Elon Musk Shares Manipulated Harris Video, in Seeming Violation of X's Policies | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk Shares Manipulated Harris Video, in Seeming Violation of X's Policies

nytimes.com

91 pointshn198629 comments

This is not unexpected, but I think he's reaching bit too far to use it on presidential nominee. It could very well kick off strict AI regulation whether Harris is elected or not, which would be amusing to see given he's trying to get the Tesla shareholders to invest in his very own xAI. AOC's deepfake AI porn tri-partisan bill had no trouble passing the senate.

To the surprise of absolutely no one who had been paying attention.

Elon...When your bank account is full but your mind isn't...Even with billions, some still seek out the comfort of conspiracy memes.

I blame the decline of model trains and stamp collecting, which is what old guys used to do before the internet. If you wanted to dabble in conspiracy theories you had to subscribe to mimeograph newsletters and buy Edgar Cayce books. Now you can get a deluge of that stuff by setting YouTube to auto-play.

The post / video: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1816974609637417112

While it doesn't say 'satire' or not real it's kind of obviously satire to me at any rate within the first few seconds. Guess this stuff can be a grey area especially if it's more subtle.

By the way the original video post had "Kamala Harris Campaign Ad PARODY" written on it but Musk removed that when he reposted. (https://x.com/MrReaganUSA/status/1816826660089733492)

Elon is ridiculous, and so is twitter. Its banned where I work tho, because the ownership desires normal internet.

There is a "relatively simple"[0] solution to this issue of deepfakes. Anyone publishing content, particularly if there is incentive for manipulation, can get a Keyoxide[1] or other similar doip setup. Then they also sign and provider a hash of any content they publish with the associated key.

There's a bit of challenge for binary content since those can't be compressed or optimized without breaking the hash, and many hosting platforms will make such changes. For that we need to advance perceptual hashing algos to the point where they only - and always - break on semantic differences.

[0] Caveat being getting the solution to be seamless enough for the not-so-tech-inclined to have little problem using it. And for the general public to get into the habit of verifying content.

[1] https://keyoxide.org/

It is his platform after all, he can post whatever he wants.

On the other hand, this is one of the reasons why the platform is really becoming unusable for me. Not to mention everyday i'm "followed" by 5-10 bots. And I get recommended a lot of posts about right wing posters that I have no interest in seeing. I mean, ofc, I don't have to use the fyp but I do wonder if there's manipulation of the algorithm going on. I don't follow any accounts that are right-wing aligned.

It's against the Twitter terms of service. secondly, "The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibits fraudulent misrepresentation of federal candidates or political parties, but the law, written in 1971, is ambiguous when it comes to modern technologies such as artificial intelligence."

the algorithm has changed to push more right wing accounts. https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search/?q=right+wing&type=l...

I’m in Australia and literally only follow or interact with furries in my city. And yet most of my Twitter feed is American political bait, and I get followed by 3 bots a day.

It’s funny to see all the posts on here saying “Elon was right, you can fire everyone and nothing happens”. Like have any of these people tried using Twitter in the last year? It’s completely deteriorated.

We have furries? I thought they were a made up subculture. Cool

Since 1965 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_B._Bear

( not to be confused with that other head to toe costumed alternative: https://wankerpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Humphrey_B._Flaubert )

Right before the pandemic there was a big furrycon happening right in front of where I was living in Melbourne. Was chill.

There’s actually quite a lot of furry events happening in Melbourne. They just aren’t very visible. You have to be in the space to be told when and where stuff is happening.

There's like 5 yearly conventions in Australia. Aus is one of the countries with the most active furry communities from what I can see along with the US, UK, and Germany.

Many of my furry friends have moved to Bluesky, but I’m begging the rest of them to stop sending me Twitter links all the time.

My fyp is overflowing with alt right low quality posts. It started abruptly 2 months ago. Until then it was very clean and relevant. I have given up marking the tweets as “not relevant”. My fyp is now 80% alt right trolls and short facebook style video clips

most people have left for threads.net or mastodon

I don’t know a single person on threads or mastodon.

> It is his platform after all, he can post whatever he wants.

Really?

Can he post snuff videos and child porn?

The billionaire owner of the social media platform X reposted a video that mimics Vice President Kamala Harris’s voice, without disclosing that it had been altered

What an absolute reach. Somebody is going to watch this and think it's a real Harris campaign ad? Get a grip on reality, nobody with a working brain will.

Given that a large percentage of the populace does not have a working brain (some 70% of Republicans still believe the election was stolen), the manipulated video is harmful.

What a crock. While that certainly takes a willingness to deny basic reality, it's a whole different kettle of fish from the kind of disjunct that would be required to believe many of these lines are from an actual Harris campaign ad. Either way, it's a total reach to claim this is some kind of hypocrisy or breaking of the Twitter terms unless there's accompanying evidence that similarly obvious satire gets taken down routinely for violating that rule.

If someone has a "willingness to deny basic reality" that's rock bottom. Such a person can absolutely believe these lines are from an actual campaign ad.

OK, I don't grant you that believing partisan conspiracies is on the same level as having actual brain-damage levels of cogniti e impairment it would require to believe this was a real campaign ad, but even if I did, that honestly has nothing to do with whether people losing their minds about Musk's "hypocrisy" in this comment section are deranged or not.

Don’t worry, I’m sure in a day or two the policies will be rewritten with an awkwardly shoehorned-in exception.

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