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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Which countries don’t do this? What China is doing is bad, but is this some sort of new development? Russia, Germany, France to name a few have been caught doing the same thing. Not to mention the USA.

Facebook and Twitter need to handle this issue. This type of stuff is going on meanwhile they’re banning people for the stupidest most innocuous actions.

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It's ultimately a gradient, some countries are more aggressive with their astroturfing effort.

China's astroturfing for example has gotten so bad, that the "50 cent army" meme has become pervasive and well-known to mostly anyone that spends time online.

I honestly worry that with the development around language models like GPT-3, the internet as we know it will be completely blanketed with astro-turfed content by language models and low-paid contractors.

I am very certain that within 10 years we will all fail at distinguishing bots from real people posting online. What that future holds is scary and I hope that humanity will be smart enough to not destroy democracy just because Russia, China, et cetera told them lies via those bots.

The turing test is still far away from solving.

And generic troll posts are nothing new and the comment sections under most news articles not worth reading as of today already.

And if wars could be started because of shitposting bots - then there is something very wrong with the decision making of when to start wars.

A bot doesn't have to be Turing passing for a one off post to be passing

> It's ultimately a gradient

It's actually not. In global politics actors rarely engage in things their peers don't. It seems to me that this is rather ultimately something more like finding the most wildly looking thing about how other culture manages information flows and PR and focusing optics on it.

> I honestly worry that with the development around language models like GPT-3, the internet as we know it will be completely blanketed with astro-turfed content by language models and low-paid contractors.

Tbh I think that we had already passed this point, with all the low-grade SEO and myriads of copy-paste clickbait internet-tabloids. The internet has already drowned in low-grade media-content and language models would hardly change anything fundamentally in that matter.

>focusing optics on it.

Basically. Western reporting trying to overindex PRC influence campaigns as part of manufacturing consent has gotten so bad that useful idiots in the west start to reflexively accuse 50C everywhere. And brainwashed enough to genuinely believe it. Official 50C operates domestically, not abroad. Even then, 50c posting is characterized by spamming low effort platitudes instead of high effort engagement. PRC isn't wasting valuable human capita with English proficiency to argue/troll on platforms like HN or Reddit. Millions sympathetic to PRC opinions like diaspora / VPN users do that on their own free time. To date, PRC influence campaigns are limited to a hundreds / low thousands of accounts boosting discourse of official accounts on Twitter and Facebook. So far, they've been low effort campaigns with poor reach. But repetitive headlines tries to insinuate otherwise.

PRC will probably harness GPT-3 to exploit asymmetry in censorship ability. They just haven't yet.

> China's astroturfing for example has gotten so bad, that the "50 cent army" meme has become pervasive and well-known to mostly anyone that spends time online

Just because a meme got popular on the internet doesn't make it true.

In the case of 50 cent army, it got popular because it's the easiest way to shut down pro-China argument without refuting their points.

It certainly looks like this, until you look at facts. What did the "50 cent army" actually achieve? Anything even close to manufacturing American consent to invade Middle East and kill million random people?

It would be very helpful if you provide some links to your claims.

There are many platform reports on state-sponsored influence, and they routinely do not name Germany and France.

Instead, the overall picture of perpetrators is that of authoritarian regimes.

Platform reports by whom?

By platforms.

Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms regularly publish (and in some countries are required by law to publish) reports on coordinated inauthentic behavior.

Example: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/07/june-2021-coordinated-inau...

Here's the GCHQ unit that somehow never shows up in the coordinated inauthentic behavior reports. We know some of the specifics because of the Snowden leaks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...

> Campaigns operated by JTRIG have broadly fallen into two categories; cyber attacks and propaganda efforts. The propaganda efforts (named "Online Covert Action"[3] utilize "mass messaging" and the "pushing [of] stories" via the medium of Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube.[2] Online "false flag" operations are also used by JTRIG against targets.[2]

I's pretty clear to me that every country does this, and it's only the countries without any political sway over Facebook, et al that end up in the 'inauthentic behavior' reports.

I don't understand why you'd expect anything from Facebook to be a reliable source? Or from any platform about their own integrity? Their historical record on truthful reporting is dismal, and they have every incentive to report what the moral fashion of the day is about.

Excuse me? Please link to articles of German and French police doing this:

>The Shanghai police are looking to create hundreds of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other major social media platforms. The police department emphasizes that the task is time sensitive, suggesting that it wants to be ready to unleash the accounts quickly to steer discussion.

It would be foolish to think that either of the companies would move an inch in tackling this. Governments need to enforce policy to lower the ridiculous amount of influence this platforms have. They can start by forcing open standards on these platforms like SMS used to be for messaging. There is barely any technological challenge to the basics of Facebook and Twitter. Here in the Netherlands the PM had a phase where he exclusively posted his messages on Facebook instead of government websites. Acts like that are ridiculous and only feed the hand. Of course the PM and his party gets helpful marketing in return which fuels the cycle.

I agree that the platforms have too much market power... but astroturfed propaganda from a centralized authoritarian power requires a centralized defense; a true "open competitive marketplace" of ideas and discussion would have just as much astroturfing and more.

I'm not arguing in favor of Facebook at all, shut them down and lock up Zuck, but I'm simply saying "careful what you wish for".

I agree entirely with you. Open competitive marketplace is definitely not an easy goal.

Then what good would open standards do? Genuine question, since I have the same fears about decentralized social networking that the above poster mentioned.

It atleast opens up the space for more healthy competition, and will aid in shaping the conversation for regulation. I don't see it as a final solution, but rather a step in the right direction. So in short, I don't think a True and pure open market is the right way, much like a completely open market is healthy. There is a middleway. But the current situation seems like the worst solution.

Ideally, countries would just not do this. “Everybody does it” is not a convincing argument to move the conversation elsewhere and let it slide. FB/twitter is trying to mitigate this to some extent, but it’s a weird notion that companies are expected to regulate governments now. When an actor abuses a platform, the blame should be focused on the actor.

It just weird seeing how China's propaganda is so good that western nation went from positive and neutral toward China too wanting to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.

China is good at internal propaganda (which, you know, repressing dissent makes easier), less so at external propaganda.

The US did the same thing with the January 6th movement. Where even family members snitched on each other.

The line of reasoning in this post is a fallacy. If you're not familiar with the concept, it's worth a read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Ironically mentioning this is whataboutism per your link. If you have an actual comment I’d like to hear it though.

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