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U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
61–70 of 107 posts
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#62It's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth. To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends. Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the on…
> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet. Democratizing propaganda. Not sure the previous state of affairs where propaganda was accessible to the ruling class and their media corporations was better, it might have just seemed that way because there appeared to be less conflict when it came to them telling you what was in "your own best interest". I do have…
As the other person mentions, much of the strident political stuff one sees online is generated by foreign state actors, so not democracy. But alongside that, a significant amount is generated by content creators in other parts of the world who realized they could cash in on America's internal problems. This has been well known since the reportage on North Macedonian content farms during the 2016 election. People falsely pretending to be from your country for profit-making isn't democracy, either.
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#63>Russian-linked Doppelganger operations have systematically cloned major media infrastructure (Reuters, The Washington Post, Fox News) using lookalike domains that replicate visual design and URL structure closely enough to pass casual inspection. This purpose-built impersonation infrastructure is supported by fake personas, AI-assisted content, and paid amplification across mainstream social platforms. Are there any…
If you want fake personas, view X on a desktop browser through Nitter, a no-bloat interface which allows you to quickly middle-click and open many new tabs. If you go through the history of accounts commenting under pundits' political tweets, you'll soon notice that many accounts claiming to be real, honest-to-goodness Americans have profile photos from This Person Does Not Exist, and their posts are clearly bot-like. The posts are often LLM-generated (before they were manually written, but with telltale mistakes the writer was from Eastern Europe or elsewhere abroad), they might repeat every few days, and they're often single-mindedly about a single issue or two that even a fanatic real human wouldn't be so fixated on.
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#64It's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth. To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends. Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the on…
Yet all you hear in this forum are voices against regulation for the platforms.
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#65>Russian-linked Doppelganger operations have systematically cloned major media infrastructure (Reuters, The Washington Post, Fox News) using lookalike domains that replicate visual design and URL structure closely enough to pass casual inspection. This purpose-built impersonation infrastructure is supported by fake personas, AI-assisted content, and paid amplification across mainstream social platforms. Are there any…
Took me a bit of digging but I found this screenshot of fox-news.in: https://urlscan.io/result/50f1da5b-5b1f-417c-91b8-8690638a6e... That URL is linked from https://assets.recordedfuture.com/insikt-report-pdfs/2023/ta... Which is linked from https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/russian-influence-ne...
They made a right-wing Fox News? Why? Isn't it enough already?
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
These sorts of things did happen before the internet though. Think of the Cultural Revolution in China started by revolutionary university students. Mass printed pamphlets was the original meme. The more things change the more they stay the same.
True. But in the physical world, ideas (or memes, if you will) are bound to people and can only survive, if the carrier survives. The idea of curing headaches with striking your head with a hammer does not spread, because the carrier dies. On the interweb, that connection is no longer there. An idea is independent and can spread without direct human involvement. We are like a tundra species finding itself in a rainfo…
Susan Blackmore calls this meme the “dangerous meme”
Susan Blackmore. “Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans Let Loose” (Cosmos & Culture p297) https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/607104main_c...
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet. Democratizing propaganda. Not sure the previous state of affairs where propaganda was accessible to the ruling class and their media corporations was better, it might have just seemed that way because there appeared to be less conflict when it came to them telling you what was in "your own best interest". I do have…
> Democratizing propaganda. Not really. A lot of the disinformation is generated by authoritarian state actors.
Yeah, it's not as if the entire corporate media is a benevolent group of organizations who want to tell us the truth.
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#68It's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth. To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends. Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the on…
I recently watched a film about Umberto Eco, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022). (It has an eerie sense of “last words” from the “maestro” of letters as the film was produced after his death).
I’m therefore unsure who to credit with the assemblage or arching themes. Nevertheless, one is about the internet. I perceived in his words a duality—-the internet is “limitless memory” as well as “lost memory”. And not just the immediate connotation of repository of lost ideas, but in the sense we as human beings, with the Internet at our fingertips, are losing our memory to it.
Turning this idea around in my mind I imagined such a thing as _Instagram Brain_, where your memory contains only the last “bird on a branch”. (Reflecting, I watch a lot of woodworking and furniture making videos, and I can only remember the last one.)
Now some of my intellectual interests intrude on this infinite semiotic chain. Adding M.Eco’s imaginary conditions, where more information than we’ve ever had access to somehow becomes less useful, the image of the internet as a “complete graph” of knowledge comes to my mind’s eye. What a tangle. Everything connected to everything else—-numinous and beyond comprehension. (I wonder what M. Eco would have made of Chat technology? More’s the pity.)
And finally I get to the political point. By comparison the film gave my imagination a sidelong image of politics. What if, in this stage of the digital revolution, we are all striving to find some mental refuge from the mass-complete-graph (and Instagram Brain): a little corner of HN where colleagues warn each other about this or that dangerous virus or zero-day. A daytime dose of enervating 24h news for the 65+ crowd.
Like this. And more. I wonder at the American two party system and today’s political divide. (The president is literally calling the Democratic Party “traitors”. What a cockup.)
A hypothesis forms: partisanship (as a “function”) makes a tearing bifurcation of the “complete graph” of social knowledge and culture. This is our nations’s social immunity in action. We’ve reached some limit of the social-mind’s capacity to be so highly interconnected, and a function is tearing through everything faster than we can comprehend the individual parts.
Sure, It’s just a fanciful idea. The furthest extent of a Chain of Semiotic reasoning before I’m bored. Maybe the result is a false idea (short of “belief” since I know it’s hypothetical). Still, some people walk away from the computer (read internet, or whatever mass media which produces “Instagram Brain” effects) in full faith, belief and without a doubt, because they “did their research”.
Scientists and other learned individuals might balk at my subjects and turns of reason. Don’t take it literally, but poetically. If I have been at all successful your mind’s eye might glimpse a vision where we Americans, as a people, are not so far apart as it might seem. We are suffering through a black turn of the Digital Revolution, and rather than, as a group, dividing into a million opinions we have split only in two. LOL.
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#69The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will. To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions. Just to…
> I have never voted and never will. Thank you for putting the reason at the top to disregard the rest of your post-hoc justification. Your prescriptions literally don't matter because you will never engage with the political system.
In general, people's ideas matter regardless of what they do.
Re: U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box
#70It's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth. To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends. Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the on…
Bet on your beliefs, and the highly liquid prediction markets make that feasible Conversing about politics has been a fool’s errand for a very long time in the US, practically this whole century so far. It has zero benefit except solidifying that you have the same the value system as people that already agree with you, or who can pretend to. The parties have failed in their primary goal of winning friends and influen…
> Bet on your beliefs, and the highly liquid prediction markets make that feasible.
Why? Insiders are rich enough as it is.
> Conversing about politics has been a fool’s errand for a very long time in the US, practically this whole century so far.
Other people sharing their perspectives and stories is a big reason I'm no longer a Republican.
> ...if your view of reality is more accurate, whether you want the accurate view or not, don't worry about discussing, just trade it.
This assumes markets are fair.