The coming automation of propaganda
warontherocks.com
warontherocks.com
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 find a list of people to pay attention to. That will be your friends and your family. And then it will be whatever media tells you to pay attention to.
Getting out of your filter bubble will be impossible because as soon as you step out you are faced by an onslaught of bots.
Maybe you could travel around IRL and acquire a diverse list of voices that way. But realistically only the elite could afford that.
Actually lets be even more cynical. Say you go traveling, meet someone. You add them on a social network. But it's not them it's a bot. And they get a few bucks for selling your eyeballs.
But then we can even further imagine that you follow them with a fake account too, and so the eyeballs were actually worthless.
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 learn the same lessons all over again.
There seems to be a kind of collective amnesia about the fact that the majority of content on the internet is written by people that are trying to sell you something, trying to get your attention for their own amusement, or are batshit insane. Frequently it's more than one of these things.
>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)
If you only read reports of vaccine-related harms, it's easy to come to the conclusion that vaccines are a terrible mistake or even a conspiracy, because human brains aren't very good at prioritising the singular fact that vaccines have saved millions of lives over a constant stream of emotive stories. If you only read about the inconsistencies and errors in contemporary reports of the Holocaust, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the whole thing is exaggerated or an outright hoax, because it's just deeply unpleasant to think about six million corpses.
I don't need to lie to you or dictate what you believe, I just need to influence what you pay attention to; if I control your attention, I can guide you towards a conclusion and make you believe that you came to it of your own initiative.
FWIW I agree with your take, but practically speaking I use whatever “metadata” I can (is this a bot, is the writer a pseudoscientist, is this thread a flame war) to help deal with the fact that it’s so much cheaper to create bull%^*t than to critically evaluate an argument or idea.
And in that light I disagree with your “obvious consequence” that people will stop paying attention to forum posts, because we know that people do engage with trolls/bots on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
People are also fine watching cable TV for hours, which is content that is entirely designed by people whose intentions we do not know. What fundamental difference does it make whether candidate Doe’s agenda is pushed by bots on forums vs TV anchors paid to read off a teleprompter, when people are so eager to sit in front of it and engage with it?
Human attention is the new commodity, and the average person just does not have the means to fight the billions of dollars collectively poured into exploiting their eyeballs.
If you instead want your assumptions reinforced, you pay attention to whatever source does that.
Amusing to read.
This is such an interesting way to refer to an author.
We're all living in bubbles. It is why travelling is interesting - you get to be in a different bubble, come home and notice the peculiarities of your bubble that you never noticed before.
It is why movies are interesting - we jump into a different bubble, for the same purposes.
There is no problem here, because there is no 'truth' that gets obscured as a result. The human experience is not about uncovering truth, it's just an experience to be had and possibly enjoyed if the universe happens to align for you to do so :)
This is necessary for 2 reasons. First, it gives us confidence the people we are speaking to are (probably) not bots.
Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law. So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.
I'll take my anonymity where I can get it, thanks. And as an aside, it's somewhat ironic you post this on a throwaway.
Mandated real names are just pre-doxing everyone so they can be censored by real world retaliation. If you're already powerful, this has no effect. If you're vulnerable, it's silencing.
You might be able to implement this in a small, affluent European country, but nowhere else. Consider the fact that in the USA, it is a standard talking point of the left that the right's continual push to ask for ID to _vote_ has been branded as a racist policy; it seems that we're simply to accept that large swathes of people will simply not have any ID, whether they're legally present in the country or not.
How do you suggest solving that problem, so as to have some actual decent ID on file with which to back the online ID upon?
And, once you've solved that, how are you going to scale it to impoverished countries that barely have the infrastructure to have any internet access at all, never mind vetting everyone's access to it?
Once you have this ID system, how are you going to mandate that all websites validate access against it? Enforce it at the ISP level? How are people going to offer wifi in coffee shops, etc? Force everything through a big proxy? The scale and expense of the infrastructure involved in doing this is immense. Government IT efforts seem to fail more often than not these days - witness the failures to improve the IRS, or the recent Canadian government payroll system implementation scandal with IBM.
> Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law.
In America, you have absolute freedom of speech, save of course for speech that is treasonous (i.e. divulging classified information). There is no requirement to censor by law. If someone wants to issue speech you consider hateful, it is not illegal for them to do so. This is not true many other places, and unfortunately may change in the USA at some point in our lifetimes ending one of the greatest freedoms that anyone has ever possessed out of our fear that somehow freedom is going to be what leads to our oppression, and not the giving of too much power to the state. Ironic; even more ironic that the left is the group most siding with big corporations to push this narrative. Never thought I'd see that; not after Occupy Wall Street, but that spirit is thoroughly dead.
> So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.
Right, because self-imposed censorship where we all go through the day with a fake smile on our faces, only saying the right things, like as though the things we feel safe saying on LinkedIn is sufficient to cover all legitimate human dialogue. Say the wrong thing and disappear into a Kafka-esque nightmare, where you can never get the complete list of all the things you can't say because such a list would be even more dangerous than what you were planning to say in the first place...
No, friend. You're wrong.
Anonymity and free speech are the incredible power to bring light to darkness. They're what enables us to be more than the sum of our parts; what lets those unfortunate in appearance have equal footing to those who are attractive, what lets those who are disabled keep up with athletes. It's what lets us find corruption and root it out more effectively than ever before, and it is this spirit of taking down evil people that is going to be crushed by ideas like yours, not the actual evils that lurk within the hearts of men.
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 idea is one person could decide on a message and hundred of articles pushing the message could be generated.
Maybe that would work. Maybe you'd see so much of this people would start to get more selective. Maybe it wouldn't matter because people believe what suits them rather than just being conditioned.
Imagine campaigns that:
Have a general idea of your life stage, interests, career, personality etc, based on advertising profile and commercial surveillance.
Can tailor each message to the recipient.
Can a/b test the crap out of every message for target groups, optimising for best response.
Can deliver fully customised messages in a natural voice (aka google duplex). Conversational ai not required, but can understand some stock phrases and responses.
The future is robots calling you, messaging you, infiltrating social media groups, probing your personality and beliefs, finding YOUR buttons and pushing them, repeatedly.
Am I wrong ? I hope so.
I think the most dangerous propaganda are the news propagandists from MSNBC and other networks who pretend to be from your specific subculture/groups, and then feed you lies and propaganda. That to me is the most dangerous, the Russian bots? nope everybody sees through cruise control shilling but when it's somebody from their own group in a news org and they're spouting lies it's a lot more difficult. I'm old so back in the 1990s news propaganda was just absolutely blatant, any kid could tell Norman General Swartzkopf(spelling) was making up bs about 'precision bombs' we all knew they were just landing wherever and blowing up Mother Theresa's Iraq orphanage by accident, but now it's different. The news corps discovered they need to recruit people from specific identities and use them as a weapon to feed lies to their subculture.
Also I’m interested in the dog that does not bark — Chinese interference in US politics. Does China prefer one side to the other? Which one? What are they doing about it?
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute and https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/02/of...
The intelligence community leadership testified to Congress that this was so.
The leadership of both parties in both houses of Congress believe it was so, though they differ in what if anything should be done, and the level of downplay or up-play differs depending on party and how close or far to leadership a person is. Or if you're Trump.
I was at a bar tonight and I chatted with a guy who works for a major cable provider. Apparently they generate 10 petabytes of data an hour on what you watch, when you watch it etc. That's a lot when you take into account that its all text columns in a MSQL database somewhere. I think they have enough room to have it stashed in S3 for a week before it goes into cold storage because otherwise it's just too bloody expensive.
What are they storing you ask? There's a whole tree on what you're demographics are, a tree on what your device is, a tree on what you are watching etc. And they're all cross referenced with what ad you watch, for how long, when in the show etc.
All of this whizbang tech to find out how to make sure you spend that extra dollar on whatever crap they want you to. I'm sure that the coming automation is pretty horrifying, but what we have now is pretty terrible as well.
On the other hand, we have had actual honest and realistic candidates, like Larry Lessig. And they were so honest they got squashed by their party apparatus before they ever had a chance.
All I disagree with is that it's already semi-automated, has been for some time.
A long time ago, I saw a tech support person with a spreadsheet full of formulaic responses for common issues. "We're sorry you're having trouble with _x_ , dear _y_, have you tried _z_. Please accept a $10 discount voucher for your trouble. Thanks, Bobby Techops" kind of thing.
It has progressed, I'm sure. Why wouldn't it? And will progress more.
And the large actors have no incentive to tell everyone how far they have got. The opposite, in fact, they will try to hide it, e.g. Cambridge Analytica being dragged kicking and screaming into the light.
And a small army of clever educated young people isn't that expensive to a large corporate or state actor. Call Centers depend on it.
The Democrat bots are triggering the Republican bots, and the Russian bots are fighting the Chinese bots for mindshare. Googlebot cannot save us.
I could totally see bots writing most of the YouTube, reddit, and Instagram me-too-style content.
What about your average HN post?
If people want to not look like spam, they're going to have to start being more insightful. This is good.
Also, the bots I see on reddit, YouTube and Instagram generally aren't pushing liberal agendas but right-wing. The automation I see are networks of influencers working together to push out the same narratives.
Here's a bitter pill for everyone. If it turns out that a large fraction of people really can have their opinion changed by bots that wouldn't even pass a Turing test, maybe its time to rethink the idea that everyone gets to vote.
If I can't use the soapbox I use the ballot box. If I can't use the ballot box, I use the ammo box.
So it doesn't matter how dumb the voters are. What matters if is if they can generate violence.
Actually its both. Voting is a legitimacy mechanism (aka avoiding civil war) and a competence mechanism (aka making quality decisions). It is much better at the former, and typically better than historical systems (re: monarchy) at the latter.
It is perfectly reasonable to consider a trade-off that buys us higher competence at a loss of 10%-15% legitimacy. That's a small enough fraction of the population that I wouldn't worry too much about them starting a civil war. Especially if homogeneously distributed.
Wars happen when enough people are willing to sacrifice themselves and others. Leaders sacrifice their own, foot soldiers sacrifice themselves and their enemies.
What makes people willing to sacrifice? An opportunity/threat for a significant shift in quality of life. I don't think democracy, dictatorship or any other form of government or its customs make much of a difference at all.
You can have stable dictatorships and unstable democracies - it's got much more to do with luck and sometimes competence of the people at the top.
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 arbitrary age cutoff?
Surely there are degrees of flawed, with some people being very gullible and uninformed and some not. And surely there is some way and some benefit to the rest of us if we disenfranchise the most susceptible to propaganda.
You're right. I don't believe in Democracy. I believe in Epistocracy.
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-boo...
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.
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 that some people get to skip the test by virtue of being born in the right place. From now on let's include 5 questions chosen at random from the citizenship test on every ballot. In order to prevent the citizenship test itself from being politicized, the pool of questions which might appear on the ballot shall be chosen from the version of the citizenship test which existed before the voting test was added to the ballot.
2. Each candidate on the ballot gets to choose 5 multiple choice questions. The questions must be directly relevant to the powers of the office. Eg you cannot use a question about TV sitcoms from 1950 as a proxy to disenfranchise by age. The veracity of the questions must be a matter of public historical record or a provable logical consequence of facts that are verifiable by public historical record. Eg you cannot ask an opinion question like "Will Obamacare destroy America?" but you can ask "In 2009 did blowhard.com publish an article which concluded that Obamacare will destroy America?". Any news source above some number of readers/viewers can submit their works to the Library of Congress in order to make it qualify as a source for the untampered public historical record. Legislative acts and government commissioned works are automatically part of the public historical record, except in cases that they are classified as state secrets. Eg you cannot use a record of a private conversation of FB as a basis for a public historical record, but you could cite an article from a tiny publication like Rotary Club Monthly (provided it also meets the relevance criteria). Questions must have either a numerical, textual, or boolean answer. The potential answers to questions with numerical answers must differ from each other by at least 10%. The potential answers to questions with textual answers must not have more than 50% of the words in common. Boolean questions can be mapped to numerical or textual questions by asking "which of these statements is true" and then making the question one of the answers. The criteria on numerical and textual questions shall apply to the mapped boolean question. The courts shall approve the veracity and relevance and answer set of questions beforehand, and disagreement with the court decision may be rectified by the usual appeals process.
3. The last part is how to make use of the test results. This is a risky challenge as if there is a simple cutoff score then it is easy to make questions that disenfranchise the majority, and then the minority of the voting minority could always vote to empower itself further by raising the cutoff higher still. Thus there's a potential runaway feedback loop where eventually Democracy is abolished. I have two solutions.
3.1 The scores are aggregated and the bottom 20% are disenfranchised no matter the raw score.
3.2 No one is disenfranchised per se. Instead each vote is weighted by its test score. Each correct answer counts for 1 point and each incorrect answer counts for -1/n where n is the number of wrong choices. A voter that is systematically wrong on every question is probably wrong about their choice for president, so their vote counts negative (which is technically not disenfranchisement). A voter that gets a score near zero is no better than a random guesser thus they add no information to the system and so the system ignores them. A voter that gets every question right knows what they are talking about and so the system gives their voice the most weight.
Edit: Currently editing. I'm adding some after thoughts right now on scenarios where candidates/parties try to attack this and how my proposal is robust to those attacks.
Edit: Demonstrations of robustness.
I think these scenario's are exhaustive but I don't have proof.
0. The people making the test aren't objective (aka the primary criticism of Epistocracy). The citizenship test questions are objective because those questions were made long before my proposed system and the people making them didn't know those questions would be used for this purpose. The questions chosen by the candidates are biased, but they are biased in a way that exactly cancels out so that neither party has an advantage. The possibility of disenfranchising most/all is addressed in section 3.
1. A candidate leaks their answers to their base of voters. This is improbable as keeping everyone quiet would require a voter-base sized conspiracy.
2. A candidate picks questions which pander to biases. Eg "True or False, Democrat XYZ proposes to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants?" The system is robust against this because the question could have actually come from candidate XYZ (who knows he never said such a thing) as a way to lower the opposition voting weight or the question could have come from opposition candidate ABC because he knows his base will think its true. A voter that does not truly know the underlying information is equally likely to increase or decrease the weight of their vote by guessing based on their biases. The only way to have weight in this system is to be an informed voter.
3. A party props up an irrelevant 3rd party in order to pack the test. The first problem with this is that if you prop up another candidate that's similar to your own, you risk splitting your own vote in two. The second problem is that the marginal benefit is 50% of the questions are favorable to you (and 25% neutral) instead of 33% (and 33% neutral). So doing this may tip the weights, but it certainly doesn't guarantee you a win. The marginal benefit can be further reduced by upping the fraction of neutral questions. The third reason this attack doesn't work is either party can do it. There is no asymmetry that one party can take advantage of. At best you get away with it for one election cycle until the other party starts doing it.
What's good enough for the purposes of immigration control isn't necessarily good enough for the purposes of voting. A civics exam would select the most motivated groups who are willing to cram, as well as the knowledgeable, and there's no guarantee that the latter would outnumber the former. You want motivated immigrants who are willing to study in order to enter your country, but you don't necessarily want to restrict voting to the group of people who are most willing to put in effort, because that group includes everyone on the political fringe.
Did you read section 2? The immigration exam is only a third of the questions on my proposed ballot.
>You want motivated immigrants who are willing to study in order to enter your country, but you don't necessarily want to restrict voting to the group of people who are most willing to put in effort, because that group includes everyone on the political fringe.
Did you read section 3.1/3.2? Unless "the fringe" is 80% of people, voting will not be restricted to only the fringe under 3.1. It is less clear how the alternative proposal 3.2 skews the weights of extremists.
The rest of point 2 is just defining valid questions in a way that is very hard to game and legally unambiguous enough for a judge to enforce fairly.
It isn't clear to me if this is necessarily a bitter pill as much as a possible direction for education reform. If unsophisticated bots are able to efficiently disseminate information to a wide audience, would it be possible to (using analogous techniques) vastly decrease the cost and increase the scalability of public education?
Maybe we should start by stopping to conflate being rational and wise with being 'educated'. As if going to college was some sort of panacea for all of our problems.
Lately I've started to think that higher education(particularly undergrad) has more in common with a cargo cult than many would like to admit.
What if I had a bot that merely said the following:
"Democratic candidate XYZ wants to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants with your tax dollars."
Such a bot would not pass the Turing test, but it would be speaking the truth (for many of the candidates) and that truth would be relevant to many voters' interest. So what?
I think people need to understand that the real problem from the media's point of view is that decades ago, they controlled 99 percent of the discourse. Now they control...95 percent. And they don't like it. So...Russia Russia Russia Squirrel! Russia Russia Russia Squirrel!
>"Democratic candidate XYZ wants to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants with your tax dollars."
>Such a bot would not pass the Turing test, but it would be speaking the truth (for many of the candidates) and that truth would be relevant to many voters' interest. So what?
Ironically, I'm pretty sure such a statement is exactly False. No serious candidate (polling >1%) has proposed unconditional healthcare for illegal immigrants. So no, such a bot wouldn't be speaking the truth. By all means prove me wrong. Find any written or recorded instance of a Democratic Candidate saying this.
>Now they control...95 percent. And they don't like it. So...Russia Russia Russia Squirrel! Russia Russia Russia Squirrel!
By thinking this is what the media does, aren't you implicitly admitting that crude repetition of non-arguments work? Just a moment ago didn't you say such tactics are perfectly fine so long as the statements are truth that are relevant to many voters interests? Russian interference is relevant to my interests.
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 or browsing links to sites of which you’ve never heard.
I suppose ''surfing the web'' is truly dead, then. This seems to me like an article written for sheep.
>The second vulnerability is a legal system with numerous blind spots that lawmakers should close. Reddit is the third-most-popular social media site on the Internet, surpassing Facebook among American Internet users. It is also shockingly vulnerable, requiring only an e-mail address to register an account. Consequently, anyone could theoretically register an unlimited number of accounts and, being careful not to stand out to system administrators, effectively control conversations on whatever topics they want.
So, here's the meat of this garbage, then, in which it reveals its ulterior motive. Yes, Reddit is the Wild West, only requiring an email instead of the socially acceptable email, phone, government ID, etc.
>The third vulnerability is online anonymity. While we absolutely do not advocate for de-anonymizing the Internet, it is now so influential over American society that legislators should not leave regulation to social media platforms alone. Congress should put more pressure on social media companies to ensure their users are, at a minimum, who they say they are.
Well, what I was going to write about this issue, after reading just the first few paragraphs, should then be a response to this nonsense. As an aside, there is no ''Who they say they are'' in a truly anonymous system.
I was going to suggest anonymity, true anonymity, as a solution to this issue. I prefer those venues where there are no names attached and one can't tell even if multiple messages are sent by the same person. When you have a discussion in this way, you only judge each message on its own merit. There is no ''Gee, this can't be a bot or government agent, since this guy has a history.'' or any such thing. So, if it seems a great many messages have been made in support of something that isn't usually in the venue, such as a political candidate, say, it seems fair to regard it as astroturfing. When no one or few have a face, it's harder to astroturf, if only because everyone will constantly be on edge and are less likely to be swayed by a few messages. Not only that, but since none or few of the real users have identities, you can't target them with specialized messages or track them or other such things.
Anyway, what a terrible article, ironically submitted by someone with an account less than a day old. I almost wish I could make a living writing such cheap garbage, but I figure it would eventually get to me.
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.