This is why social control won't work for long, no matter if AI supercharges it. We're already seeing the blowback from decades of advertising and public opinion shaping.
Example: in my country we often hear "it costs too much to repair, just buy a replacement". That's often not true, but we do pay. Mobile phone subscription are routinely screwing you, many complain but keep buying. Or you hear "it's because of immigration" and many just accept it, etc.
You can see other people falling for manipulation in a handful of specific ways that you aren't (buying new, having a bad cell phone subscription, blaming immigrants). Doesn't it seem likely then, that you're being manipulated in ways which are equally obvious to others?We realize that, that's part of why we get mad.
Worse, these sections have been under coordinated manipulation since the 60s-70s.
That said, the scope and scale of the effort required to achieve this is not small, and requires dedicated effort to keep pushing narratives and owning media power.
And probably a lot of people in those sections say the same about your section, right?
I think nobody's immune. And if anyone is especially vulnerable, it's those who can be persuaded that they have access to insider info. Those who are flattered and feel important when invited to closed meetings.
It's much easier to fool a few than to fool many, so ,private manipulation - convincing someone of something they should not talk about with regular people because they wouldn't understand, you know - is a lot more powerful than public manipulation.
You're saying this a lot in this thread as a sort of gotcha, but .. so what? "You are not immune to propaganda" is a meme for a reason.
> private manipulation - convincing someone of something they should not talk about with regular people because they wouldn't understand, you know - is a lot more powerful than public manipulation
The essential recruiting tactic of cults. Insider groups are definitely powerful like that. Of course, what tends in practice to happen as the group gets bigger is you get end-to-end encryption with leaky ends. The complex series of Whatapp groups of the UK conservative party was notorious for its leakiness. Not unreasoable to assume that there are "insiders" group chats everywhere. Except in financial services where there's been a serious effort to crack down on that since LIBOR.
Or would that just result in another moving of the goal posts, to protect the idea that everyone is fooled, and that no one is without sin, and thus standing to speak on the topic?
This is a political topic, in the sense that there are real conflicts of interest here. We can't always trust that expertise is neutral. If you had your subject matter expertise from working for FSB, you probably agree that even though your expertise would then be real, I shouldn't just defer to what you say?
Work in trust and safety, managed a community of a few million for several years, team’s work ended up getting covered in several places, later did a masters dissertation on the efficacy of moderation interventions, converted into a paper. Managing the community resulted in being front and center of information manipulation methods and efforts. There are other claims, but this is a field I am interested in, and would work on even in my spare time.
Do note - the rhetorical set up for this thread indicates that no amount of credibility would be sufficient.
Higher education itself being basically a way to check for obedience and conformity, plus some token lip service to "independent inquiry".
Making matters worse, one of the sub groups thinks they're above being manipulated, even though they're still being manipulated.
It started by confidently asserting over use of em dashes indicates the presence of AI, so they think they're smart by abandoning the use of em dashes. That is altered behavior in service to AI.
A more recent trend with more destructive power: avoiding the use of "It's not X. It's Y." since AI has latched onto that pattern.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529020
This will pressure real humans to not use the format that's normally used to fight against a previous form of coercion. A tactic of capital interests has been to get people arguing about the wrong question concerning ImportantIssueX in order to distract from the underlying issue. The way to call this out used to be to point out that, "it's not X1 we should be arguing about, but X2." This makes it harder to call out BS.
That sure is convenient for capital interests (whether it was intentional or not), and the sky is the limit for engineering more of this kind of societal control by just tweaking an algo somewhere.
Constantly changing the topic to something more important produces conversations that get broader, with higher partisan lean, and are further from closing. I’d consider it some kind of (often well intentioned) thought terminating cliche, in the sense that it stops the exploration of X.
I'm basing the prior comment on the commonly observed tendency for partisan politics to get people bickering about the wrong question (often symptoms) to distract from the greater actual causes of the real problems people face. This is always in service to the capital interests that control/own both political parties.
Example: get people to fight about vax vs no vax in the COVID era instead of considering if we should all be wearing proper respirators regardless of vax status (since vaccines aren't sterilizing). Or arguing if we should boycott AI because it uses too much power, instead of asking why power generation is scarce.
The main thing that's annoying about typical AI writing style is its repetitiveness and fixation on certain tropes. It's like if you went to a comedy club and noticed a handful of jokes that each comedian used multiple times per set. You might get tired of those jokes quickly, but the jokes themselves could still be fine.
Related: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/magazine/chatbot-writing-...
Sufficiently effective propaganda produces its own cults. People want a sense of purpose and belonging. Sometimes even at the expense of their own lives, or (more easily) someone else's lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring
I hated to come to this conclusion, but the average neurotypical person is fundamentally so batshit insane they think that not manipulating them is a sign you aren't trustworthy and ability to conceal your emotions and put on an appropriate emotional kabuki dance is a sign of trustworthiness.
> People hate being manipulated.
- People are primarily social animals, if they see their peers accept affairs as normal, they conclude it is normal. We don't live in small villages anymore, so we rely on media to "see our peers". We are increasingly disconnected from social reality, but we still need others to form our group values. So modern media have a heavily concentrated power as "towntalk actors", replacing social processing of events and validation of perspectives.
- People are easily distracted, you don't have to feed them much.
- People have on average an enormous capacity to absorb compliments, even when they know it is flattery. It is known we let ourselves being manipulated if it feels good. Hence, the need for social feedback loops to keep you grounded in reality.
TLDR: Citizens in the modern age are very reliant on the few actors that provide a semblance of public discourse, see Fourth Estate. The incentives of those few actors are not aligned with the common man. The autonomous, rational, self-valued citizen is a myth. Undermine the man's groups process => the group destroys the man.
Knowing how we are fallible as humans helps to circumvent our flaws.
Everyone will say they seek truth, knowledge, honesty, while wanting desperately to ascend to a position that will take all of those things from us!
If all your trusted sources are saying the same thing, then you are safe.
If all your untrusted sources are telling you your trusted sources are lying, then it only means your trusted sources are of good character.
Most people are wildly unaware of the type of social conditioning they are under.
But lying is a good barometer against reality. Do your trusted sources lie a lot? Do they go against scientific evidence? Do they say things that you know don’t represent reality? Probably time to reevaluate how reliable those sources are, rather than supporting them as you would a football team.