Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation (2022)

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

coffeefirst wrote: post #7

kubb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread. 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…

Yes. I’ve also been asking every engineer I know what they’re doing with AI and there’s a lot of people doing a lot of different things, but it’s a deep mismatch with the online rhetoric. This phenomenon appears to be incrementally coming for every single topic and public platform.

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

kubb wrote: post #6

dluan wrote: post #2

We have a massive poisoning of the commons catastrophe coming, driven by further authoritarian government overreach and control. I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. I don't just mean half solutions like tor or social protocols that let you in and out of walled gardens. There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to…

It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread. 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…

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

rrhjm53270 wrote: post #42

As an individual, this paper suggests that I must move beyond "Is this news true?" to "Why does it look like everyone agrees with this?"

Post by bpavuk » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #44

bpavuk wrote: post #27

related: https://doublespeed.ai/ - basically astroturfing as a service. 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

I have one of those 'flying lawnmowers' here and I'm not sure you would like to get up close and personal with them. They are super dangerous even when they are nominally under your control. But I agree with you that on the larger canvas the astroturfing will in spite of being more bloodless will do far more damage. People are just not ready for being skeptical against this, they've barely gotten used to phone scams…

Post by whatshisface » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

alwa wrote: post #46

whatshisface wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of collecting biometric info from humans and IDing all of their online movements, you could mandate that LLM output be watermarked (using a technology that Scott Arronson was hired by OpenAI to help develop, after which the project was shut down under Altman right after proving that it could work) so that their online movement would be IDed. The implication in this story that it was shut down to keep the Orb…

Is that viable given the proliferation of open-weight LLMs that don't apply that sort of watermarking? If somebody with malign intent can skip the attestation, presumably they will, right?