Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The coming automation of propaganda

warontherocks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#61

Post by hackermailman »

jointpdf wrote: post #38

Recommended reading on this subject from RAND: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html It covers the underlying strategy of Russian disinformation operations and why/how it works. Mind you this is from 2016, so prior to the Mueller investigation. If nothing else, read the blurbs in the text boxes.

The right wing has their own version of this, a KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, who has powerful (meme) videos about the coming destruction of America and how it would take 3 decades to fulfill, all recorded in the early 80s. 'To change the perception of reality of every American, despite their abundence of information, nobody is able to come to sensible conclusions,... it's a great brainwashing process that takes decades' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA Yuri also claims the Soviet Union never fell, it just reinvented itself. This is pretty standard 'alt-right' materials that people should pay attention to if they wish to understand that reactionary wing of politics

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#62

Post by dredmorbius »

scarejunba wrote: post #36

This is the best thing to happen to human information processing since the printing press. The democratization of propaganda will mean that no longer will people be slave to the voices that are loudest. Now, all ideas will fight equally. No longer will Judith Miller be powerful and lead us into war because we will not trust her. Because when everyone is a liar, we will not choose one liar to trust.

Amplification technologies tend to favour the empowered and invulnerable blessed with immunity or impunity. The power dynamic is not neutral.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#63

Post by SubiculumCode »

I read a recent article on foreignpolicy.com about a Chinese Bonds/etc rating agency which systematically gave Democratic nations lower ratings than authoritarian ratings. This was taken as a form of Chinese propaganda and ignored as such...but this article makes me wonder, as much as I hate to say it, if they are right...

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#64

Post by MarcScott »

bitcurious wrote: post #24
im3w1l wrote: post #9

Imagine you go to an online forum and that there is a 99.99% chance that a given message was written by a bot. Imagine further they are sufficiently well written you can't tell from the post itself whether it was made by a bot or not How would people respond to that? Well the obvious consequence is that you have to stop paying attention to random posts. You have to depend on something outside of the forum itself to f…

You would enjoy reading Neal Stephenson's new novel "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell." The middle part imagines how America would change as a consequence of exactly that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell

This was the most interesting and realistically prescient part of the novel for me. Coastal elites have "editors" to curate their feed, while the rest of the population are awash with conspiracy theories, cults and extreme libertarianism. The story took the 2016 election shenanigans to its logical conclusion. Definitely worth a read.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#65

Post by _jn »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #48

> As U.S. policymakers remain indecisive over how to prevent a repeat of the 2016 election interference, the threat is looming ever more ominous on the horizon. That interference is specious, I think. In any case, the US interferes in every election it can, so is it unreasonable to believe every other country that can interfere would? > You probably know enough to avoid following small, suspicious accounts on Twitter…

Emails are optional on reddit.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#66

Post by scarejunba »

dredmorbius wrote: post #62
scarejunba wrote: post #36

This is the best thing to happen to human information processing since the printing press. The democratization of propaganda will mean that no longer will people be slave to the voices that are loudest. Now, all ideas will fight equally. No longer will Judith Miller be powerful and lead us into war because we will not trust her. Because when everyone is a liar, we will not choose one liar to trust.

Amplification technologies tend to favour the empowered and invulnerable blessed with immunity or impunity. The power dynamic is not neutral.

Ah but it's not amplification, it's maximalization. Anonymous ubiquitous propaganda!

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#67

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

cirgue wrote: post #34
whatshisface wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a hot take: you shouldn't be trusting intenet comments written by humans anyway. If a bot comment contains something you should actually listen to (sources, evidence) then you should listen to it, and if a human comment is just a Reddit-style popular opinion dogpile it is just as bad as a bot comment.

> Here's a hot take: you shouldn't be trusting intenet comments written by humans anyway. I remember an old New Yorker cartoon from the 90s that says 'On the internet, no one knows you're a dog'. Lying has been a fundamental feature of the medium since the beginning. Most of the history of the internet pre-smartphone is people trying to figure out how to combat trolls and spammers. It appears that we are having to le…

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) depicts a galaxy of countless highly advanced civilizations in the far future - and describes its "net" as "the net of a million lies". However, it also depicts every message with an AI's best judgement of its reliability - for example:

>From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living dangerously.]

More examples here: https://hur.st/afutd.html (spoilers if you read more than the From lines)

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#68

Post by geargrinder »

Pretty soon the internet will be the place for bots to meet and manipulate one another. I'm sure this is happening to some extent already.

The Democrat bots are triggering the Republican bots, and the Russian bots are fighting the Chinese bots for mindshare. Googlebot cannot save us.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#69

Post by colordrops »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #55
colordrops wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The establishment would just set unfair and arbitrary criteria based on their interests as to who meets the knowledge bar. Anyway it's already sort of an epistocracy. Those "in the know" have more power and already pretty much run things. Ethics and morals are orthogonal to knowledge.

Your counterargument is therefore not with the principle of Epistocracy but rather with the implementation. I've thought about this before and I think I have a way to construct the voting test in a way that is robust to being "hacked". Copy and paste to follow: 1. There is already a de facto voting test for some fraction of Americans. Its called the citizenship test. And I for one find it offensive to basic reasoning…

Way too complicated and certainly would be gamed. And it only filters out for lazy people, not intelligent or informed people. In any case why wouldn't you make the questions about the office that the candidate is running for and what they would be responsible for? That seems like the most relevant knowledge to a vote.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#70

Post by ikeyany »

colordrops wrote: post #53
IIAOPSW wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't kids get to vote? Is it not because they are seriously uninformed and easily influenced? If you agree that one subset of the population shouldn't get to vote for these reasons, why not a wider subset? In fact why not throw out voting age entirely and make a voting test the only barrier? Would not a direct test of civic knowledge have fewer false positives and false negatives than the blunt tool of an arbitr…

The establishment would just set unfair and arbitrary criteria based on their interests as to who meets the knowledge bar. Anyway it's already sort of an epistocracy. Those "in the know" have more power and already pretty much run things. Ethics and morals are orthogonal to knowledge.

If the only difference between the two is that one is said out in the open while the other is said in hushed voiced, then what's wrong with it? Is it not arguably more honest and ethical in a twisted way?
Post reply on HN