State-backed manipulation rampant on social media

I see this a lot too, and I have seen it the other way around as well. Where people believe everything is either Armageddon or a non-issue. Ironically I think this effect is applied to itself. Are we distressed because we think our world-view is wrong so we seek to the extremes for validation?

One of the biggest problems with social media is the fact that social media companies are financially incentivized to keep the public at large from knowing. Twitter has long refused to answer exactly how many of its users are bots as a percentage of its user base, Facebook did the absolute bare minimum in cooperating with Senate Intelligence in 2017 relating to Russian propaganda, etc.

Kara Swisher said it best in an interview with Preet Bharara around the time of the Russian propaganda scandal: "The Russians didn't hack into Facebook and manipulate its servers. They were users of Facebook, they were users of Twitter. They used these platforms exactly the way they were designed to be used."

I have always been of the opinion that the only people who should be restricted with regards to how they get their message out are those in office but Trump has changed the game a bit and now I realize there are far too many who have been waiting this moment to find new means to regulate who and what message can be conveyed.

prior to the net and social media sites we had to rely only on the press, printed and televised. both were shown their bias if not outright distortion of truth by the same social media many are being told to revile.

in the end it comes down to educating people and accepting that in any free society you get the good with the bad

No, ESPECIALLY really smart engineers.

"Techies" have some of the most crippling blind-spots when it comes to political sensibility. Moreover, it's not just bots and computational propaganda that we need to worry about (though that is serious problem too). Propaganda is just as "real" regardless of whether it's computational and offered up by bots, or if it's a guy with a megaphone, or if it's a poster or newspaper article (like in the 1930's).

What really matters is the intention behind the propaganda and that's what needs to be uncovered and dealt with. Coming up with AI to deal with AI-backed disinformation campaigns can only ever be an infinite game of wack-a-mole, unless the root-causes are addressed. These are political problems and they require a political solution. Facebook and Google aren't going to be the hero here.

For me personally, I treat social media as entertainment. Sure you can have reliable sources of news, but I force myself to deal with social media like entertainment so that I moderate myself. I will never sit and watch TV all day and so I will never sit and scroll through social media all day. I keep my follow list manicured so if someone is tingling my BS meter, I drop them. It is far too easy to get inside an echo chamber. The goal is to always have credible but challenging points of view in my feed and to limit how much I time I spend in the feed.

If people are acting based on what they read, is banning the words the real solution? It seems that learning the reasons why people are dissatisfied is the more useful approach.

Suppressing people's words or beliefs under the guise of Democracy has never been a good strategy throughout history.

Several years ago I took a week-long python class from a PhD who spent his days building and tweaking weather pattern models. A lot of the class was learning Pandas and other mathematical libraries. One of the assignments in class was twitter sentiment analysis using a prebuilt dictionary of weighted words. In other words I'm heartily agreeing with you that this is not difficult for anyone with skills and time.

In 2016 there were Russian accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. They maintained accounts on both sides of contentious issues and pushed inflammatory stories simply to increase divisiveness.

Stories they wanted to promote, whether they created it or not, they could use bots to push to higher visibility. It isn't as if any one vote made the difference.

- newly created account (or, in the more sophisticated variants, an account created some time ago with a few meaningless postings) - ask for help, or ask a question to distract from the actual goal - somewhere in the text, throw in some association that should stick (like "refugees steal", or "refugees sexually assault woman", as a fact that doesn't need discussion) - when confronted, the only answers were contentless excuses, like "but I am really asking this for my mother, who can't use a computer". Never any attempt to engage in actual discussion.

The reaction to these is that people usually address the question, don't address the baseless association, which probably then starts to stick in the unconsciousness of at least some of them.

And on the political side, at the same time there was an increase in support for extremist and nationalist, anti-foreigner parties.

Though of course how much such messages contribute to that is difficult to say.

Motivation and opportunity ...

> These companies should therefore increase their efforts to flag and remove disinformation, along with all cyber troop accounts which are used to spread harmful content online.

So the suggested solution is to have different lots-of-money companies stop the lots-of-money manipulation. Of course, if you are doing the right kind of manipulation (ads), that's allowed.

Seems a bit hypocritical to me.

How much of the accepted-without-question, 100% undisputed mainstream narrative is disinformation as well?

Just two recent examples:

1. Voter fraud in the election.

After the election was done and rumours of fraud arose in the social media memeplex, nearly immediately the "There is no evidence of election fraud - claims of election fraud are disinformation" counter-meme was released into official media channels (and from there spread into social media). That this too is disinformation should be obvious.

- Election fraud (to whatever degree) occurred, or it did not.

- Evidence of election fraud (that is discoverable by humans) then existed, or it did not (regardless of that discovery).

- The necessary investigations to discover any such evidence had been launched and completed, or they had not.

disinformation: false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.

As of the date of the election completion + 1 day, the necessary investigations to uncover the existence of election fraud had not been completed - therefore, the assertions of fact broadcast from multiple independent media organizations that there is(!) no evidence of election fraud is disinformation.

2. The riot at the Capitol

Immediately after the Capitol incident, a coincidentally similar narrative was asserted by multiple independent media organizations: this was literally a coup attempt, an attack on "our most sacred(!) institution". And, the intent of the people on the ground was(!) to execute a coup against the US government. This was asserted as if it was a fact. However, what was actually going on (which is contained within the minds of the human beings who were there that day) is not actually known.

(Meanwhile, speaking of "attacks on sacred institutions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... - curiously, this seemed to not come up in the conversation, despite its obvious relevance).

Getting back to the "Morning, boys. How’s the water?" story...somewhere along the way (my sense is that this has occurred mostly in the last 5 years), the notion of what is actually(!) true seems to have become somehow radioactive in a way - the very idea is considered repulsive, not to be mentioned in polite company.

And it's not just braindead political partisans who exhibit this behavior - as far as I can tell, this default intuition has been adopted by extremely high percentages of people across all categorizations. If anything, it seems to me that highly intelligent people are often even more repulsed by it than normal folks (who perhaps don't grasp the philosophical depth of the idea).

The election fraud disagreement and the Capitol riot, these things concern me somewhat, but what concerns me even more is the degradation of the very fabric of reality, the "This is Water" in the story. And not only the degradation itself, but that the degradation is being promoted (at least unconsciously and passively) by some of the brightest minds in our population. A society that is arguably involved in some form of a new cold war with a rapidly rising new global superpower adopting a culture of disregard for what is actually true seems like not a great idea to me. If we actually care as much about the Capitol riots as we proclaim to, I think we should be willing to face up to what the actual underlying causes of it are, as opposed to the simplistic narratives (disinformation) that are asserted as fact to be the cause.

This is also how you lie and con people, you construct a plausible lie they want to tell themselves, but if _you_ do it, they have deniability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-retweeted_tweets

Doesn't seem like you are right about that.

Edit: Going by replies might yield a different more negative result, the word "ratiod" imply that many see a reply almost as a downvote. But I was not able to find a list of most replied-to tweets.

Fixing it isn't going to be easy, though. Look at the amount of effort that the scientific community tries to put into improving the quality of communication:- peer review, standards for content ... and there's still nagging issues with reproducing results and even outright fraud in some cases.

Whatever solution we come up with will likely increase friction in the user experience, but there's lots of room for innovation here.

Politicians using social media as a convenient way to communicate with people directly can be a net benefit for society, although probably more so the more local government becomes. But using social media exclusive of other, official channels is obviously a problem.

They're not limited by geography, time of day, cable provider, and due to recording capabilities, the messages kept online easily without many restrictions. And potentially most importantly, they're easy for everyone to find.

In 2018, a number of people sued Trump for him blocking them on Twitter. It was viewed as unconstitutional to be blocked from reading and engaging with his messages. That went to the Courts and they agreed, his Twitter account was declared a "public forum" and he had to unblock them.

That's the real mismatch here.

  >To me the biggest issue that was raised by the Trump bans is that we shouldn't be relying on these channels for communication with our governments and elected representatives

When you couple this with the fact that the USA pretty much decides political policy for most of the western world too, I really fear that [more than ever before] we're living in a world where US 'correct think' and US 'correct act' are the only acceptable forms of behaviour, outside of Chinese totalitarianism and Russian nepotism.

Not only that, but we seem to be so in thrall of the US that we even have to adopt your social problems as our own. A classic example of this is the recent George Floyd protests in the US:

All of a sudden, all over Europe, virtue signalling folks were going on BLM marches vandalising statues etc. Now, we may have had our problems in the past but, here in most of Europe, the kind of nasty emdemic racism that seems all too prevalent in the US barely exists any more. It's largely been consigned to that handy receptacle 'the dustbin of history'.

But, here we were, all of a sudden stirring up division and conflict in our own societies because "If the USA is nasty and racist then we must be nasty and racist too!" And, of course, the media were falling over themselves to unearth black celebrities to recount the traumatic tale of how, sometime between earning their fifth and tenth million, someone once looked at them in a funny way in a supermarket.

I just can't understand why the almost total domination by the US of European cultural and political life is a complete non-issue here. Why are Silicon Valley hipsters deciding on the acceptable parameters of discourse in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome... etc?