flagged, because otherwise HN's front page would consist of little else, and that's not the purpose of the site. But it's also important that the topics not be ignored completely, even though they're painful. There's no happy medium here, unfortunately.
Here are some links to previous explanations. If you (or anyone, of course) have a look at these and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Reasonable approach and I applaud your effort to maintain the site's purpose while also not ignoring these issues (that do have some relation to the tech industry, as we've seen). Thank you.
Appreciate the case by case basis approach to moderation here. There are quite a few topics where discussion becomes suppressed when blanket bans are enforced.
The problem is that we've already solved these issues many times over on other sites that are decades old. HN simply refuses to implement 21st-century forum enhancements.
Brigaded reports? 4chan solved it by adding a mandatory enum to reports to specify what the report is reporting for. Identifying bad reports and banning users as a result becomes trivial.
Flooding with stories about a particular topic? That's what stickies are for and they work particularly well so that mods can auto-delete any non-sticky stories pertaining to the MOT.
Flamewar on a MOT? Add a sticky to the top of the thread like reddit does saying moderation will be minimal and to enter the thread at your own risk.
Is it really that hard to imagine congress supporting the democratic country with one of the biggest pride parades in the world vs the country that hasn’t had elections in 18 years and is split between 2 leaders who disagree on pretty much everything?
Readit News
Just like I've predicted many times on HN.
Text generation is low on the list of things needed to successfully engage in automated spam. Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest. And funny enough the ex-OpenAI people (mostly Helen) calling for gov regulation said GPT should not have been released to the public because of this risk.
This is not the whole picture at all. I’d even say mostly incorrect. You can definitely influence public opinion with a social media consisting entirely of bots, provided the public aren’t aware of it.
Someone from their group is clearly thinking ahead and automating all of them out of a job :)
Note the biggest word in the cloud: UNRWA. All my confirmation bias was in one direction in October. The oddly dissonant and desperate messaging you'd see made things extremely difficult to maintain that, like, you have to be of a very specific mindset to see message after message about the evil UN and not say, "uh, did we go off the rails somewhere?"
(n.b. this was in a lefty Jewish space, broadly denigrating governmental institutions isn't a usual virtue signal)
Going back to the beginning, there's an uncomfortable willingness/ignorance of Overton window widening, in a way that reduces sympathy rather than engenders it, and all of a sudden, otherwise kind people are engaging in rank racism*, glorification of destruction, and extreme conspiracies**.
* lots of "no such thing as innocent Palestineans", "Palestineans love redacted", when questioned, turns into "it's not racist if they're not a race, and they aren't because bla bla bla"
** Day after day after day of the bailey, "World Central Kitchen was trying to smuggle terrorists", coupled to the motte "Jose Andres held a barbecue buffet! Lol!"
I think saying "evil" anything is wrong. But the UN is still a body made up of people, and like everything has its flaws. Its done some things that have turned out great and truly made the world a better place. Its done other things that haven't worked out so well. I certainly don't think it is above criticism.
So good luck to you, but I'm not surprised you'd stay private But my anecdata (or some may call life experience) tell me you'd be fine and fare well where a similarly extreme position on the opposite end of the spectrum would cost you a lot personally and professionally. I wish we all reflected in the West or in tje region or conflict area, well, why is that?
For the record since I inevitably get routinely called an anti-Semite anyway: I think Hamas and groups like them are vile, but many in the region opposing them don't take the high road by comparison either. Im nkt sure if its recent or monitoring that become easier and more economical, but that means their opponents with this crap and other tactics have really screwed up. This HN post further supports my cynicism and disappointment.
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That's a solvable tech problem to shut it down. Unfortunately, it's not a priority on a state level because everyone is doing it.
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Evidence aside, I personally think it is extremely likely that Russia, China and most other countries active on the world stage have tried to "interfere" in US politics to some degree, but nowhere near the amount that we interfere in the politics of other countries or that Israel interferes in ours.
These campaigns were multifaceted and included calling proven basic facts into question, going so far as to suggest Russia wasn't interfering at all.
Convincing people to disbelieve this basic fact precluded them from any possible consideration of whether Russia was supporting specific candidates, how Russia might benefit from such a candidate taking power, and why Russia might consider interference to be worth the effort, money, and risk.
This disbelief would also preclude any consideration about why the politician might:
- support such Russian meddling by pretending it did not exist
- make unsupported claims implicating their political opponents which completely ignored known facts
- play dumb whenever the subject came up
It was a playbook, followed to incredible success in conjunction with other propaganda efforts.
This all served to enable the politician to completely avoid addressing core questions about why Russia would support the candidate to the point of interfering with US elections to begin with.
> last decade
well over a century..
The thing is that it’s a Constant. It’s not a new or surprising thing like fake news presents it as.
You mean through completely accepted and legal campaign donations to pretty much every major politician? Oh no wait that’s AIPAC and Israel and “just fine”. You mean through bots that post shit on FB right?
I don’t care for conspiracies, but I do wonder why American politicians don’t try to stop donations from foreign government institutions to politicians in general. JFK was on track to do just that before he was murdered.
Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
The difference now is the speed, cost and scale. It is super cheap to spread crap today than ever. Also it is quick and the reach is massive.
By the way, Manufacturing Consent is a depressing book. You’d lose what little faith you have in media, if you read it…
God knows what % of the population has mental issues because we watch too much Twitter and Facebook and other crap
Here's AI Trump and AI Biden debating live now on Twitch (video isnt great as of today but the voices are) https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2157689323
Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).
If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command is the closest thing that we have today. It's not a formal branch, though, but rather a joint effort across the existing branches.
A cursory look and it seems Germany and China were first to having a specific branch, but China dissolved theirs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_and_Information_Domain_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army_Str...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_warfare
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Why internet is the battlefield? Because everything in our world is based on an opinion. You can sell a lot of bs to your “client” if he has “correct” opinion.
Bad news, our opinion system was designed for groups and villages, not for the internet.
Cyber Force!
They have cyber marines, cyber carriers, cyber destroyers, cyber bombers, cyber jets, and cyber drones. They even have their own sister agency called Veterans Affairs where veterans can go to get virtual healthcare treatment.
The US hasn't been especially loud about it, but it's been a dominant force in 'internet warfare.'
This is not a war.
how competent they actually are at this, who knows...
US military spent over half a billion on war propaganda - outsourced to experts.
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It's not like we haven't done this either. I worked for a company in 2005 which was doing this paid for by politicians. Moment I worked this out, I quit.
You can sit there and do nothing and wait for your enemy to paint you in a bad light and the next thing you know your usual political allies are throwing money and aid at your enemy. Or you protect your citizens as best as possible by entering the game. The moral high ground may have a higher body count.
This point applies to both sides for ref. And because it's a war, the rules of fair play go out of the window until people are on trial afterwards.
i dont know of a single country that wouldnt do the same in their position.
I mean it'd be nice not to have them but as a species we're stupid animals with stupid ideas so there's no end of it in sight.
I don't agree with any of it for ref.
I mean, if Israel started bombing me, I'd try to garner support from US citizens too? There is a world of difference between that and faking social media accounts
Dead Comment
It's pretty important that most stories about this conflict and similar current affairs get flagged, because otherwise HN's front page would consist of little else, and that's not the purpose of the site. But it's also important that the topics not be ignored completely, even though they're painful. There's no happy medium here, unfortunately.
Here are some links to previous explanations. If you (or anyone, of course) have a look at these and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418881 (May 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 (April 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 (March 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39161344 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749162 (Dec 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527 (Dec 2023)
Brigaded reports? 4chan solved it by adding a mandatory enum to reports to specify what the report is reporting for. Identifying bad reports and banning users as a result becomes trivial.
Flooding with stories about a particular topic? That's what stickies are for and they work particularly well so that mods can auto-delete any non-sticky stories pertaining to the MOT.
Flamewar on a MOT? Add a sticky to the top of the thread like reddit does saying moderation will be minimal and to enter the thread at your own risk.
Dead Comment
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In: blame FB comments for congress funding Israel
Is it really that hard to imagine congress supporting the democratic country with one of the biggest pride parades in the world vs the country that hasn’t had elections in 18 years and is split between 2 leaders who disagree on pretty much everything?
Do you mean NYC Pride or Sao Paolo Gay Pride Parade?