It's like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.
In Turkey Erdoğan's presidential communications office has budget of 100 million dollars and 30 story building. He has also 11 million registered members and the word on the street is that they are granting jobs based on social media trolling performance and pay for tweets. When Musk announced the Twitter Blue subscription, Erdogan said he will ask him for discount and regional pricing.
You think you can catch trolls by IP or geolocation? Nope, those people work from home or wherever they are. You think you can catch them by requiring government ID or payment? Nope, they have the budget and they are real people.
The content created by these people is nor organic but it's not a bot generated crap too. They do utilise bots to manipulate trending topics but the wast majority is real people following orders.
Maybe large scale monitoring over trends can be helpful to identify inorganic campaigns nut the lines are very blurry. After all, arguably, marching behind a leader with agenda is an organic behaviour.
Humans are simply not equipped with defense mechanisms for the era of mass communications. Tiny issues can be easily amplified to push an agenda. If you look at the social media you would think that half of the youngsters are trans, the other are fascists or something.
It gets unhealthier and unhealthier as the in person relationships are breaking down, people start living in imaginary worlds where the life is about culture wars.
Techies like to imagine that they are going to "defeat the government with tech" but they are wrong, the governments can have the tech because they have the money and the power to design the landscape. For example, here is the Turkish interior minister boosting to a Youtuber about this special app which has total overview of the social media and takes a photo of him to run face recognition in seconds: https://twitter.com/Darkwebhaber/status/1655561171900964865?
IMO some of the most effective government propaganda is stuff that portrays government as inherently bumbling and clueless, unable to engage in effective repression due to sheer incompetence, and effortlessly bested by scrappy kids/activists/etc.
And of course leaving out USA doesn't make you a shill, right?
It's a very lucrative business, I can write hundreds of lists a day and for each list I'm getting paid by the governments who would like to stay out of my lists.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-20...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
You gotta remember. These guys used to do COINTELPRO (and never documented stopping it either). You think they won't troll people on the internet?
Or they use AI. Would be very easy actually.
I've never heard of any such domestic department myself. Like the rest of our intelligence work, I assume we outsource that job to the Israelis.
Spoiler: a lot of agencies have a program need for this type of thing
they only different thing is now it happens online, hence it's all much closer to 'real time' unlike the historical versions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...
But here's Israel explaining[0] their troll army operations explicitly (see former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett directing the organization at 3:28 in video)
https://youtu.be/4xl30Re1EUI?t=208
Why wouldn't any powerful state do this? It is effective, and other countries do it so you can't abandon that "battlefield".
{{By whom}}
An ex-employee of the FBI or the CIA isn't the FBI or the CIA. Are you still working for your previous employer?
At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psychological operations” at the National Security Council, The Post has learned. Another is Matthew Williams, the company’s co-lead of its Trust and Safety department who spent more that 15 years in intelligence with the agency.
The discovery of the DC-to-Silicon Valley pipeline comes amid an outcry over revelations that the FBI influenced Twitter to suppress The Post’s account over its reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas business interests in October 2020 and has regularly demanded specific accounts and tweets be banned.
Multiple releases of internal company documents since Dec. 2 show Twitter developed a close working relationship with the intelligence community, which frequently leaned on them to censor political speech."
Meta’s top policy manager for “misinformation,” Aaron Berman, is a former CIA senior analytics manager.
The migration from the intelligence services is particularly pronounced at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, where at least nine former CIA agents and six former intelligence employees at other federal agencies are or have been employed.
Jim Hanson, president of information warfare analysis and consulting firm WorldStrat, told The Post Meta took a particular interest in bringing G-men and woman on board after the 2016 presidential election.
Meta’s top policy manager for “misinformation,” Aaron Berman, is a former CIA senior analytics manager who spent 15 years with “The Company” — even writing the president’s daily briefings.
Others include Scott Stern, Meta’s senior manager for trust and safety risk intelligence, who spent more than seven years with the FBI leading “high-stakes operational determinations for complex and ambiguous overseas counterterrorism operations,” according to his LinkedIn page.
Stern joined Meta in January 2020 to help develop algorithms to combat “misinformation,” as well as more traditional FBI bailiwicks like child safety and counterterrorism."
[0] https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-...
"Zuckerberg tells Rogan FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship" [1]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532
Maybe it's cognitive dissonance. Maybe it's simply that you support what they are doing, who they are censoring, the propaganda they promote, or you feel this deep-state apparatus is aligned with your interests and your worldview, but it's very obvious what this is.
I'm going to assume you're an intelligent person, just being disingenuous. They explicitly admit they are in these positions to counter "misinformation".
And now add LLMs into the picture.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA4e0NqyYMw
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Psychological_Operations_G...
The report is very readable, entertaining, and includes pics of the memes, posts, and other things. It also provides some degree of insight into the messaging that the US military psyops teams believe are most effective on an array of topics, including Ukraine. In general though it also really emphasizes the hamfisted nature of propaganda and psyops.
The accounts averaged 2051 tweets per account, with an average of 0.49 likes, and 0.02 retweets. 19% had more than 1,000 followers. The accounts, regardless of where they were feigning to be from, primarily posted from 1200-1800GMT, or 8am-2pm EDT. They also tended to share US propaganda that was translated word-for-word into foreign languages. There were also amusing tells with things like the scripts they were using. The majority of posts were made within the first second of a new minute.
All those accounts also went into overdrive on March 2022.
[1] - https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:nj914nx9540/unheard-v...
[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/25/23322214/us-government-pr...
Is this sarcasm?
We know the US absolutely does, and targets USAmericans as well.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
https://northwesternlawreview.org/issues/apple-pie-propagand...
The funny thing about propaganda is that it is still largely effective even when openly disclosed as such. The human brain is a sucker.
You could really see it working before the Iraq war in the US. It was unpopular until media really hammered it in with weapons of mass destruction and the allegedly imminent danger.
Not exclusive to the US, but western countries tend to keep key figures in the media very close aside from the more naive reporters.
Of course they will, and do. They do both. And it's not "pretending" — your neighbor could very well be one, and truly believe in The Cause.
Don't be too shocked. Vietnam is little China in the region. People are still ok with it because Vietnam has been seeing tremendous growth in the last couple of decades… sounds familiar? Lots of tech companies are also setting up shop there… it's a 100% dejavu. I just hope it won't suffer the same fate in 20 years.
Average commenters hasn't been worth the effort, at least pre chatgpt.
Everytime one of these foreign (non English country) programs gets revealed, the underlying pattern is concentrated effort coordinated against visible voices on public platforms with high dissemination potential (not HN). There's a reason they're spamming reporting to silence instead of just drown out with counter content is because it takes a lot of effort, disproportionate amount, to disrupt even one voice. Especially by non English speaking countries where English fluency is much better allocated and rewarded for other sectors. Up until now, coordinated groups are limited / busy with a few dozen/hundred state enemies, not yhour average commenter, and even then they don't have time/energy/resources to "particpate" in discussions. Even PRC, with all their resources, coordiated campaigns was mostly limited to twitter size responses, most of the time splamming pro PRC platitudes instead of engaging in topic, because ROI of genuinely exchanging paragraphs of discussion with some nobody on HN or reddit is terrible.
Of course this is pre LLM.
I once read is that if an activist movement rises they prop a flawed individual, find as much as info as they can, and at an opportune moment they ‘out’ the leader.
Apparently this happened with the Occupy movement.
So who ended up being propped up? Who became the leader? I cannot find any solid information about your claim, but I did find lots of vague essays mostly from right-wing blogs/outrage outlets.