Here comes the first TikTok war
mikeelgan.substack.com
mikeelgan.substack.com
I disagree with this statement. The Chinese government has taken a controlling stake in Bytedance [1], which is the subsidiary that owns TikTok. It could perhaps, then be possible, that China would "alter" the algorithm of TikTok users worldwide to sway public opinion? Push certain videos that fit a given narrative, and hide others that don't?
Tiktok collects and shares your data more than any other social media app, and it is unclear where it goes [2]. This could become a dangerous tool.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more...
I understand your point, but I think the platform is relevant. There are four platforms that have a considerable number of users (TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram), and they all have provenly effective censorship, especially optimized over the past couple of years. If it's one of those four, it does matter.
I would also claim that the platform is only irrelevant if removing that platform results in a negligible reduction in views. Removing TikTok removes 1/4 of the services, and probably the vast majority of younger eyes.
If everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube is talking about something, people will be talking about it on TikTok. If they aren't, that is noticeable and that too will be something people will talk about. That can actually lead to more attention on that platform due to the Streisand effect.
The primary concern would be if all the social networks censor the same thing, but that isn't a concern here due to the opposing political views unless your concern about censorship is just these platforms not allowing extreme violence, but that isn't what the article is discussing.
1) “Wtf, why’s your dog laying on a nail??” “It doesn’t hurt enough yet” 2) YouTube is paying people enough that they make a good living and questioning the policies means potentially risking their bills not getting paid.
Three of those platforms are American-controlled and one is Chinese-controlled. Even if all four have "effective censorship", it seems unlikely that American-controlled and Chinese-controlled platforms will block/manipulate in the same way and to the same end.
This is not a fixed set either – every few years, a new platform pops up. Tiktok is a relatively recent example, Instagram an earlier one.
If content restriction gets too heavy-handed, people will respond by moving to new platforms which are less restrictive – at least in free(-ish) countries. I personally think that inconsistent and overly heavy-handed moderation – punishing too many users by algorithm for innocent or trivial things, even while reports against other users doing seemingly much more serious things are dismissed – is one of the factors behind Facebook's recent slide in users.
Added to that, many people on the political right (30-40% of the population) view these platforms as politically biased against them, and are keen to find new places without that perceived bias. Attempts at establishing more conservative-friendly platforms generally come unstuck by being overrun by extremists (neo-Nazis, antisemites, etc) who push mainstream right-wing users away, and also through pure incompetence (both technical and business). But I think it is likely that sooner or later someone is going to come up with the right balance to succeed in that space.
The common idea is to assume that “the masses” move slowly, but the reality is that when properly motivated everyone wakes up early and changes technology in a matter of hours. Many of them bringing their followers with them with only the last of the followers being the ones moving slowly.
If not deep-fakes than at least propaganda, like this one of Chomsky stating that US promised no NATO expansion which is not true: https://v16-webapp.tiktok.com/c7fe2cbc57cb276832f49e2542fe4f...
People on TikTok aren’t reading twittter. They’re doomscrolling on TikTok and sponging information for better or for worse.
This is about trusting the source, sure it could weaken traditional media outlets, but some of them are driven by social media, you will often see stuff first on Reddit and then a day or two later its a DailyMail story.
That tiktok footage of the two jets fighting was shown on a UK tv news channel, but watching it, I couldnt tell you the date time or location, I dont recognise the location so cant say where it was, and its like watching the mainstream media, their reuse of library shots sometimes labelled as library shots and other times not, makes anything hard to trust.
Another technique I saw on the news, was one studio news reporter asking a military base commander some questions, the interview was shown again later on but 2nd time around, the studio news reporter was a different person asking the same questions.
Anything which doesnt include two people in the same shot is questionable.
In todays age, where CGI makes the past come aline, you can get software from Adobe which can instantly change the colour of clothes in video clips with minimal effort, and photoshopping, makes this a distraction.
If anything its a psychological measure of fear, to work out how people react to different situations, which the internet is very good at doing.
I also find it interesting talking to people to see what they bring up thats been on the news and not, I sometimes think in todays digital age with digital transmissions and digital tv and settop boxes we get a personal form of news. Why do I say this, well we are given an idea of how the news studios work, but what about the other studio presenters, are they doing the same in a different studio, have the news anchors recorded a variety of piece to camera's and they get edited and digitally delivered to different people.
Question everything, but unless you see it with your own eyes, dont rate it too highly and even if you saw something with your own eyes, have you been surreptitiously drugged, or are you just seeing some live performance with actors?
Obedience to authority experiments are always ongoing.
Introducing doubt into an argument is a valid debating technique.
Edit: I saw this as someone who witnessed some people winning the UK National Lottery in dubious circumstances.
It’s good to be skeptical of all media these days, just as long as you aren’t too skeptical or contrarian just for the sake of it. That line of thinking has led to fantastical conspiracy theory thinking. One side refused to admit that COVID vaccines can potentially be harmful and have a nontrivial amount of risk. The other refused to admit any benefit and didn’t get vaccinated at all. If instead we were presented the full story, instead of 4 minute sound bites, I suspect the pandemic would have been over a long time ago. Same with the anxieties of WW3 in this case.
Is the media culpable if it makes a normal, rational person go insane?
Also, it seems that since two days ago, pandemic is no more, at least in the media.
Much like when communications go down and the amateur radio enthusiasts come out. Or how when the roads are impassable in the UP by car, you'll see people out on snowmobiles. There are enough people with reserve tech skills that I genuinely don't think it would matter if the big platforms attempted to suppress all information.
What's far more likely is that things are going to be selectively suppressed in a way that's invisible to the average person in order to control their feelings and support for whatever is occurring.
In theory and in reality, they will and have had no idea it's manipulated because they have no basis for comparison. Social media manipulation is hardly new; Russia itself has been doing it for many years. And most people say they don't care and still use Facebook, Twitter, etc., and many buy into and spread the disinformation.
> whether there is enough ambient knowledge
That 'knowledge' has to come from someplace. In fact, I would say that 'ambient knowledge', and the belief in it as some source of truth, is the medium of disinformation.
That works only if people know it's manipulated and then are motivated to act. It's hard to know if query results (broadly: search results, timelines, etc.) are manipulated because you have no basis for comparison. And IME most people don't care about social media manipulation - the disinformation campaigns have been well researched and documented for a long time.
There is definitely a dangerous tool here too because there already has been a lot of fake images and videos appearing. It's unclear who is posting these but it certainty generates a lot of noise for OSINT. While the former situations had low noise but high bias in the current situation we may just have so much noise that it is impossible to figure out what is real or not. Though I think it still changes things since military analysts have better tools and know corroborating information to sort through this noise more easily. But fake news travels faster than truth.
Sure, we've been discussing war online since the Web started (I sure did; I was online after I got out of school on 9/11), but that was all or mostly text. All the photos and video we were provided were still carefully controlled.
It's not TikTok. It's the smart phone. In the Gulf War, if the one guy with a camcorder agreed not to show you committing a war atrocity, that was it. It was done. Now? Good luck.
And medium matters. The outrage generated by the Vietnam War is partially due to it being the first major US conflict after a substantial portion of the population had access to TV.
I imagine these hypothetical "other platforms" (could you name one?) will be deemed as "that bad place that platforms <insert scary thing here>", omitted from search engine results/feeds, advertisers blasted on twitter/pull out, and payment systems cancelled, with direct sharing being the only real way to propagate the videos. We've clearly seen effective censorship like this over the last few years, with other unfavorable topics (right or wrong). I don't see how it's possible to consider the internet as some free place where unfavorable ideas can be exchanged, at a public/viral level.
Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, PeerTube, Signal, Telegram, Matrix. Need I go on?
> We've clearly seen effective censorship
I'd beg to differ.
>"In the summer of 2019, as pro-democracy protests raged throughout Hong Kong, U.S. employees of TikTok were horrified to discover that content moderators on the global team, who reported to TikTok managers in China, were taking down videos of the demonstrations, according to a person involved in the discussions.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-wants-to-avoi...
They are still pushing this "nazi" narrative weeks later, when social media and many of the millions of people that attended the protests are like, what are you talking about?
It's been truly eye opening to see blatant lies by the government.
I was at the protests for 3 weekends. I guess that's my "source". I think that's as close as you can get to a true source (your own experience). And I say that as someone that leans left, previously voted liberal, is vaxxed, and was also against "anti vaxxers" previously to attending the protests.
I'd say the actual narrative is it's a group of diverse people all affected by mandates, lockdowns and other government responses to covid. I don't agree with what they all want, but I can understand their pain. And I think we can figure out a solution that would make life better for them while also protecting our hospitals and vulnerable.
Imgur used to show currently viral images and was all about entertainment and filled a fairly similar niche to Tik Tok. Nowadays it has gone down the outrage engagement path(?) Politics seems like most of the content and it's so curated that it's feels like Pravda levels of blatant propaganda - even reading takes that seem to agree with what you were already thinking gives you pause that you must have missed something. I'm predicting there will be zero "anti-war" posts advocating that the US stay out of the Russia-Ukraine disaster. None. Such a position, right or wrong, is likely to be held by a signficant fraction of Imgur users and indeed Democrats.
Imgur is so extreme as to be obvious especially in the light of how dramatically it changed, which is instructive for us as an example. How would we know if facebook and twitter were playing with their algorithms with just a little more subtlety than that? (And maybe in an utterly different, unpredictable and unexpected direction?)
Maybe it's all organic and a totally fair reflection? How do you explain the change from an almost equal amount of eye-rollingly bad pro-trump stuff as there is pro-biden stuff now to zero. There was vast amounts of pro-sanders, anti-democratic establishment stuff ranging from fair to pretty silly that all suddenly vanished too. I also have trouble with the sheer consistency of the viewpoint. It's one voice, there's no variation to speak of at all. I've never seen any realistic crowd chatter that works that way. Have you?
But sure, I guess it's possible. How would you know that's what it is? How would you know if Facebook and Twitter were tweaking their algorithms to drive public opinion? It's the whole point of this. How would you find that out?
Even with the potential for fake news, it seems this might change the war dynamics. At the same time Ukrainians are fighting for their lives you can see Russian people protesting against this invasion. The real time loop could break military reality distortion field.. if you're a Russian soldier and you see people in your city walking the streets against what you've been ordered to do.. it might cause deep conflict in your head.
Ukraine cities should show that on public displays for troops to see..
Far from it. News media might be, but rogue social media apps like Telegram and WhatsApp are used frequently, and are outside Russia's control.
I think here lies the hope of Ukrain. Putin does not want bad social media coverage (especially for ukrainians - his hope is just to change the government as far as I understand it).
Thus they will try to not make the war a blood bath and they need a quick capture of Kiev. No quick victory means city by city fight, which will be very costly for Putin, both in terms of resources as well as Ukrainians seing the social media coverage.
On the other hand, the troll farms are based in Russia.
They still get called "protestors" by the US media if they have the approved politics. For example, a year and a half ago: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/513902-cnn-ridiculed-for-...
I suspect that's the usage of they were referring to.
If GP is on the right wing, the probably think that people protesting policy brutality/the George Floyd murder are rioters/criminals.
I think that most Americans will agree that one of the above viewpoints I correct (although everyone disagrees about which one).
I believe you have created, in my estimation, a false dichotomy. You frame those involved in "January 6th" as "insurrectionists" while also framing the entire Floyd saga as "protesting police brutality". The Republicans, in my personal interactions at least, specify that they opposed "riots" and many have said they aren't reffering to all of the peaceful protests. They don't appose "protesters" but "rioters". Conversely, again in my personal experience, Democrats will frame the "Jan. 6th" events as an "insurrection" unilaterally.
I know that most Republicans know that the majority of protesters against George Floyd were inarguably peaceful. As a Democrat, I also know that some protestors broke into stores and such - I just don’t care about these businesses and I think the discussion of theft distracts from the serious issue at hand, which is murder.
As a Democrat, I also know that most people who showed up on 1/6 went to a rally on the mall and then went home. Everyone also agrees that a subset of those people entered or tried to enter the US Capitol building. Most of these people were simply content with taking photos and/or shitting on the floor, but subset of that subset wanted to kidnap and/or murder elected officials. I think that this attempt to kidnap and/or murder politicians is the most significant thing that happened on 1/6. I’m sure many other people believe that discussing the crimes committed in that day detracts from what they view as the more important discussion, which is whether congress should have overturned the election results.
The world will bear witness to the consequences of this conflict in ways it never has before. It is no longer up to the editors of major news outlets to decide what is shared [1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/th...
I checked the #ukraine tag on TikTok and found zero raw on the ground videos of conflict. Looks totally sanitized to me. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Maybe it’s merely hard to find. Maybe it isn’t allowed.
Try and find a copy of the 'Horst Wessel lied' on YouTube any more, for example. Or 'Triumph of the Will.'
Humans really can be terrible.
While the curation of the news allowed the US to cherry pick only the "good stuff", it also let professional journalists vet the sources, and while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson.
A-10 "Warthog", only flown by the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...
But out of context, it could have fooled me too.
Unless it's been modded you'll find the Arma games have an absurd level of accuracy in their physics, they have the correct speed of bullets down to decimal points and other real world interactions like gravity and air resistance.
The entire engine is built around simulating the real world as far as technically feasible and the other half of the game studio uses it to sell war simulations to militaries around the world.
Arma 3 is a mess, even before taking apart their idea of future war (combat mission black sea did way better there)
At least mods fix most of the unit issues, albeit the game as it is just don't work as a milsim because any consideration between doctrine and taor and toe gets thrown out on the name of cool
I was more talking about the physics, I doubt there's any other game on the planet that takes it's so far wrt emulating the real world.
I think what gives it away is that it's too crisp. Look at other combat footage, even from today's events. It's grainy (especially night footage), blurry, seldom very clear and definitely not as crisp. Even the sound is worse in real footage and often arrives at the "wrong" moment, not matching exactly what you're seeing.
This one is too perfect to be true.
Ironic.
For those who don’t know, the incredible team at Bellingcat are the same ones who hunted down the FSB hit squad sent after navalny.
Aren't they basically CIA/NSA? I mean, I love their content and find it fascinating but I find it very hard to believe it isn't sanctioned/released/funded from the very highest levels. You don't get that sort of quality out of somebody's garage.
I was mulling it in the context of deepfakes, and there's enough money in it that someone has to be working on the problem.
E.g. Something that signs metadata (time, geolocation) at time of capture in a verifiable manner
The camera sensor is not a trusted input. Nothing can prevent somebody pointing their camera at a high resolution screen displaying a manipulated image. Or a staged scene. No image signing mechanism can prevent this kind of attack.
There are manipulation detection techniques, but they are imperfect. And even if you verify the image is an unmodified camera original, you still have to analyse the context surrounding the image (what is portrayed in the image, does it line up with other reports, who is the photographer etc.) to determine if it is actually a true.
It is trivial to digitally sign text, but a signature on a string doesn't mean that string is telling the truth. It just means someone signed it.
Highly recommend http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ for in depth digital image forensics content.
The issue of authenticity is getting some third party to attest that video happened at a particular date and time - at least part of that solution could be getting the various low orbit constellations to provide a simple timestamping service for hashes. Since the orbits are known, and position can be triangulated, any 3 satellites signatures would at least prove you transmitted a particular hash for attestation at a given date and time.
This obviously doesn't help with someone traveling there and sending junk, or using local repeaters to send junk, but it ups the difficulty level a notch.
*after a given date and time
There's nothing stopping people forging the data later with already broadcast cryptographic signatures
But low-orbit satellite internet is designed for 2 way communications, and probably already has the equipment on board to calculate checksums (or at the very least is a sufficiently trusted third party).
So we develop a protocol we can run on miniaturizable boxes which can be served point-to-point with the constellation members to at least prove transmission origin providence.
Assuming that though, you send a hash of your content up to the system, which geolocates it (based on physical reception), adds a timestamp and geolocation into the metadata, and returns the signed information, using the central party's key.
You also could run a similar method on cellular networks by using towers as the signing node and the telecom as the centralized entity.
Because realistically, it's not Byzantine Generals. What you want is (a) timestamp verified by a trusted party, (b) geolocation verified by a trusted party, (c) content hashed/signed to prevent subsequent modification, (d) prevention of replay forging of (a) or (b), & (e) most of the infrastructure not physically accessible by users (e.g. signing chip embedded in a camera).
I especially liked the phrase “chain of blame”
My guess is the best we can do is keychains of trust and the reputation that comes with them. Trustless authentication seems very difficult indeed.
The horrifying part is that I honestly don't think any of the governments involved (except possibly Ukraine's, and good for them) have considered the full implications of this.
It also lets professional journalists cover up atrocities. Speaking of the Ukraine, Walter Duranty was a journalist for the New York Times who covered up Stalin’s genocide of over 3 million people in what is now the Ukraine. He was celebrated and even won a Pulitzer Prize.
Outside of Russian propaganda, it's just “Ukraine” not “the Ukraine”.
> Walter Duranty was a journalist for the New York Times who covered up Stalin’s genocide of over 3 million people in what is now the Ukraine.
It was Ukraine then, too.
That is false.
You're right about the layperson, but that's a low bar, the p50 of the population.
What measures did you take to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia on this point? This seems to be one of those things that everyone takes to be true, but which I have frequently found to be false on manual inspection. Here are examples where I tested this by chasing to the primary source in areas not of my expertise:
- California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering the text of the bill.
- Indian Railways budget reporting. This was Bloomberg, and it was re-reported elsewhere. The numbers were wrong. This informed decisions I made in the next case.
- SuperMicro spychips. Bloomberg again, but rebroadcast by other media outlets. This was one of my directional trades. I bought SMCI calls off the fact that Bloomberg was poorly informed and that reporters were mostly low-grade GPT-3 copy-machines off each other.
In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they will outperform a professional journalist over the same period of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news.
So, yes, better than the layperson, but not better than the average techie I know. And this yields a data pipeline problem: if you have a lossy compressor in your pipeline, the loss cost can overwhelm the compression advantage. I think for anyone reasonably intelligent, news has passed that point.
> California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering the text of the bill.
I am however quite curious about this one. I followed this closely and did not see the bias you claim. What was it that all the journalists got wrong about the 7/8s rule?
If you would mind explaining what you understand the rule to be, which sections of the proposition text helped you reach that conclusion, and how confident you are in that interpretation, I will happily describe my side of this.
> You seem to be suffering from the belief that techies are smarter than everyone else, which is not only offensive but just wrong.
Ah, no. I stick by what I said, which is not what you seem to have read. But I'll quote it here anyway:
> In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they will outperform a professional journalist over the same period of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news.
Imagine that I used those words intentionally and also purposely avoided saying "smarter" and "everyone else" and all that. And since I didn't explain "outperform", we will interpret it as "model the world in a more accurate way".
Usually the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. What did the journalists say and how was it wrong? You said they all got it wrong, but do you have an example? What is the "right" interpretation and what in the bill text makes you think that?
> Imagine that I used those words intentionally and avoided saying "smarter" and "everyone else" and all that.
"it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news."
That's just a coded way of saying "they aren't smart enough to do anything specific so they do something I think is easy". You clearly think techies are smarter than others and are better at doing a job the journalists spent years in school learning.
> That's just a coded way of saying "they aren't smart enough to do anything specific so they do something I think is easy". You clearly think techies are smarter than others and are better at doing a job the journalists spent years in school learning.
Nope, people say "smart" for innate talent. I make no claim to that. I'm only making a claim to outcome. I think they lack skill (a trainable thing) in comparison, yes.
And if you don’t actually have the evidence to back up your claims just say so. You don’t have to hide behind this faux intellectualism or whatever you call bragging about your consulting rate.
I’m not sure what my opinion on the 7/8ths matter has anything to do with anything. You claimed the journalists got it wrong, and I asked how.
And it's obvious why I'm asking you to put in some work: the standard on this board is to go "citation needed" and then not contribute equal work. So I want either an expression of good faith from you by you doing equivalent work or by you paying me.
And come on, you live in the Bay. You know that's (to my embarrassment) not bragging.
I'm upset because you said that someone who knows how to make a website is better at journalism that someone who studied journalism in school and has spent years honing their craft. I've worked with journalists -- the real ones who write for reputable publications, not the ones who write for the blog of the week. I have friends who are journalists. I've sat side by side with them. Their primary skill is separating truth from fiction, and you just said that someone who can construct a URL is better at it. It's an insult to them and a reflection of how poorly informed you are.
> So I want either an expression of good faith from you
Lol, where is your good faith? You made a claim, I asked you for a link to evidence of said claim. If it existed, it should take you no longer than 60 seconds to find one example. I didn't ask for an essay, I asked for a single link to a single example and a single sentence as to why it's wrong. Should be pretty easy for you if it exists.
But sure, you can win your petty game of "who will provide evidence first". The 7/8ths rule was bad because it requires 7/8s of the legislature to change provisions in the law, which is basically impossible, so it's meaningless. Sure, most propositions require a new proposition to change, but adding the 7/8ths provision is just a red herring to make it looks like they are being so generous.
But fine, I can do equivalent evidence: Journalists claimed it required 7/8ths to overturn. They were, of course, wrong. Because they were just reporting based off each other. There’s your equivalent “evidence”, I suppose.
I’m kidding, I can do better. Behold, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/uber-ly...
> Prop 22 sought to invalidate AB5′s impact on Uber and Lyft drivers, and it included a provision saying a seven-eighths legislative supermajority would be required to overturn it. Its passage effectively rendered AB5 moot.
Now, you can ask your journo friends (who are 4-year-college-trained experts at separating truth from fiction) what’s wrong with this. Compare with bill text as an exercise, if you’d like. Should be easy for the master truth seekers.
Is your concern that they used the word overturn instead of modify? That's pedantic at best.
IIRC, the comment to which I replied reflected a pretty common understanding of the issue and was in some of the reporting on prop 22.
AHAHAHAHAHA *inhales* AHAHAHAHAHA! Good one!
This is some fantastic post-irony.
First, past wars involved journalists directly embedded into forward units. If they said 7 rockets were fired into City X because they were present and witnessed it, then what they were reporting was correct. It doesn't require expertise in anything to correctly report that. The vetting was on the part of the news organizations themselves, not hiring war correspondents who were blatantly making things up. Now that everyone has access to publish their claims to directly witness something, there is no longer any sort of filter on whether they're even actually there.
So if you're watching video taken by a professional reporter sent to a theater of combat by a reputable news organization, you can at least be reasonably sure they're not fabricating the video. If your source of videos is TikTok, you no longer have much in the way of assurance that what you're seeing is even real video footage.
The second part is what you're talking about, whether the "expert" opinions of pundits writing in professional news outlets are any better at interpreting events than a layperson. This is much more of an open question.
I agree with this, but specifically this. i.e. drop any of the nouns and adjectives in the first clause and the second clause changes.
Professional journalists are reliable eyewitnesses and can be trusted to transmit their eyewitness expertise, factoring out any active conspiracy. They are not, however, skilled at obtaining facts except through witnessing, i.e. I trust their first-party accounts but not their third-party accounts. They are easily misled, but it can't be helped: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It was an interesting read, but the guy is about 10 years too late. Social media today is most definitely controlled by a few news companies and the state ( military/admin/etc ). Especially when it comes to important news events.
> The Pentagon learned a lesson from that conflict, which was: Control the information and imagery at all costs. And they applied that lesson in the Iraq War.
As if the pentagon didn't know before the vietnam war to control the information and imagery at all costs. Of course they did. They controlled all the information. It was the state that decided to end the war. Not journalists. Not the people.
> And with social media, artificial intelligence and Internet-enabled crowd-sourcing, the intelligence will belong to the global public. And that changes everything.
The state curated, censored and controlled social media changes everything? Don't think so.
See: alt-right media being widespread on Twitter, Quora, Reddit, Google, and sometimes even YouTube. Not only is that stuff not censored, it’s actively being shown to people who are not alt-right and aren’t looking for alt-right content
(ask me how I know.)
Actually, most of the raw footage comes from instant messaging(WhatsApp or Telegram, mostly), shared in groups with an agenda. Then it is shared on TikTok, Twitter etc. to a wider audience where it is curated and censored by algorithm that optimise for something(engagement, impression, revenue, agenda and so on).
Which means, instead of getting our news from journalists on the ground who know the context(at least the good ones) we get a snapshot of the event curated by an algorithm or people the way the analytics told them to.
The difference is, with journalists actual humans observe a situation, builds an understanding, creates a presentation where picks or produces material to convey that to people who cannot observe it first hand.
The accuracy and the fairness of the presentation they create defines their careers as journalists. Sometimes they build a reputation to be co complete hacks but the history is full of high quality reporting. The bias isn’t that big of an issue because there are multiple journalists who operate. Their censorship happens on editorial level but there are(or used to be) also high quality editors that don’t dilute the reality too much.
With algorithms, everything is systematically optimized for some irrelevant to the truth metrics without any understanding of the context. It’s also censored on massive scale, you can’t really use another source to see a different perspective.
All human beings are biased, and the systems we build inherit our biases. What is the alternative?
https://gizmodo.com/10-photos-and-videos-from-russias-invasi...
Now with deepfake and increasingly photorealistic real-time 3d engines like UE5 can cross the uncanny valley, especially when they are repeatedly reuploaded to the point compression artifacts make the footage even more believable.
In 2003, the USG could've only dreamt of such deceptive tools, now its part of hybrid warfare.
There's tons of TikTok content about Syrian or Yemeni war over the years, or the more recent Nagorno-Karabakh, with associated OSINT analysis and communities. It just does not get much attention. Queue geopolitical conflict that affects the west and much of western OSINT analysts have pivoted from their respective areas to Ukraine, something not seen other conflicts. I get it, it's a sexier conflict where a competent military power is going balls out. Of course there's also issues of race as seen in EU policy towards UKR refugees.
Sadly very true.
"And with social media, artificial intelligence and Internet-enabled crowd-sourcing, the intelligence will belong to the global public. And that changes everything." ...sounds very much like things I recall from the late 90's about how the internet would make dictatorships impossible because they relied on censorship. Dictatorships, uh, managed to survive. It would be awesome if ubiquitous smartphones "changed everything" about war. But it seems unlikely.
Contrary to public belief, knowing an artillery shell landed somewhere near a preschool/hospital/whatever ranks pretty low in actual tactical significance.
Will TikTok / Facebook / Twitter censor these videos? Probably, but will they succeed?
Will people watch the videos? Will they leak into mainstream sites?
Right now despite the internet being notorious for violent and serious content, i think most mainstream sites are good at hiding it and most people definitely aren’t looking for it. But this is the first major conflict outside of the middle east / Africa (aka the first major conflict people are really paying attention to) where we have widespread social media and 4K video. If anything, i only hope that it will make the war more real and serious to people, so it will prevent further atrocities in this war and avoid wars in the future.
I imagine Twitch and other actual livestreams are insane right about now. (I dunno, I am not into it, or TikTok.)
Intermixed with various teenage influencers impotently insulting Putin.
It seems while those populations have smartphones and the internet, they failed to capture the attention of western media and western populations with their plight.
Also the Ukraine is far more embedded in the economic and moral calculus of the West. The US has made agreements with the Ukraine regarding protection, and basically all these decisions have major potential geopolitical ramifications.
It's one of those potential tinderbox situations.
A: using artificial intelligence when statistics would have been enough ( or a failure to explain what part made it AI )
B: Using Chinese tiktok as the title.
On a side note, Telegram is the nexus of raw information. For every video going viral on other sites, the other 99 stay on telegram and aren't very interesting for an outsider. Its going to be Russia's downfall if it doesn't have a way to control it.
We have to consider that this is very intentional. There must be some Russian calculus that the wide sharing of content within Ukraine and without serves some purpose. It's possible that Russia sees it as a free intelligence gathering platform.
While this author may feel like this is a level playing field, I don't think that would be a safe assumption if you are actually on the ground in Ukraine.
The author is also majorly discounting the role of intelligence services in debunking Putin's false flag operations. Weeks worth of updates on Russia's exact plans and motivations haven't come from TikTok but rather the US government and its allies. There is no substitute for spies and satellites.
A lot of qualifiers here to solidify a weak thesis. Sure, the first "textbook" war (and probably not even that, I just personally can't recall any), but there have certainly been many revolutions and combat actions across the world that have been deeply documented across social media, aggregate sites, etc. for many years now.
I guess the author thinks there's something special about this war because it's "conventional". I'd argue no war will ever be conventional, if it's ever been in first place.
There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted TikToks on the same morning revealing their locations and movements.
The intention of this is to both misdirect from actual large-scale Russian movements and to lower Ukrainian morale: "Look how easy and fun it is for us to invade you".
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgd7dd/google-maps-live-traf...
https://t.co/CqYg4qIUqf https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1496860423810912259?...
They are responsible for the famous picture of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima (which was actually the second flag raised, and IIRC that picture was not taken under fire).
What? Nobody believed a word this man said.
And the thing about him is that it was not an attempt to convince at all. He didn't think anyone would believe him; he couldn't have, because you could see it in his face. It was theatrical, showy, a performance, not a tedious attempt to lie.
If he had a purpose beyond personal survival it was to humanise the regime as much as was possible. Really nobody thought it was true, but perhaps it was useful to them that it was optimistic, brazen, indomitable, even charming.
Baghdad Bob and Sean Spicer were really quite different.
OK so you are partly right on two fronts.
One, there was a Baghdad Bob moment right at the beginning, the whole "largest crowd ever PERIOD" rant, but even the presentation and the sentiment of that were rather different. It had no humour, it was an angry, hectoring, nasty, shouted attempt to bully and control.
Two, he failed at it in spectacular fashion, which did lead to him being car-crash television in kind of the same way BB was, except he'd so severely soured his relationship with the press corps that you were watching a man slowly shrinking, rather than a man in control of the limelight.
But Spicer also was just plain bad at his job, ignorant of history, incompetent, indifferent or unkind on screen to the people he spoke to, had terrible presentation, no theatrics, no presence, and he told humdrum, lazy, formulaic lies among his charmless distribution of the day-to-day humdrum stuff. Not comparable to BB. No one believed in him, but the press corps went there expecting to -- needing to -- be told the truth.
Apolitically: a really bad press secretary, in short. Out of his depth.
Trump's own press conferences were much more like Baghdad Bob in tone and approach; Trump inflated the truth, told huge, flowery, dramatic lies, timed press conferences to distract, and used one ridiculous hoax claim to distract from the fallout from another. Theatrics, performance. A weird amount of car-crash TV control from sheer, unprepared brinksmanship and BS (in the specific sense of indifference to the distinction between truth and lies). Like with Baghdad Bob, the truth was never being approached; it's not what the Trump press conferences were even for.
I often felt a little sorry for Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, who to be clear told the same sort of lies as Spicer, but at least you could tell it made her uncomfortable to do it, and you could tell she cared about the press corps as people. She especially hated clearing up after a Trump press conference.
And yeah, sure, access to the U.S. military came with caveats, but it was possible to be a non-affiliated reporter.
But it's also not like the stories couldn't be cross-checked with, you know, reality. You could relatively trust the information coming from U.S. sources, because they coincided with reality. Iraq was doing their best to prevent information coming in and going out.
That's why Baghdad Bob became a meme. Because his accounts were hilariously at odds with reality. He'd go on TV and claim the American forces were in full retreat while being frog marched out the studio by those forces.
And it's also not like this is going to be the first conflict in the social media age.
The author isn't even too young to remember, so I am really puzzled by that claim.
I, like everyone else, am glad that Baghdad Bob made it out alive, but I think we should have paid more attention to the idea that post-modern post-truth trolling could come from a source we expected to simply lie.
Did he ever deny the presence of WMDs? Sometimes we must review our memories with the benefit of facts we learned later.
This is coordinated propaganda. It's meant to both misdirect from actual large-scale Russian movements and to lower Ukrainian morale: "Look how easy and fun it is for us to invade you".
Don't overestimate them. It might be a sign of a problem with discipline or morale, or overconfidence.