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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

I don't think hiding manipulative content is the right path here. Instead of burying your head in the sand, it would be better to make people aware of the manipulation and expose the techniques and messages they use to that end. What do they want you to believe, and why? That puts you in a much more powerful position.

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> I don't think hiding manipulative content is the right path here.

True; shadowbanning would be more effective as it doesn't require a user to install and maintain their own filter(s).

> I don't think hiding manipulative content is the right path here. Instead of burying your head in the sand, it would be better to make people aware of the manipulation and expose the techniques and messages they use to that end. What do they want you to believe, and why? That puts you in a much more powerful position.

Fair take but would you argue same regarding ad blocking and adblocking circumvention? You can only focus on so much. There are people in OSINT community who exposed IRA projects. But who's gonna read up on that? Primarily those who can benefit from it. Very few people would read into that out of sheer curiosity. I'm a very curious person (ha-ha!) and I only have so much time. If I were to respond to all my curiosity signals I'd get no work done. And, most working adults on this planet (they got 'em voting rights therefore interesting target) have very little leisure time.

It would be extremely useful to know what people want you to believe and why, but how on earth do you figure out someone's intent?

Attempts to manipulate public perception are usually launched as campaigns with lots of content pushing the same message, often in different ways. In the case of mass media, for example, you could detect manipulation efforts by finding commonalities across multiple articles from one media outlet or by finding commonalities across multiple media outlets. It's possible you could distill this down to something like "From October 14 through October 23, content from media outlets X, Y, and Z seem to be correlated and are pushing the same message, and that message is ---".

Having that knowledge would be extremely powerful, effectively neutering manipulation efforts by identifying them as such. A person is far less susceptible to manipulation if they are aware of the belief that the manipulator is attempting to instill in their mind.

You should be able to build a profile of a person based on adtech, credit score, and social credit score/surveillance. With enough data on everyone we could easily determine intent with AI.

Though for some reason minorities always have questionable intentions, but whatever, it’s basically a utopia already.

In reality you can't, but most people seem to think you can. It can be enraging trying to debate things even on HN because people often ignore the actual content of what you're saying and try to figure out what you secretly think or meant. My guess is the way people "accomplish" this with AI is by training it to make major assumptions based on other things. It will have an abysmal error rate (just like it does now) but the vast majority of people won't ever notice, and the person speaking will never even know they were censored, let alone have a chance at clarification or God forbid, explaining the nuance.

Or, even simpler - replace it with the 1-2 word version of the message so that it's obvious and blatant. Like the 'They Live' movie. Long as it's a decent AI at reasonable speed, that sounds incredibly useful.

Edit: if those apple glasses take off, and we can live-edit text in the real world (if it's done, it'd probably be for sign translation etc) - those 'They Live' glasses could probably become an actual reality.

This doesn't work because the average internet user isn't an hn user. How many people here do you think would fall for an sms phishing campaign? And then ask yourself why they are as common. It's because this is a bubble and the average internet user doesn't even know what ssl is or has heard of the term astroturfing before. This is being abused all the time and it won't change.

I strongly disagree. Interacting with manipulative content both harms you, whether or not you believe you are "immune", and only serves to give the author of the content more views and influence. In fact, this sort of content often relies on being able to engage people who are don't like it and speak against it.

There are no easy solutions here other than encouraging others not to engage and read manipulative content, or producing your own counter-manipulative content. Consider, no reasoned argument or exposing of techniques is going to make a Qanon victim change their mind. Arguing with them just further entrenches their belief as they see you taking it seriously.

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