Russia Leverages AI-enhanced "Meliorator" software for foreign malign influence | Hacker News Reader

Russia Leverages AI-enhanced "Meliorator" software for foreign malign influence

cyber.gc.ca

78 pointstoss142 comments

Teaching things like critical thinking, cognitive bias/fallacies/sophism detection, formal logic and fact-checking to the masses has became a vital necessity for national security. Sadly there still are many politicians who prefer to keep their people susceptible.

There's no conspiracy necessary: it's just extra effort.

I've always been a proponent of mandatory rhetoric courses in public schools.

Hard to see how a democracy produces good results without learning Defense Against the Dark Arts.

Indeed. Nevertheless lack of a conspiracy (which means organized effort of many cooperating actors) doesn't necessarily imply it's not the case at the level of many individual politicians. So many of them actively use so much of the dark arts routinely, trying to trick and hypnotize people into supporting them, that honest rational rhetoric starts seeming obsolete.

I'd hazard you're giving politicians far too much foresight: 1.5 year timeframe is a stretch.

If you're waiting for everyone on the planet to just get smarter you're going to be waiting a long time. People can also be critical in one area yet turn their brain off in others.

It seems impossible to make everyone on the planet perfectly smart, yet it seems possible to make the majority smarter than it is, in this specific aspect. We already mass-teach reading and writing, also essentials of sexual hygiene etc. Why not just add basic logic, rhetoric and philosophy to the list of the essentials?

Sure, now you just need to convince the people who shriek about it being pagan indoctrination designed to smuggle in a communist agenda. Take a look at the people one US state have decided are best qualified to overhaul their social studies curriculum: https://x.com/tylerkingkade/status/1810746515750875537/photo...

You also don't want people so media savvy that they see through domestic propaganda.

I do want such people because it's the only way to make them see through enemy propaganda.

Easiness of controlling your people is less important than making it hard for opposing parties to control them.

This is a valuable point that gets understated in much of the discourse about public manipulation and intelligence on an individual level, or as a concept.

People, even smart people, are very, very rarely what you could call fully rounded in their reasoning and intelligence. Sure, we know that many people aren't quite as robust in certain areas of intelligence as they are in others, and on the other hand we know that some are particularly resistant to bad reasoning and dogmatic habits, but as a general trait, people of all stripes and positions, often with mostly rounded intelligence in most things, can be absolutely blind or idiotic in very specific areas of thought, to an irrational degree.

You can have a perfectly skilled engineer that is absolutely convinced the earth really is flat, or a highly capable doctor who simply won't accept any amount of evidence that AIDs is caused by a virus. Or you could have a political genius with all the pragmatism that comes with that, but who's fanatically obsessed with a very specific dogma that drags his country to ruin. Examples abound.

No amount of strong education in logic and critical thinking is going to eliminate these curious but very widespread human tendencies toward deep fissures in otherwise rounded reasoning. You might only reduce the number or depth of fissures as a tendency, but their existence in general is simply too entrenched to really be banished from our psyche.

Still? That’s how it works for them. They may be better or worse, but having a vote by bs-ing average people is fundamental to politics, which at the end of the day is just people who talk, command and avoid work.

AI gives us hope that this system will (finally!) collapse and something new will take its place. Cause it clearly doesn’t work in favor of an average man on the current civilization scale. But it’s not gonna be education and critical thinking for sure.

There’s also no reason to believe that a similar system is not already deployed by “good guys”. It’s such a low hanging fruit for politics-grade budgets that it’s almost a treason to not grab it.

>Sadly there still are EVERY POLITICIAN who prefer to keep their people susceptible.

Do you maybe know some good resources for self-learning these areas?

Melior in Latin is "better", or "better off". So this software is betterator.

This amuses me.

> The tool also allowed for the management of the persona profiles through an administrator panel called “Brigadir” and the spreading of disinformation through these profiles through a seeding tool called “Taras.”

Brigadir is something like team leader, not necessarily military. Taras is a bit odd, it's a typical Ukrainian name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_(name), and I can see it used in a derogatory way. Like say if the FBI used "Ivan" as their tool targeting Russians.

I suspect the idea is to influence the social media via fake Ukrainian personas sowing discord or sounding ridiculous, as a way to erode support. They probably gave up trying to make Russian army or government look good, and instead are focusing on making Ukrainians look bad.

When I read "Taras", the first thing that comes to mind is Nikolai Gogol's "Taras Bulba": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Bulba

Not sure it's related, but (spoiler) Taras Bulba's ending isn't pretty (and he is of Ukranian origin).

And now, 30 years later, the name of this Disney character finally makes sense to me: https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Taurus_Bulba

Exactly. I just don’t see Russian disinformation agents using it out of respect of Gogol. Unless we take the idea of fighting against Poles, representing the West, from Taras Bulba?

I think this now is exposing a hidden advantage to having reasonable fees behind twitter/X API calls to read information. I haven't seen nearly as many research papers on user's posts in cybersecurity, so they just don't have the same avenue of people doing free work finding ways to combat AI generated profiles. Now that all has to be internal or enough of it to gain some trust back from government agencies and maybe the public.

Personally, finding ways to detect this is exactly the stuff that made me interested in the academic route of cybersecurity.

1) Whatever advantage there may be was completely wiped out by the decision to hand a blue checkmark to whoever would pay a couple of dollars, instead of doing a real identity verification.

2) When the perpetrator is a state, paywalls aren't all that effective as a deterrent. The ROI for the perpetrator is always going to be much higher than the ROI for whoever is trying to put the pieces together after the fact.

edit: I failed to understand that you were talking about benefit to X, not benefit to society. Gross.

Fair, this is coming from a place of trust my government to handle this stuff since X isn't going to. (Canadian) I agree with what you posted thats why:

1) I prefer open access and because of the reasons you posted, so others can hold the private company accountable

2) This is capitalism if they don't see profit they aren't going to do anything. So I think this is an interesting case for a pure profit/cost saving argument to have that open access to user posts.

3) social media as it is now is measurably bad for society even without propaganda

bonus) I like seeing how Elon, touted as a genius, has continuously fumbled X and somehow making it a more exaggerated place that he said it was before his purchase.

Funny you mention "trust in the government to handle this stuff" I was considering applying to this "canadian center for cyber security" but all the DEI upfront stuff and the fact that they are putting time and effort into "social media" turns me off real hard.

How do they expect tech nerds who want to work for some other reason than someone else's capitalism dream to settle for "monitoring social media" They need job postings mentioning "illegally hacking foreign hardware" or something

> completely wiped out by the decision to hand a blue checkmark to whoever would pay a couple of dollars

I personally thought this was clever at the time, but maybe I’m missing something.

By charging for the checkmark, it seemed like they took a short cut to “identity verification” that uses what we accept for our financial infrastructure as a baseline.

If you show up with a credit card bearing a name, either you are bamboozling the financial system or you are who you claim to be.

You can just buy a prepaid debit card at a supermarket and call yourself whoever you want.

When I got a blue checkmark it required a review period.

I’d assumed that the review involved checking the payment against the public profile.

This belief is reinforced by the observation that every change I’ve made to my public persona (name, profile picture, description) has resulted in a temporary loss of my blue check mark for a review process.

Maybe I misunderstood the nature of that review.

Don't you mean that's a disadvantage? It used to be much easier for volunteer researchers to map out botnets and dissect influence campaigns in real time. Now you can't get at the Twitter streaming API unless you have $60,000/year or a search warrant.

Exactly - most people, including the parent poster, have never worked with a misinfo researcher

I'm saying it's an advantage since they publish their techniques, and you replicate it without having to do the research internally. It's better than this being dropped by a government agency or having most users notice that there are mostly only bots on the platform like they are now.

Regardless there is going to be bots and bad actors on your platform no one has enough money especially X to deal with them. A third party doing 80% of the work is an advantage, your reputation is already going to be tainted regardless

If you want to see some arguing really hard, check out r/UkraineRussiaReport

I enjoy it because you can genuinely interact with FSB influencers.

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