Kenyan social media campaign designed to undermine the country’s judiciary
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
The biggest disinformation influencers who parrot the governments like stenographers are showered with millions as news anchors, talking heads and get juicy book deals. These amateur troll farms are a joke in comparison. They have not lied countries into wars unlike the other more insidious kinds.
> Since 2009, more than $60 million has been collected by firms that promote messages using bots and other amplification strategies, according to research from the Oxford Internet Institute.
The man that owns Wagner owns one of the most prominent ones.
From discussion with people I disagree with, I often find a similar M.O.
- An actual legitimate academic suddenly starts outputting content that is completely left field from their expertise.
- The content is Sophistry at best or blatant lies at worse. However it consistently serves a destabilizing purpose.
- A critical mass gathers around them, with youtube/twitter/fb giving them momentum.
Examples:
- Bjorn Lomborg, Political Science academic turned climate science denialist.
- Steven E. Koonin, published physicist turned climate science denialist
- John W. Oller, Linguistics Academic turned Editor of a make believe Immunology Journal claiming adverse Covid vaccine effects.
Perhaps I am just looking for patterns and malice but it makes me worried that there is more orchestration than what we assume there to be.
John Maynard Keynes, English mathematician becomes an economist and leading proponent of stimulus programs that have helped millions?
Here is what Hayek said about Keynes for instance: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y8l47ilD0II
Sometimes an outsider is unaffected by the established biases and censorship, in their thinking.
I remember reading books by Serge Lang in my mathematics Ph D courses at NYU. (He had an idiosyncratic approach to complex numbers, entirely basing it on Taylor series and deriving everything that way.)
That same person got heavily involved in debunking or challenging certain mathematical analyses (look at his wikipedia page). Most notable was his denialism of the connection between AIDS and HIV. His arguments mirror much of what is said about coronavirus and vaccine denialists and the Google Books from early 1990s features the same Dr Fauci responding in much the same way about that pandemic.
There is nothing new under the sun. Look at the Anti Mask League of San Francisco during the 1918 Flu pandemic. Same arguments.
There are many books like this, as well as people who are fed up with chemotherapy and publish alternative cancer cures, and so forth. You don’t need George Soros to fund BLM protests and you don’t need a conspiracy to have these people publish either:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Duesberg/publicat...
Same goes for people who challenge claims made for macroevolution, etc.
How is anyone being paid to influence not manipulating the "Platform"?
I think it is past due time for legislation preventing all public money from being used for social media, including tax exempt NGOs and government intern salaries that hire social media managers.
If Widgets inc pays a person to publish a bunch of influencing articles which are signed by "Joe Shmoe, social media manager of Widgets, inc", that's appropriate, but if the exact same content would signed by "Joe Shmoe, just a random bloke from Kansas writing my own thoughts about what's wrong in this world", that's misleading.
Seems to me that we are in a choice between the devil and the deep sea.
Governments and NGOs spending money on these platforms further enables the continued existence of said platforms and all of the problems that they entail. But because the social media main players are so big, not spending money means leaving the table open for others to further their own agenda to an even greater extent.
It’s difficult.
For example Mozilla Foundation has a special program for projects in countries with low internet penetration[1]. They also sponsor education and culture in some poorer countries like Brazil and Kenya [2].
On a technical front, Mozilla also funds some open projects that intend to be an alternative to Google's services, like their open voice recognition program or their open location service (which helps devices resolve your location based on cell towers, like Google and other companies (Apple?) do).
Mozilla has chosen not to allow the public to directly fund development of Firefox, instead leveraging the foundation to fund both their activism and browser development from the same pool of money. Perhaps they wouldn't be able to maintain their activism without the income from the donations intended for Firefox, or maybe they only do this to simplify their accounting; I'm not that familiar with their plans or finances.
According to this article [3] software development made up about 61% of the Foundation's expenses, but this information can probably be considered outdated because since a large part of the Rust/Servo team have been fired.
[1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/f...
[2]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/f...
[3]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...
Another project (personally I'm more familiar with this) that's not very notorious but has a whole team of researchers is Common Voice, i.e. open-source datasets for training voice tech systems.
From their website : "Mozilla is a global non-profit dedicated to putting you in control of your online experience and shaping the future of the web for the public good." -> https://foundation.mozilla.org/
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28445028.
Anti-vaxxers and government mismanagement long predate online trolls.
Correlation does not equal causation sounds like an argument that would be peddled on Reddit. HN gets close to crank territory on this. It's a nuanced, real-world situation.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
Platform Manipulation = promoting anything JD disagrees with?
2) On the surface, it sounds great. But one problem with social media doing something like blocking/banning paid disinformation campaigns is you just have to take their word that this is what happened. Twitter or Facebook can go and ban 25 million accounts in the run-up to a future heated election. They can claim that they're deleting organized paid influencers or deleting Russian bots that are trying to subvert the election and the media will publish that explanation without a hint of proof. The reality is that there's no public proof of who has been deleted, what the evidence is against them, what algorithm or review process was used to label them a bot or paid influencer, what IP addresses were involved, and if there's any false positives. This gives them the power to just label any political opponent they want a Russian bot or organized disinformation and silence them without any pushback from media.
The state is who holds power in a society, it isnt just Congress or the president or senators or a pair of political parties.
They censor because it is in their own interests to. Their platforms are designed to enable this and they work with the state to determine what gets censored. Any private, public, or non profit company that is not collectively controlled will turn itself or be made into a tool for censorship and/or espionage for its own preservation. These are the great american interests.
Section 230 exists specifically to allow online platforms to act as publishers without publisher liability. That's the exact and only thing it does, by its own terms. And it does so specifically because Congress wanted them to actively moderate content.
Was the intent for them to delete illegal content like child porn or bomb threats, or to boost one political viewpoint over another? I'd argue that it was the former.
The latter, fairly explicitly. Or, more specifically, with the fairly explicit hope that platforms would overall enforce one particular dominant cultural viewpoint (which is not without political dimensions) beyond the scope of what government had the power to regulate, but that this necessarily meant delegating to private parties with potentially divergent views.of community standards was acknowledged and accepted as the cost of broader censorship than there was any argument (even as much as there was for the rest of the Communications Decency Act in which 230 was included, which was otherwise entirely struck down as a First Amendment violation) might be consistent with the Constitution.
Collective ownership is not the only solution. Alternatives include public benefit corporations, non-profits and federal government ownership.
Mostly the interests of those with enough power to influence that corporation, nonprofit, or federal company will be represented. Which is what happens today and we are right back where we started.
I believe that mass representation of user interests for social media could be achieved through popular usage of distributed platforms and popular developing. To have a popular platform nodes must run the mass accepted protocol/version. Else you just have a fragmented network.
The majority could rule in this scenario if we have the right ideological framework to sustain it. What you propose is not a real solution.
Why do you think the majority should rule anything? Much less control ideology?