Rest assured it's for our safety. Those pesky Russians are always trying to destroy us!
It’s been estimated that around 50% of the comments on the internet are bots. It’s cheap and easy to target people with messaging that influences their behavior. It’s worthwhile to try to prevent this.
That's just the sort of false misinformation being propagated through the internet and social media these days that makes it difficult for us as a society to properly assess and deal with our problems.
There is no way that only 50% of comments on the internet are sock puppets of one kind or another.
Strap a neural net to an headless blink/webkit with a virtual mouse and keyboard.
Click farms would be used to generate the data for machine learning.
No way? Why not? First the content doesn't have to be original, just a variation of some provided template, then it doesn't have to be unique. Now combine this with automated tools and voila - even a single person can produce a lot of content but now multiple it with multiple accounts re-sharing it and you can increase it by order of magnitude.
And to further fuzz the culprits, the usa/china/russia people invest in each other's "countries".
If people feel represented and informed and wisely governed and have a stake in the system, adversarial information wars will be much less effective.
Trust in western governments is not great at the moment. The primary cause of this is probably not adversarial disinformation.
Also the Establishment: We also have to stop disinformation!
The simple conclusion is traditional campaigns are money laundering and money wasting operations but you really want to win, just pay the Russians and Chinese a rounding error of an amount and they’ll change the outcome in your favor!
It's fascinating to see Americans cheer this on.
Dissent is good. It's a vital component in any free society. The first two amendments of the US Constitution exist to preserve the right of the people to dissent, to the point of violence. Theoretically. Legally you can't just shoot a politician in the head, however cool Thomas Jefferson might have been with it. Point being, the US is supposed to be a society in which instability and dissent is always present, threatening but hopefully never toppling the edifice.
Of course that requires an educated and informed populace capable of discerning between critical thinking and cynicism, likely truth and horseshit, and a free press that isn't wholly subservient to corporate and government interests, and a lot of civic and cultural traits the US lacks. But that's what we should be focusing on, and that remains the case regardless of whether one is talking about Chinese propaganda or American. It's all the same. Over half of the anti-vaxx conspiracy content spread across social media during COVID came from only twelve people[0], one of whom was a Kennedy.
Mind you, i'm pro deplatforming - as long as it's the platform's decision. Platforms should absolutely be free to reject whatever they like on whatever terms they wish, freedom of speech doesn't compel anyone to spread that speech against their will. But when the government steps in and says it's on my side, I assume that eventually they'll just want to send me to the camps.
[0]https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
Indeed, that feels like the root of the matter. If men were angels we wouldn't need laws. Real people are messy, and bumper-sticker principles don't adequately characterize us well enough to design a set of pragmatic laws.
A real compromise leaves everyone mad, and given how mad we are already I'm at a loss to suggest how to proceed. I'll be honest that I'm pretty angry myself; I think we've allowed ourselves to be taken in by some pathetically obvious propaganda. I wish we were at least talking about subtle and interesting problems. Instead we seem to be gleefully re-litigating the obvious.