People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook | Hacker News Reader

People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

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258 pointsericzawo144 comments

The worst thing about widespread fake information is the ease with which you can convince yourself that everything you don't like is fake. We don't really have a defense against it that allows for people with opposing perspectives to coexist.

I wonder if it's possible to somehow create a "consistency checker" that can check to see what claims are compatible with what other claims. Not a truth checker; that's far too dangerous and easily abused. But a system that just checks for consistency, combined with a "web of trust" where you can see the connections to people with different perspectives who you know are NOT liars/can connect to events you KNOW are true. That might help people trust information from outside of their comfort zone and identify problems with their own outlook.

There's precedent for that kind of a thing in the math world. MetaMath is an example of a system that verifies proofs based on substitution rules alone, plus whatever axioms you add to the system. Natural language news stories that need to correspond to reality are obviously a much different beast, and maybe it's impossible to do something equivalent with knowledge that isn't as rigid/formal as math, but it's tempting to try.

Could easily backfire and make the problem worse if done improperly, though. The risk is that such a system could be taken over/hijacked my ideologically motivated individuals to reinforce their own ideas and hide inconsistencies rather than shine a light on them.

My solution is to just hang out in meatspace, and assume everything I can't physically observe doesn't exist. This has been a surprisingly effective solution.

This seems like it is how (non-ironic) flat earthers come to be.

The motions of the sun and seasons (my personal experience) are much easier explained by the "round" model :) The truth from ground level is more like "I can't actually know if it's round or not, because the scale is invisible from here". I readily admin I have not seen a round earth and can't say that I know for sure (in the end not even my own memory can be trusted, so I can never really know). But even with that the flat model is really horrible.

My point being, I'm sure theres some more weird psychological phenomena that makes people want to believe in a flat earth, rather then hanging out in meat space.

The worst thing about widespread disinformation is that it convinces many people to vote in a way that conflicts with their interests.

> I wonder if it's possible to somehow create a "consistency checker" that can check to see what claims are compatible with what other claims.

Bad news: the political narratives of whatever party you don't like are self-consistent, and perfectly consistent with the facts that they hear about. The people you think are ignorant are already seeking out news from sources they know and trust, and they already evaluate new information in the context of whatever they already believe. The issue is just not as simple as you suggest.

Don't get me wrong, in no way am I suggesting this is an easy problem to fix. I'm aware of how good people are at cramming huge amounts of knowledge into a siloed yet consistent narrative (and I am not claiming myself to be completely innocent of this either, though I think I try fairly hard not to). I'm also well aware of the extreme difficulty in making a system that can automatically check for consistency in the way I'm describing.

However, there are chinks in ideological armor which, if given the right light, can cause breaches and get people to collaborate and understand one another better.

I would argue that the current lack of any form of reliable, extensive consistency checker that people can trust (ie, a SYSTEM they can trust rather than a group of people) leads people to silo themselves into small, isolated networks. They don't operate outside of their network, even though there might be information out there somewhere that's valuable and would cause their worldview to expand, because they know there are at least some nefarious actors putting out inconsistent/untrue information, and it's too hard to identify.

If there were some way to automatically "expand" your axioms and see how much of the world they can explain while maintaining their consistency, it could theoretically be a non biased, trustworthy way of testing your assumptions of the world outside of your own, small, limited network, and might help people recognize what parts of the world it is and isn't explaining.

I'm not sure any human system is self consistent. Our entire society is built on incomplete information.

Indeed, I've long desired such a tool not as a weapon to convince my enemies of their logical flaws but as a mirror to convince myself of my own.

> I'm not sure any human system is self consistent

I think you're right, with the possible exception of math. The entire discipline is about finding a large, self consistent set of rules, and a lot of progress has been made towards that end.

I think a system that checks for consistency with regards to observations about the real world would be useful as a roadmap even if the ultimate goal of finding a set of rules that was entirely self consistent and described pretty much everything we observed would be too large/complicated to figure out.

If there were a way of testing the effectiveness of our information and our assumptions by testing our information and assumptions against all other information, I think it would help identify how "good" our information and assumptions were.

Such a system could theoretically help identify bad actors. If an actor is putting out information that is inconsistent with other information, that could mean a) that actor's information is "bad" b) the other information is "bad". To determine which person is "right", you could look at whether the axioms they put forward are consistent with things you accept as true, how many things those axioms can explain accurately, and then compare that to the axioms and information put forward by other people.

I realize this is essentially what people do now when they generate their own little web of trust (although there are lots of charisma/confidence/rhetorical angles to human trust that this is unrelated to), but I think if you could some how automate those consistency checks, you'd be able to more easily test your own ideas without worrying about someone with an opposing ideological bent messing with you/being turned of by personality types of presentation of people with a different worldview/etc.

This is all extremely theoretical, and again, if the kind of system I was describing were somehow possible, there's a fair chance it could backfire/be used as a sort of "ultimate truth authority" that ideologues could use to stifle ideas they don't like. But I do think the current situation is such that people are going to try to make a "truth engine" regardless of whether it's possible or a good idea, so trying to figure out how to steer that ship in the best direction possible seems prudent (and imo that direction is to try to make it free/open and dependent on consistency/webs of trust rather than anything authoritative).

Even if it the “consistency checker” was completely unbiased people wouldn’t care. Most people are just looking for validation and will deliberately ignore facts or find a way to rationalize them away.

You'd be surprised. For example, there was a terror attack in London shortly before the recent UK elections, which our Labour party responded to by spreading a bunch of lies that tried to blame the ruling Tories for the attack. One of our legal bloggers then attacked the Tories as the liars for correctly debunking those claims, backed it up with a blog post that showed those Labour claims were false for exactly the reasons claimed - but crucially, without tying the errors it pointed out to any claims made by anyone but the Tories - and managed to successfully pass it off as proof the Tories were the lying liars.

(His objection was that the Tory claims were misleading because they didn't mention that the courts could have given the Parole Board the oversight which Labour falsely claimed they had anyway and failed to exercise by handing down a kind of sentence that Labour falsely accused the Tories of stopping them from handing down. Except carefully worded to make it sound like the Tory claims and only those claims were complete lies.)

I actually just published a guide on how you can help ensure that ("deepfake") tools that you make are less likely to end up misused like this: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614912/ethical-deepfake-t...

Curious what folks think. I also just posted it to /newest if you want to respond there.

Is anybody old enough to remember if people once had analogous reactions to software like photoshop?

While I don't recall any specific article like this one published, I do remember people writing about similar worries in the mid '90s.

I am (mid-forties) and started using Photoshop around version 2. People definitely worried about the integrity of photographic evidence.

I think what's different now is the combination of much more powerful cheaper tools (those fake GAN generated faces are likely taken from one of the sites making them for free) vs Photoshop at the time was thousands of inflation-adjusted dollars.

This is coupled with a much more efficient peer to peer and unvalidated news system (which there's much to like), but consider Dan Rather. He was forced out of CBS Evening News and producers were fired for having been fooled by (not producing) digitally forged memos for a story critical of George W. Bush. [1]

Contrast that to whatever group is putting up fake stories and accounts of Facebook, there are no repercussions.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather#Killian_documents

What is even crazier about the Dan Rather story is that the story about how George W. Bush avoided Vietnam due to political manipulation and bribes was actually TRUE.

Before it was ever reported in the USA it was reported in the UK by The Guardian among others. Dan Rather's team started their investigation with sources in hand which already constituted very strong evidence.

Given that the story was true and Dan Rather's team was starting with solid evidence of it, Bush's team was at a disadvantage in discrediting the story. Their solution was to slip a clearly faked smoking gun that was so good that Rather would have to lead with it. After Rather lead with it, Bush's team was able to discredit Rather and get him fired. The result was that the story became toxic and nobody in the USA was willing to report the story.

The result is rather amazing. By faking evidence for what really did happen, Bush's team was able to make everyone believe that it didn't happen! And was able to keep the story out of the US media!

Part of the problem may have been the story didn't really resonate with the American public. In theory I guess I'm meant to hate cowards and hypocrites, but learning that Bush the Younger once feared war is almost humanizing.

That's an interesting conspiracy theory. Now where's the hard evidence?

I read it in one of Greg Palast's books. He reported on the story for the BBC, and knew what evidence Rather's team started with because he was one of the people who supplied it to them. You can also still find reporting on the story online from The Guardian if you look for it.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Palast for more on the reporter that I named.

And lest you think that this kind of dirty and underhanded trick would have been off limits, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Vets_and_POWs_for_Truth for a more widely known story of the underhanded tricks used by Bush supporters in that particular election.

So no actual evidence, just innuendo.

Let's see.

I pointed you at an author who is a reporter for the BBC. I am not sure which of his books it is in, but that shouldn't be too hard to find out. (My guess is Armed Madhouse.) He lays out the interviews and documents that were sufficient for the BBC to report the story as fact. This is all verifiable.

According to you, this is "just innuendo". And therefore you have dismissed it out of hand.

The BBC is not in the habit of publishing as fact what is "just innuendo".

I looked at the BBC reports. There's no hard evidence, just innuendo and hearsay. You're making things up.

I'm not sure it even matters if the tools are used at all -- the mere "boogeyman" factor that it's possible will likely cause people to start discounting video evidence as real. The same happens with altered photos already. Nobody believes a photo anymore.

Here is a summary of potential mitigations for those too busy to click:

# Limiting users or use cases

- User Vetting: Carefully vet those who can use a tool (Example: Synthesia only working with vetted enterprise clients.)

- Usage Constraints: Limit the synthesis possibilities. (Example: Humen is providing only a limited set of movements for generated videos.)

# Discouraging malicious use of flexible and public tools

- Clear disclosure: Ensuring and requiring that manipulated outputs are clearly labeled (including via metadata).

- Consent protection: Requiring the consent of those being impersonated.

- Detection friendliness: Supporting those working on detection and not seeking to fool detection systems.

- Hidden watermarks: Embedding data through robust watermarks.

- Usage logs: Storing information about usage and media outputs.

- Use restrictions: Enforcing contracts that prohibit forms of violative or malicious use.

Not all apply to every system of course. The article has more detail!

> Curious what folks think.

Personal take: I value open source software, and while you do note that some of your suggestions can be implemented in open source while hoping that bad actors don't take the time to remove them you also suggest (especially in the other article that elaborates on when to release code) that some code simply shouldn't be shared with the public. I hope you lose the culture war, and we find other ways to deal with this issue. The people I trust least are the ones most capable of forging evidence, and I hope that proliferation of this technology you fear will cause us to rethink our standards of trust and evidence altogether; signature or it didn't happen.

What age demographic still really uses facebook? American's 35+? All my friends us Messenger and the rest is on other social media platforms for content.

edit dont know why this got downvoted, it was a legit question because everyone knows who the primary age group of votes is, so Im wondering if there is data on age demographics of actual FB use.

>American's 35+?

You're probably right, but until recently that was also the people most likely to vote. [1] So going after your core demographic who can be found on one site makes sense. You said it yourself: younger people are spread across many different social media platforms. I assume that means reaching them as a whole requires more time, effort and expense than buying ads on Facebook.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-mille...

>American's 35+?

I.e., the demo majority[0] and the only ones who actually vote.

Seems pretty solid.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...

>All my friends us Messenger and the rest is on other social media platforms for content.

Be cognizant of your bubble. All of my friends (aka people I actually regularly interact with) don't ever use FB anymore, but a quick glance at my FB feed shows that a huge population of people from my high school (people in their mid-to-late 20s), mostly the ones I haven't interacted with in years, still use it heavily.

I've got every known facebook domain blocked in my hosts file (basic common sense move for the non-dumb) and can't even verify that sort of thing.

I agree, that is why I asked the question. Has there been real research done to determine who the most active deep users of the platform are. Im not judging people that do or dont use it, for any reason, just curious about the efficacy of these fake users trying to shape a platform for an election (I assume that is what the fraudulent accounts are for).

The ones that vote in high numbers.

> American's 35+?

FB has >1 billion real users. So by the simplest arithmetic, the vast majority of its users cannot be American, regardless of age.

The context here is affecting American elections. Given that the only interesting FB demographic to discuss is the American one.

And I say that as a European.

We're including bogus accounts then?

Or are we saying that foreign users are more naive and less likely to value privacy? I doubt that that racist supposition is true, but respect your opinion and your forthcoming documentation proving it.

I have a bunch of events and groups on facebook, what do you use instead of these?

meetup.com worked for me in the past

Email and Signal/SMS work very well for invites.

All my friends us Messenger

You mean...Facebook Messenger?

The same group is on Twitter, and just got kicked off.[1] Fake Messenger accounts are a thing, too, and harder to report.[2]

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/475536-facebook-twitte...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-messenger-user-watch-...

I'm 42. Anecdotally, most of my peers at least have an account. Many use FB periodically for checking in with older family. It's also used for events and "meetup" stuff. And the market place (with various local for-sale-or-trade groups) has largely replaced Ebay and craigslist, because access to those groups can be somewhat controlled. Craigslist and Ebay are both a dumpster fire of scammers, low-ballers, and overall shady characters (which is saying a lot when FB is increasingly patrolled by "Russian" bots).

Basically, FB was the first massive social network, and so far, nothing better has come along (that has enough membership to entice people away).

It will be interesting when the election cycles start to cross over into eachother. For instance, start lining up primaries for an election 5 years away. We could be in a permenent election, with people slowly positioning themselves to be elected sometime later.

Then, we can finally give up and just draft our representatives. Two months before it's time for new politicians to take over, they would draw names, and do 6am door-kicking raids to abduct the "candidates" and take them to D.C. to represent us.

Multivac to the rescue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)

>We could be in a permenent election, with people slowly positioning themselves to be elected sometime later.

Aren't we already there? The current US president held his first 2020 campaign rally on February 18 2017, less than a month after his inauguration:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/us/politics/campaign-over...

I might be misunderstand but politicians have always positioned themselves to be elected sometime later. In fact it seems the opposite is just gaining some steam, first time candidates running for high office as first race, when it used to be slowly going from local to national.

Trump never stopped campaigning as it is. He has been holding rallies this entire time.

Who are those people who go to political rallies? This feels so alien to me. Americans support their politicians like the rest of the world their local club and badge and vice versa.

Having grown up in Germany, the concept is super scary.

I'd say the phenomenon is pretty unique to Trump and Sanders. In Trump's case, his speeches are largely stand-up comedy, and the parts that aren't played for laughs contain the kind of rah-rah patriotism that people come out to see at 4th of July parades and the like.

Most Americans are indifferent or hostile to their representatives, when they even know who they are.

The only thing a first term president cares about is a second term. Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton etc all did this.

>Then, we can finally give up and just draft our representatives.

This is called sortition. It's basically what we do to select jurors already. Athens did this to select their officials (though people had to opt in to be selectable) and they thought it was obviously better than elections.

Facebook won the social media war by cultivating a smaller, more selective group of users (college students). It meant sharing had some more definitive meaning, and provided some added safety for marketplace and message board functions. It was their secret weapon against the MySpaces and CraigsLists, and yet they completely abandoned it.

If they really wanted to further their company mission, their Manhattan Project should have been a plan to keep the internet authentic and "owned" by humans. I no longer think this will be their downfall (it has been a problem in the system since at least 2012), but I cannot think of a more stark example of a company trashing an original philosophy so wholeheartedly.

It wasn't Mark's original philosophy - it was a stolen mechanism that the twins who hired him to develop ConnectU had come up with, so unsurprising that it wouldn't be kept as a cornerstone.

That is a catch-22, isn't it? The common definition of "winning the social media war" is to get a lot of users. That is inherently contradictory to "cultivating" a "selective group". Just as water flows downhill, there will inevitably be a few most popular social networks, which will inevitably be driven by clickbait and moral panic and targeted by all bad actors.

I already saw that happen with atheism. When I was young you had to be pretty far from normal to be really into it, and there was some fantasy that once everybody was an athiest, society would be cool and rational. Now about a hundred million Americans are effectively athiests and we're no more rational than before. The problems stayed the same, because people stayed the same.

> Now about a hundred million Americans are effectively athiests and we're no more rational than before.

The US has approximately 330 million people. Asserting more than 1/3 of all adults (330 million includes children) in the US are atheist is a bold and, in your comment, unsubstantiated claim.

This is a weird tangent, and "effectively atheist" is an ill-defined umbrella, but if we take that to mean "no religion / unaffiliated / atheist / agnostic" then it doesn't seem too far off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_Sta...

By survey, over a quarter of Americans are "nones" when it comes to religion. Much fewer actively take the label of athiest, but there's functionally no difference.

The measurement for success isn't "a lot of users", the measurement is "a lot of real users". Bots do not click on ads and make users more distrustful of the content on the platform. Even the most ill-informed person adds more to a group than an automated propaganda machine.

I don't have a way for Facebook to counter the rise of AI and other technology trends short of all new accounts submitting a vial of blood to guarantee they are a unique human being. I'm being facetious here... but Zuck would probably love this dystopia. If Facebook devoted their near-infinite resources to solving this modern problem of technology, they would be in a much better shape today. The internet, privacy activists, and humanity as a whole may not be better off, but FBs value would be.

Also, I'm not so certain about your atheism argument. The decline of religion in the world has people thinking more rationally about some problems (LGBT Rights, a woman's right to choose, censorship based on lewd/unfit behavior, etc.). We may not be a utopia, but I wouldn't say "people stayed the same".

On Facebook you would mostly encounter such people if someone you know shares their posts. Comments are buried too deep to have a widespread impact.

If a fake person writes the post and your friend shares it, or a guy named "Joe the Plumber" writes it, does it really make a difference?

It is also in the realm of possibility that a group of folks is "false flagging" these profiles to make the other side look disingenuous and shady.

Sure, in fact there’s a term for that called Ratfucking.

... what?

It's a real term in American politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking

Thanks! Now I've seen everything. (It's official; with that one link, that was the everything.)

love how the only facebook comment under the article is a fake "make money from home" bot

It's poetic really. I bet most of us saw that too but because of the all-too-familiar bot text didn't think twice about it. Kind of like banner blindness.

It makes me wonder just how much damage these influence campaigns do. For instance, if Russia spent $100k in FB ads to reach ~140 million people[1](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/04/18/w...), how much of that "reach" translates into votes? I'd like to think people aren't as dumb as people think.

>I'd like to think people aren't as dumb as people think.

It's not really about people being smart or dumb. There's evidence that marketing and advertisements create sentiment, even if you don't believe in what the ads say. It's just the way our human brains work. And these entities are, if I had to bet, putting a lot of money towards getting people to believe certain things and act in certain ways without them explicitly knowing that they're being influenced.

If only the political bots were as obvious, though. When you spot one of those "make money easy", you know it's a bot right away, not even two words in. With a political troll, you can't tell unless you know what to look for or can spot a pattern in their behavior.

I'd like to remind everyone that as we are fast approaching the prospect of hundreds of thousands of AIs and bots graduating from their Turing Tests, we must take the internet's own proverb very seriously.

  Do not believe everything you see on the internet.

It doesn’t matter how autonomous and free thinking you are or any other individual is— social media is transforming us into a collective. Like ants excreting pheromones, our actions in aggregate are more powerful than any individual, the result being whatever results from this untested cocktail of biology, language and global connection. It’s unprecedented and borderline unpredictable.

Nobody is in a position to directly manipulate our path... but our trajectory, if nudged in the right place and time, can have massive consequences in the future. Both the left and the right in the US are dysfunctional as a result of trajectories that were nudged decades ago.

How is this worse than tightly controlled mass media?

I think people like to look back on this non-existent golden era of News where it was fair and balanced and just reported the truth. That era never existed.

At least now you have options.

I hate social media as much as anyone, but it's not bringing an end to the world. It's easy to manipulate people of Facebook. But it's way easier on Fox News or CNN.

I think they're actually feeding off one another. e.g. recent controversy:

> In December 2019, Newton Dunn wrote an article for The Sun titled "'HIJACKED LABOUR'", in which he reported that former British intelligence officers alleged that "Jeremy Corbyn is at the centre of an extraordinary network of hard-left extremists."[10] It was later found that the ultimate sources for the claim included the antisemitic, far-right websites the Millennium Report and Aryan Unity... The article was deleted on the day of publication, without comment from the paper or Newton Dunn.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Newton_Dunn ; I believe this has already been through the wikipedia controversy process)

You have options but you are being manipulated in subtle ways, whether nefariously or not. And that "manipulation" is a whole lot more hidden due to simply being "algorithms". On some level it is getting a free-pass compared to traditional media where you can clearly see the bias.

"Algorithms" aren't mind controlling magic. Even if they can shift your political opinions accidentally, there are tons of people trying their hardest to do that on purpose. Your feed is filtered, so are the articles in your favorite newspaper.

You don't really have options. They're just replaced with the equivalent of dark patterns nudging you into buying things or doing certain things.

You immediately know where the government stands. You have no clue whether or not the user you're interacting with on Twitter or Facebook is an actual user or someone paid to spread bullshit.

Similarly, we all know the exact stances of Fox News or CNN whether or not we agree with it. But when you see an article on Facebook with a lot of likes or a trend on Twitter, do you know whose pushing it and why? Did it occur through an organic series of social actions or is it a narrative pushed by unaccountable bots?

You’re prioritising truth over social cohesion. I like truth but without social cohesion, no amount of truth matters.

> social media is transforming us into a collective

Or said another way: if you play, you lose.

Your best bet is not to play. Quit social media. It’s actually not hard.

I can still lose if my fellow voters are making decisions based on nonsense, electing the Flat Earth Bridge Construction Party.

It really isn’t hard, and by leaving you make social media less valuable to the leftovers. I left Facebook and people started messaging and inviting me to events over other means. People value relationships over platforms, a fact the “how am I supposed to engage with my family/friends/events/groups/photos”-excuse crowd often overlooks.

I think the rise in awareness and practice of mindfulness counteracts this dystopic march.

Just a few paragraphs in, the writer incorrectly states that Unsplash requires attribution, which is the exact opposite of the entire premise of Unsplash.

If the writer can’t pick up on that obvious fact, makes me trust the whole story less.

There's another story (I assume of many) over at the NY Times with the headline "Facebook Discovers Fake AI-Generated Profiles".

I rather like the "People Who Do Not Exist" in this headline.

To blend in with humans, these fake profiles could take advantages of AI progress on the Turing test to converse with real people, ultimately befriending (some high fraction of) us.

The persuasive effects of these fake friends on (political) advertising are terrifying.

I have a couple fake profiles I setup. Pretty easy to do!

Did anyone stop and consider these aren’t fake people but people who value anonymity?

I have 20 friends who use such tools and tech to hide their identities. Yes they lean right, slightly but they do. They all do this to avoid being found by employers and other. One of my friends is a prominent person in a legal field, another one is a member of a three letter group.

Other than my real name - My Facebook profile has all fake information for public facing as well. It always has - and it always will. Any AI viewing my profile or person viewing my profile has no means of identifying me as a real person unless they coorelate my name elsewhere.

For many of my friends - Their real name is not used.

In an era of fake news and “ZOMG RUSSIA” we’ve become our worst selves and thrown logic out the window instead falling victim to knee jerk reactions.

Surely that scenario is the exception and not the rule.

But also, if you have the Facebook app on your phone, or associated with your phone number or email, you’re not anonymous. It’s been an issue for sex workers in the past who try to conceal their identity on social media but Facebook still manages to suggest their “Johns” as friends.

People are seeking anonymity from their peers and their employers, not neccesarily from facebook itself. I haven't heard of facebook Doxxing people with any sort of regularity.

This isn’t true. I have Facebook on my phone and there’s no way to identify me by my phone number. It’s unlisted on my profile and not public. Searching for me by number or email does not work. I’ve check my Fb privacy settings quite often and try to find workarounds.

If you upload contacts in Wazzup you’ll see them suggested into your facebook

I've heard that using fake names is also popular with the youth, though I'm not sure if they're doing it on facebook or some other platform.

I promise you... they’re not doing it on pornhub.... :eyes:

Why are they all, in unison, spreading political bs? Don't be naive. These are not accounts for privacy minded people, this is orchestrated bad-faith people attempting to sabotage elections.

> Why are they all, in unison, spreading political bs?

People enjoy participating in discussions about their interests. Many people are interested in politics. It seems natural that people would enjoy discussing politics.

This is common place. Anybody who has ever been on Reddit knows that people enjoy discussing politics via pseudonym. It seems natural that people would do so on facebook as well.

Whether you like it or not - Political bs to one person is another persons truth.

Only through solid and level communication do we remove lies, slander, and fake news.

In 2016 - The man who ran the largest fake news website on the internet. Abcnews.com.co ran it was a joke and a means to make money. He had no ill intent. He had no skin in the game politically. He was just a dude trying to make money.

And afterwards he fell into a depression for the belief he got Trump elected.

There’s no sides to this issue than people are willing to accept.

If it walks like a duck and quacks exactly like 10,000 other ducks, then it's probably a duck.

This article isn't about accounts being used semi-anonymously. It's about accounts which are all spreading the exact same thing down to the letter and propagating the exact same articles.

> I have 20 friends who use such tools

Wait, do you have 20 friends that ran StyleGAN2 for a couple of hours to generate human faces? Can't they just avoid uploading a profile picture?

When I used Facebook my avatar was an anime and my name was an obvious joke. I didn't need to simulate a natural person identity.

One of these friends works somewhere Edward S worked. A building with guards and guns.

You tell me.

How is that relevant? Why would working for a military contractor with guards and guns mean you should use an image from thispersondoesnotexist.com instead of an anime picture? Especially when your 100 friends also use an image from thispersondoesnotexist.com , drawing attention to a weird group of people who then all become admins of the same groups.

So you're saying there are hundreds of people who all create accounts at the same time, all use the same type of profile picture, all join together to be admins of political groups, and then all spend all day spamming links to thebl.com ? That's beyond belief. It's very unrealistic to think so many people would behave so identically.

This is nothing new. Influencing elections is a part of having elections -- this liberal idea that "bots" are somehow poisoning the electoral process is beyond out of touch.

The TV you watch, whether it's CNN or FOX or MSNBC or CNBC has more of an outsize effect on how you develop your personal beliefs than any of this nonsense. The biggest thing to come out of America's Second Red Scare is that people are more likely to listen to others when they spout propaganda that they already believe.

To think it's the FSB or GRU is somehow responsible for a defect in the design of elections in a democratic republic is laughable. If anything, the "Russians" are doing what Siberia and their rough country taught them: make the best of a bad situation.

I was forwarded Sacha Baron Cohen's facebook critique (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/22/sacha-bar...) by a friend, as an argument to outlaw facebook. I brought up how Bush swiftboated Kerry and won the election. Media has always been used as a political weapon, it seems. Is FB much worse?

In somewhat-related news, a group of Washington Post reporters tweeted a party photo labeled 'Merry Impeachmas'.

There is no impartial source of media today. Not traditional media, not social media. You have to go out and talk to people around you to know what people really think.

"If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed, if you do read it, you’re misinformed." - Denzel Washington

How can we know anyone online is real?

Ironically, zuc's new photo looks like it's been generated: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10111007623865331&se...

Catching faces from thispersondoesnotexist is easy - just poll the their site every 1 second and collect all faces. Others are probably trickier but FB is sophisticated enough.

My real question is how can one specify Z vector that generates a specific (say myself's) face? http://podgorskiy.com/static/stylegan/stylegan.html#wMUUPtHj...

Fake people reading and writing fake news on fake websites? If this keeps up, we'll end up with a fake President. Don't give me negative points, for this is a fake reply.

The world has gone full Philip K Dick

For those interested in understanding the reference here, I found this useful: https://expressiveegg.org/2017/01/03/four-kinds-dystopia/

It's Always Sunny in Phildickia.

I occasionally think about the end of The Man in the High Castle, when the characters realize they are living in a fictional alternate history.

WTF man? Not everyone has read everything already...

It’s been out for decades, surely spoilers are expired now by any reasonable time limit

While I am fine with the social conventions that hold spoiling recent works as anathema, or even older works within limited contexts (for instance, /r/WoT tries to allow readers to talk about the early books without instantly being spoiled for the later ones), the absurd demands people make to not "spoil" any book or movie people still read or watch recreationally -- and not just as a homework assignment -- is harmful.

The metaphors, the concepts, the philosophies expressed in books, even trashy 1960's SF, are important. They are tools we can use to explain, to convince, to argue, to communicate.

Demanding that we never speak aloud in any public place the words from any work of art more recent than Black Beauty (is that too recent? Is it OK to at least reference the end of Romeo and Juliet?) is demanding that we weaken ourselves, like Harrison Bergeron in Kurt Vonnegut's short story of the same name, and only communicate at the level of the least well-read individual in any society. If books are not going to contribute to discourse, if we cannot tell other people of what we read, we might as well burn them all, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

And at the end of the day, the only thing being protected by fervent cries of "spoilers!" "spoilers!" are the barest, sparsest facts of the story: if finding out the ending of a story is the only reason to read it, you were probably done a favor by having it "spoiled". Journey before destination.

While I appreciate your thorough and heartfelt response here, what I don't understand is how your comment would have been diminished in any way without the explicit spoiler?

Anyone who has already read the book would get it anyway. Everyone else wouldn't be any worse off, since that simple summary doesn't help understand the nuance of why it reminded of the ending. The only thing it does is spoil the ending.

> If finding out the ending of a story is the only reason to read it, you were probably done a favor by having it "spoiled"

False dichotomy much? It's not the only reason, but it's certainly a decent sized factor in the enjoyment of a novel. I certainly don't feel like you did me any favors.

!!! SPOILER ALERT ABOVE !!!

Hopefully you saw this before reading the above comment.

Spoiler alerts are a 20th century invention. Everyone has been taught to get angry about spoilers, but the very word "spoiler" itself is an internet invention coined in Usenet. The idea of society at large working hard to keep a fictional story secret is a marketing ploy invented by Alfred Hitchcock to sell more movie tickets to his mystery films. It used to be common to know everything about a story before you even experienced it, and there is evidence that despite what people say, they actually enjoy stories even more if they know beforehand how the story ends.

http://www.wired.com/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything/

If a story isn't worth reading if you already know the ending, it's not worth reading without knowing the ending either. Good stories cannot be spoiled. Good stories are not merely puzzles to be savoured for a single punchline.

We also enjoy stories we already know well. It's why James Bond movies keep getting churned out despite all following the exact same formula or why Shakespeare plays are still in production centuries after they were written. Only bad stories are ruined by knowing the story.

" but the very word "spoiler" is an internet invention coined in Usenet,"

Spoiler as a word was around in avionics well before UseNet even existed.

Obviously I mean in the meaning of "spoil a story"; of course the precise sequence of characters of "ess, pee, oh, eye, ell, ee, are" existed before.

This is a fascinating perspective I never really considered. The implications of "Spoiler Culture" on modern storytelling and consuming entertainment really are massive.

The seasonal buzz about Christmas movies has me dwelling on the paradox between the backlog vs. the new release. 21st century entertainers are competing against an entire century of modern culture available to viewers in a second.

How is it that my home has Netflix, HBO, and Hulu, and yet my wife and I are still paralyzed about what to watch every night? Why do we naturally lean towards the fresh thing on the front page?

Movies and other art forms are just bandwidth now, so Hollywood has to artificially set the value through marketing and buzz. It seems like every studio is combating this existential threat in different ways (Sunday night dramas that trigger water cooler conversations, visually stunning films that are meant for the big screen, twist-filled plotlines, podcasts and other media focused on discussing the "latest episodes").

And even without spoilers, one often already has a pretty good idea of the ending not even halfway into a movie.

As far as I'm concerns, spoilers should be avoided only for works where there's a prominent Sixth Sense-like twist.

Do you mean the President Rudy Kalbfleisch simulacrum who keeps breaking down in "The Simulacra", or the President Abraham Lincoln simulacrum who doesn't want to be sold in "We Can Build You"? Or do you mean the world has gone full blown "Faith of our Fathers" where the government is putting hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply to keep us from discovering the truth about our glorious leader(s)? Or some other book written by the fake Philip K Dick simulacrum built by Hanson Robotics, who was was ostensibly lost on a flight from Dallas to San Francisco in late 2005, and is rumored to have absconded to an undisclosed location and rebooted his writing career on the Dark Web?

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226460.The_Simulacra

The Simulacra, by Philip K. Dick.

Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, The Simulacra is the story of an America where the whole government is a fraud and the President is an android. Against this backdrop Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist, is struggling to practice in a world full of the maladjusted. Ian Duncan is desperately in love with the first lady, Nicole Thibideaux, who he has never met. Richard Kongrosian refuses to see anyone because he is convinced his body odor is lethal. And the fascistic Bertold Goltz is trying to overthrow the government. With wonderful aplomb, Philip K. Dick brings this story to a crashing conclusion and in classic fashion shows there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/400270.We_Can_Build_You

We Can Build You, by Philip K. Dick.

Louis Rosen and his partners sell people--ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there's the added complication that someone--or something--like Abraham Lincoln may not want to be sold.

Is an electronic Lincoln any less alive than his creators? Is a machine that cares and suffers inferior to the woman Louis loves--a borderline psychopath who does neither? With irresistible momentum, intelligence, and wit, Philip K. Dick creates an arresting techno-thriller that suggests a marriage of Bladerunner and Barbarians at the Gate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_of_Our_Fathers_(short_st...

Faith of Our Fathers, by Philip K Dick.

Tung Chien is a Vietnamese bureaucrat in a world that has been conquered by Chinese-style atheist communism, where the population is kept docile with hallucinogenic drugs. When a street vendor gives Tung an illegal anti-hallucinogen, he discovers that the Party leader has a horrible secret.

https://www.hansonrobotics.com/philip-k-dick/

Philip K Dick, Research Robot.

Activated in 2005, Hanson Robotics debuted Philip K. Dick (aka Philip K. Dick Android) at Wired Nextfest. Designed by David Hanson as a robotic paean to the sci-fi writer of the same name, it was initially created using thousands of pages of the author’s journals, letters and published writings.

The most powerful agent is the one which manages to confiscate our only real asset - our time.

Trump is pretty good at it with all the controversies he is generating.

AI-assisted systems will be targeted at maximizing this interaction metric. You are slowly cooked by your favorite entertainer of the day to be then fed with an opinion which you take as your own. It is not novel at all.

This. Fact-checking is more time consuming than making things up. So they can drown out the fact checkers easily. And the facts are often uncomfortably murky. Whereas the lies build loyalty and belonging, an ideal basis for a movement.

> Fact-checking is more time consuming than making things up.

AKA the "bullshit asymmetry principle"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

"Both sidesism" is a closely related problem.

"We interviewed Elena, a geophysicist, about the different ways scientists collect data about the planet we live on and the cosmos it's situated in. On the other side, Bob from the internet offers his theory about the earth being flat".

Your expecting a fake reply from a fake phone sending fake bytes through a fake cyberverse. The worst part of all the faking is the people who won’t fake their faking.

Well, fake you!

In Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" he proposes a distant alternate-history future where a priest-like cult of technical experts set themselves up to do effective human-aided Google searches which were necessary because the Internet was full of machine-generated disinformation.

I genuinely thought this was an implausible, hokey premise when I read the book in 2008.

I felt similarly about Orson Scott Card's plot in "Ender's Game" where two teenagers influence global political trends by posting a lot on social media (and I'm not the only one who thought this was silly: https://xkcd.com/635/ ). Then a bunch of Macedonian teenagers proved it worked in 2016.

It is very difficult to predict the future.

I tried a few times to explain how Ender's Game was different as they got into "moderated political debates in the higher class nets", but...it's not. We had the 2016 Presidential Debate.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/635:_Locke_and_De...

The thing that worries me is that every year, I find the premise of Neil Schusterman's "Unwind" less far-fetched.

It still seems improbable, but no longer utterly inconceivable.

Yet you give two examples of the future being predicted

"Then a bunch of Macedonian teenagers..."

Uh, is this a commonly accepted fact? I literally had not heard this before now.

I thought it was "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds".

This is super well documented; see:

* This coverage about the industry in Veles: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/

* Similar coverage from Wired: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/

* NBC's version: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma...

* A re-told version of the story in 2019 from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190528-i-was-a-macedoni...

What is "this"? You can't document something if you aren't claiming anything in particular.

I'm really sorry, but I think I had a little bit of trouble understanding your question.

In your first reply, you quoted me saying the phrase "Then a bunch of Macedonian teenagers..." and asked "is this a commonly accepted fact?". You then said "I literally had not heard this before now."

I apologize for not asking you what you meant by the word "this" in either of those two places where it was used, and I agree that it can be difficult to have a conversation if two people don't agree about what they're talking about.

It sounds like you were confused by my answer because you weren't sure what question I was trying to answer.

I suppose I should say that my original point is that:

The notion that teenagers could successfully influence global political trends by posting a lot on social media seemed far-fetched in the 1985 novel "Ender's Game". Indeed, Randall Munroe in 2009 seemed to think so, when satirized that novel's storyline in a webcomic suggesting that this notion was far-fetched.

My first claim is that this notion seemed considerably more likely after the events of 2016, specifically the part where Macedonian teenagers successfully influenced global political trends by posting a lot on social media. Their behavior, including their influence on political trends and their profligate posting, was well documented in news coverage including CNN, Wired, NBC, and BBC reporting.

To the specific claim that their influence was not merely profitable but also successful I'd suggest as evidence NBC's analysis that "The challenge of engaging readers on social media is one familiar to most journalists. They have a formidable opponent in Dimitri and his peers; analysis by BuzzFeed after the election showed that fake news websites actually performed better than conventional press and television", and the linked primary-source information ( https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa... ) showing that among the most twenty popular news stories engaged with by Facebook users, from August 2016 to election day 2016, more engagement was had with "fake" articles promoted by people including these Macedonian teenagers than with "real" news. This included several million engagements with "fake news" falsely claiming that the Pope had endorsed the President; that WikiLeaks had confirmed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS; that per federal law, Clinton was disqualified from holding any federal office; and that an FBI agent involved in investigating Clinton had been killed in a murder-suicide.

My second claim is that the news that Macedonian teenagers were involved in the fake-news fracas of 2016 is fairly mainstream knowledge, meant to answer your question about whether "this" is a "commonly accepted fact". I would cite the same news coverage as evidence that "this" (Macedonian teenagers were involved in spreading fake news in 2016) is indeed a "commonly accepted fact" (although I would say rather a story which has been reported with large amounts of evidence; I would set a pretty high standard for proving a fact).

Do you feel like you sufficiently understand my claim and its evidence or is there an area where you are confused? I am happy to discuss further, although perhaps we should have this conversation in person as I have clearly had some difficulty understanding your responses.

Reminder that the Russians primarily targeted black americans to agitate us over police brutality, and that every single media piece that gives more than 3 example ads without showing a single one target black americans is, with high probability (a statistician can formalize this), peddling an agenda. "White working class voters" were never the primary target and they targeted them less as the campaign went on.

Primary source: https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/social-m...

Here are the assumptions I have about what's happening here.

But, the real question I have is: are these thoughts which have been influenced/crafted unbeknownst to me?

Pro tip where I attempt to bring awareness to my thoughts: look for the keyword "automatically" in my statements below.

1. These are pro-Trump sites. Perhaps the author filtered only these groups for their results? The takeaway is that I automatically think pro-Trump groups must be creating these fake accounts. Then, I automatically think "Russians!"

2. There is another article from the NYTimes on Hacker News right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847051). It mentions a pro Falun Gong group behind it. I automatically think this must be a Chinese state funded group doing it to discredit Falun Gong.

This is an amazing bit of research and write up. And, could it be that not everything is what it seems here?

I recently heard a discussion from Ben Freeman on Terry Gross' Fresh Air (https://www.npr.org/2019/11/21/781579229/ukrainian-oligarchs...). Mr. Freeman is the director of the "Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy." His point was that Russia is actually pretty bad at interference, which is why we know about it. Everyone does it, and the Saudi's and Israel and Japan do it with much more class and craft. It makes me wonder whether these fake accounts come from who we think they do.

A FB ToS violation is not a violation of the law. Nothing prevents people from having multiple accounts to shill with. The only thing "wrong" is how much people will trust what they read on the internet from random people they don't know.

What, then, ought people to trust?

Is Hacker News fake news? Many times people post things that would make a real expert roll their eyes. There are some smart people here but also lots of inaccurate information.

Is anyone out there simply unaware of the "fake news" phenomenon. Are we so inured that we cannot differentiate BS from the real thing and need to be protected? I don't think so. Everyone KNOWS. People aren't that stupid. Why wasn't lying us into the Iraq war considered fake news?

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