When Virality Is the Message: The New Age of AI Propaganda
time.com
time.com
Looking at the US from outside, I am starting to wonder how close they are to a societal collapse. Things seem to have gotten so extreme over there the last decade. Or maybe its not like that in reality, and its just the internet siphoning content that gets reactions.
We're fine, the trick is to remember to GET OFF THE INTERNET and remember that reality isn't the same as the Internet. Treat the Internet like a highlight reel channel on TV - if you don't like your current 'algorithm', then change 'channels'. Also, remember why tech has always pushed for Adblockers - then filter out the things demanding your attention. Once you realize a lot of news agencies (political, financial, tech, etc) is using the same dark patterns as ads, you start to filter them out of your attention.
I'm enjoying rewatching Supernatural on Amazon Prime right now.
You are correct in that we must be better about selecting our news sources. But the answer is not about drowning yourself in pleasant fiction on Amazon Prime or ignoring current events.
The answer is to pick non-clickbait / non-doomscrolling news sources that provide more actionable news and stronger analysis. I've picked The Atlantic for this, once a week magazine is fast enough and gives enough time for the writers to provide deep and through analysis on current events.
The fast moving clickbait media of Twitter and Facebook is trash. It's often incorrect, it's full of propaganda, and the people drawn into it seem like idiots (and arguing with them pulls your intelligence down). Find better media, find better people and leave the trash behind.
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Pick your news sources. Otherwise, the news sources will pick you. That's always been true since the early days of Yellow Journalism. The media landscape is harder to figure out today, but there continues to be well written independent media today, if only you went out to support them and reach out.
Sure it is important to be aware, but If being perpetually aware of the current events makes one feel anxious, helpless and fearful of the future then I think it is better to drown in pleasant fiction than read news.
Just being anxious and concerned in your home has not helped any cause except of that of the media that want your perpetual attention, eye balls and clicks.
I don't say to ignore everything bur being constantly in the loop gives you nothing. Your anxiety is someone else business model. I do not use media like X, watch tv or similiar. It's absolutely ok to not know what uterrly stupid some politician did with intent to get you mad.
I watch few independent analysts on youtube from time to time and I do not miss anything important. Really. It's the best and easiest thing you can do for your mental health now.
That's just Twitter/Facebook doom scrolling and shitty writing style. They are selling clicks to advertisers and nothing sells clicks better than doom.
Yes. Stop going to internet algorithmic feeds. However, do not ignore the news. Simply choose better, less angst and less clickbaity news. Do you think the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s were informed by angsty clickbait articles? Or were they filled with ignorant dufuses who ignored the news?
Ditto with the Vietnam war. You know, the one with an actual draft and far worse situation than we have right now in Iran. You have to stay informed of events, but that doesn't mean you have to accept the shitty, angst inducing writing style of these clickbait magnets.
No. Back then, they chose better sources of news that inspired action and provided plans. Same is required for today. Stay informed, but ignore the crap, clickbait and idiots.
There is a difference between the upthread claim that there is no significant real problem and the impression that there is is an illusion created by the internet which one should disconnect from to avoid being misled and your claim that it can be better for your mental health to cutoff from stressful news sources independently of whether those news sources accurately depict the real state of the world.
What you are saying may be broadly true, but it is orthogonal to the argument you were responding to.
> The war isn't happening as long as you don't look at it.
I'm not ignorant of the war, and yes I follow it; however my mentality stems from the sheer number of months of bad news happening somewhere. I can only give so much of my attention to The World when there's things at the local level to worry about. So I don't engage in "all of it" on the Internet. I have those conversations in person.
> But the answer is not about drowning yourself in pleasant fiction on Amazon Prime or ignoring current events.
I disagree, but also not drowning. Rather engaging online in the manner pre-COVID. You know, like Walking Dead "How would I survive a zombie apocalypse" or Game of Thrones "who's next to die". The 24/7 Internet chatroom known as "the comments section" just wants to deviate the conversation back to politics. I also disagree with the sentiment that we're in "Idiocracy", but I still enjoy the film.
> The fast moving clickbait media of Twitter and Facebook is trash. It's often incorrect, it's full of propaganda
So is every aggregator site. Agenda-Setting Theory [1] dictates what information you're receiving on any given day, and smaller scale Discords with self-promotion know how to gamify Trending algorithms (since most rely on some degree of 'velocity' based on time since post). Couple that with how we've over engineered attention by A/B testing thumbnails [2] and how the mind reads TEXT LIKE THIS [3] (which was also A/B tested for email campaign clickthroughs), I'm left with a curiosity of "what headline text is emotionally anchoring a sentiment"?
Heck, GET OFF THE INTERNET isn't even yelling [4], it's just me abusing that all caps does thing in brain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory
[2] https://netflixtechblog.com/selecting-the-best-artwork-for-v...
[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
[4] Reddit Version: https://v.redd.it/hlo2z6a6rctg1, Twitter Version: https://x.com/amgaweda/status/2040744192020717592; Gotta work on encoding cause something made my audio out of sync with the video
I open this site and the first thing I see is,
>This Is Not How Presidents Typically Communicate. (About trump)
And it screams to me that this is a biased site.
So I think it is not possible for a layman to know the ground truth. Not even close. Have you seen the movie "Wag the dog?" It is a 1997 movie. Things have only gotten real worse since..
So given that, what is the point? Either put your life on line and go to these places and understand the truth and do something about it, or just zone out and enjoy the what ever little fragile peace that you have right now.
I think it's pretty factual to point out that US Presidents don't normally send the message "Praise Allah" on Easter Sunday. A blasphemy like that is certainly news and warrants the Atlantic's headline.
Or do you consider the message of "Praise Allah" to be a normal thing for sitting US Presidents to say? It's a straightforward situation, there's no reason to beat around the bush on this news item.
Is he doing a good job? I think only time can tell and it is impossible to answer that question by micromanaging every little thing he does or says.
A media that does that is not really doing a good job of informing the people.
So I think that headline fits the title of this post "When Virality Is the Message".
Is it really contrary to facts to point out that this is not normal? You started this by saying The Atlantic's headline was incorrect.
The question is what is or isn't normal, as per the headline you disagreed with.
I do believe that a sitting US President tweeting such a thing is extraordinary. And does indeed deserve some analysis for how we got here. Not like in a clickbait we are doomed way, but just a reminder of how far we have gone as a country here.
I don't want to spend any more time on this. Have a good day.
Its an active negotiation going on about a currently on going conflict. People are literally dying over these words.
Say what you will about it, but the President's words _DO_ matter. Especially in times of war, negotiation, and global posturing.
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The hundreds of idiots hyperventilating about this don't matter. But what I can say is that in the USA vs Iran conflict, these words absolutely matter. We can ignore the pundits who don't matter. But the words being discussed here are the President's words.
And I happen to like The Atlantic's overall analysis on this particular situation. But you can't convince me that... this is "pointless". Its literally life or death here man.
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> I don't want to spend any more time on this.
NONE OF US want to spend any time on this. But staying informed about how this war and conflict plays out is hugely important. Digging your head into the sand because you don't care is... well... take your pick at any way to finish that sentence.
We've been forced to spend time on it because it affects business, it affects military readiness. It affects our global positioning, the lives of our soldiers, the lives of Iranians, etc. etc. Even the unrelated Europeans (who did nothing) are forced to pay attention because of the oil crisis that flows out from these events.
You already "know" that the president is someone not fit to be the president. This news outlet shows you trivial stuff that confirms your impression, getting your attention and approval.
You feel that you are staying "informed" but all that this is doing to you to push you further into your bubble.
This is war. Literally war. I will be paying attention. Maybe you should too.
That is how you are supposed to feel about it. That is the whole point of targeting.
That's wrong. And the sooner you get off of clickbait / boy cried wolf style hyperventilating, the sooner you can focus on what matters.
You know. Like what the President says during wartime. While ignoring a million of useless bots and bad analysis.
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Your opinion is correct, with regards to Twitter and other awful clickbait media. Most things there don't matter.
But The Atlantic wrote a story about the Presidents escalating words and rhetoric in wartime situation. That actually matters.
The issue of today's media is one of prioritization. Deciding what does, and doesn't matter, is key.
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I get that you are tired of the clickbait and crap. But my recommendation to you is to cut out the crap from your life. Disconnect from Twitter and Facebook and maybe you will feel better.
Choose better media. And think about what is or isn't important. Decide how you spend your time and what stories you should be reading. Don't cut off the world, but instead focus your attention on what matters.
I think a ton of people didn't get the memo during the first Trump term, and are still baffled by it during his second one.
Republicans have never used the media like the Democrats. Conservative values change very slowly and are disseminated through institutions like the military, religion, etc. Trump has taken it to the next level by only ever using the internet to troll the chronically online and anyone else out of the loop. That's radio discipline.
The equivalent question for the Democrat party would be where they expect to find new leaders when their voter base is increasingly antisocial and doesn't believe in higher education.
I'm not saying the Republicans keep their plans secret. The brutal simplicity is the main appeal for Republican voters. They emphatically don't want discussion. They want action. There's nothing to pick apart or analyze, and that's the point. It's hard to argue with someone waving a big stick.
Here's a quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
> Jonathan Clarke, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and prominent critic of Neoconservatism, proposed the following as the "main characteristics of neoconservatism": "a tendency to see the world in binary good/evil terms", a "low tolerance for diplomacy", a "readiness to use military force", an "emphasis on US unilateral action", a "disdain for multilateral organizations" and a "focus on the Middle East".
This is the same game plan since the 1970s. If you want to hear any debate about it, you're gonna have to go that far back. Nobody in today's Republican party is ever going to entertain or reiterate any of this because it will just make them look weak to voters.
Worth a watch (the Chomsky episode of Firing Line): https://youtube.com/watch?v=9DvmLMUfGss
Now you may understand why the Republicans are constantly and loudly asking that same question and insisting that all of social media is hoaxes/conspiracies/lies.
I know these answers all seem so simple and convenient, but they're just plain true. Take it for what it is.
> none of it actually making much sense
I think you just disagree with how little depth there is to this, and while that's understandable, I wouldn't go as far as saying it doesn't make sense.
If you're not aware of what's happening, how will that impact your political views? Your spending? Your habits? Your vote?
Edit - A few more:
- The war in Iran is triggering an energy and economic crisis globally. Fuel prices are skyrocketing globally as a result, with some countries mandating that people cannot work (thus, cannot get paid) more than a few days a week to preserve fuel. This is pushing up prices on groceries, materials and other goods that will disproportionately impact the global poor. Many will not be able to survive.
- The US has been intentionally and illegally embargoing oil and gas shipments to Cuba plunging the country into blackouts and instability, also against international law. People can't work, or cook, or refrigerate food, or turn on their lights.
You sure we're fine?
Edit 2: Downvotes already! Amazing. Good to see the right wing slant in Silicon Valley is alive and well. Looking forward to the day the market crashes and all of your RSUs and stock holdings are worth fuck all. You can't eat stocks, but you can eat the rich.
That works fine, except in the cases where the bad news reflects reality, or understates how bad the reality is. In that case it's like saying cancer isn't the problem, the problem is that you visited the doctor and listened as he told you bad news.
Part of the problem here is you can only list a few papers that might tell you the truth at all, when in the past there was far more independent news organizations that would vie against each other. Now they need to check in with their shareholders first.
Reporters are at the bottom of the list, there is a pile of middle and upper management that does all this work for Bezos without his need to keep an eye on it.
All it takes is one phone call from him saying they need to be careful around a topic and that's it. Funds dry up for investigations into that topic.
Now, I never said 'throw away' journalism, I said to ensure you understand the bias of the paper in question. Just because WaPo isn't reporting on Bezos doesn't mean there isn't anything to report on said guy.
> I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages...We are going to be writing every day in support of defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others...
I'll leave it to others to make a decision on whether WAPO qualifies as a propaganda outfit.
The issue is that the 24/7 Internet chatroom/forums shift the "bad news" target on a daily basis. Sometimes its war, others its natural disaster, others its a horrific crime, etc. If you've been only seeing bad news since Covid, then it makes you (read, made me) think the world's in a terrible place. I stopped spending allll my time in the 24/7 chatroom and when I say this IN the chatroom everyone thinks I'm completely unaware. I'm not. I just engage on other matters, like cheering on my buddies when they release something.
Shutting off the feeds (especially those that are becoming more extremely manipulated to produce ineffective rage, which is part of how the world is worse) may be an effective way to manage the near-term stress of the present combination of media and material conditions, but it doesn't do anything to actually address the material conditions. Heck, detachment and demobilization to reduce resistance to arbitrary exercise of power is a big part of what you are being manipulated for. It's not an accident that that works as stress relief; that's part of the design of the manipulation.
I neither agree nor disagree (if that makes sense), but I certainly agree that being modern Internet has warped people's views on things. I hear it called a "screen detox" via my Spotify BetterHelp ads and while I never used that service, I get what they mean.
Back during Digg 4.0 last year, one of the core members of users referred to it as "trying to have a conversation while attending a riot". Its a lot of third parties and faceless usernames chiming in, and if you don't answer all of them the impression can get equally get warped about the original intent of the conversation. Even how the conversation gets steered after the original comment is interesting to see.
I just think Covid made us all "get on the same wavelength", then someone(s) tainted that through things like heavy Reddit moderation. Like, we were all doing our own little things, then "everyone" is refreshing Johns Hopkins' dashboard, wondering if they have enough toilet paper because of the Seuz Canal, or watching all of the protest/riots unfold in other states.
But what got lost was no one going out to things, saving/gambling their money on the next short squeeze, and not supporting local stuff. If anything, GET OFF THE INTERNET is my attempt at manipulation/psyop/marketing campaign. And, locally, yeah, we're offline, openly talking about what we see on the different platforms since Reddit and Twitter are politically skewed, and sort of remembering a time before the pandemic.
I go to Magic the Gathering events at my LGS now. Its pretty cool to meet the nerds in that "missing third space". We're still talking about tariffs and global conflicts. We're just doing it respectfully and not trying to ruin the game at the same time cause not everyone agrees. I can even tell when someone is fresh off Arena because they play some of those insta-win meta combos. I just make tribal decks, I don't have time to study all that.
I can understand how somebody could hold onto this comfort: it used to be (mostly) true. Political "scandals" were usually either truly bad but localized (e.g. a politician caught and kicked out for bribery) or performative furor (e.g. a lapel pin).
It's different now. Those times were our "pro wrestling" era: earnest professionals who put in the work but also put on a show to keep the fans. No matter how dirty the script got, everyone made sure the lights stayed on. Now we're in the "teenage street gang" era. The "show" is actually how they see the world, participants literally delight in physical pain, and citizens on the sidelines are only terrorized.
How anyone could think things would be fine after what the childhood vaccine panel tried to do is beyond me. Or Noem withholding relief funds. Or blanket tariffs without any further plan for improving our industries. Those acts have huge negative effects across the population. The vast majority of citizens have been needlessly harmed by those choices.
I disagree, but sadly I don't think text will provide my full reasoning. But it stems from "modern WWE" (AEW is a different 'culture' right now with Brodie King), but comparing it to Ole Anderson [1] getting stabbed by a fan compared to these day when most wrestlers are just getting swarmed by people wanting them to autograph their ebay resells. Again, more about how fans (not IWC) treat wrestlers IRL, not politics. (Aside, looks like the was an attempted stabbing too so may be a moot point [2])
I think politics has just now entered its "pro wrestling" era. And yes, its largely due to a certain President that's appeared on WWE in the past.
[1] https://www.midatlanticwrestling.net/resourcecenter/gateway_...
[2] https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/krule-says-he-is-fine-aft...
"reality isn't the same as the internet" was already starting to be a dangerously out-of-touch delusion when Boomers and Silents were saying it in the 1990s.
This is American behavior: crude, cruel, hostile, arrogant, and proudly ignorant.
Richard Hofstadter wrote about Americans acting this way in the 1960s.
Look at the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, stood for decades. It's not like those sentiments went away...
And there's no "good states" either - the California Constitution in 1879 set up a racial apartheid system against Chinese people. Even had a second called "The Chinese".
Oregon was admitted to the Union explicitly with a "whites only" clause.
The Declaration of Independence even has wild conspiracy theories about "merciless Indian savages"
No amount of empirical evidence will make Americans realize this because it gives them a frowny face.
So anyways no. This is all business as usual
The history doesn't really bare that out and the peculator American prejudice seems to simply retarget more often than recede.
The largest mass lynching, for instance, was against Italians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
Anti Irish riots? Sure what about Philadelphia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_nativist_riots
This history is everywhere in the USA.
Or look at the Bronx in the 1970s or Tulsa in 1921. We didn't need bombs to drop on our cities from an adversary - we did it to ourselves
So when people say "is this American society breaking down?"
I say "no. This is simply American society"
A better way to think of this nonsensical online content: it's just the form that has been shown to win in the modern democratic political arena. Unfortunately, being a serious professional doesn't connect with voters anymore. Posting lots of goofy memes seems to, or at least it did a few years ago – IMO the media tactics used by current politicians are a few years out of date, culturally.
Not just that: how do you even define "the collapse of American society"?
What, exactly, do people think that would look like?
The Purge?
Complete anarchy? Riots in the streets?
The classic image of a burning metal garbage can in the street?
To the extent that a modern society like that of the US can "collapse", it's going to be a very, very slow and uneven thing. Most likely what it would look like is a Balkanization of the country—either de-facto, or full legal (or illegal) secession of groups of states, over the course of a number of years.
Then two paths: he's either successful, forming the sort of "managed democracy" you see in Russia etc.
Or he's unsuccessful, and we see what happens. ICE are a militia beholden to the regime. Could get spicy.
Constitutionally, I think the framework that's supposed to check executive power is already shredded, or at least revealed for what it's been all along: pretty much norms.
Good luck.
My guess is that it has more to do with reading news sources particularly aligned with one political viewpoint than the actual facts of what the government is doing.
And so it's much better to compare the US government's record with the record of other states, and in that comparison I think the US comes out reasonably well. Not the best, but certainly not the worst.
The best way to figure out what someone's going to do in the future is looking at what they are doing now.
The bad news is they keep doing crazy things.
Actually, that's bad news too. It's the cope that's convincing Democrats to stick their head in the sand and avoid dealing with their problems, which are what created the opening for Trump. They're more concerned with their own orthodoxies than actually becoming a popular party that could win a real majority and end this nonsense.
So our present course is: Democrats remain unpopular and eek out a win in the midterms in 2026, probably do some nutty things of their own, and then in 2028 we'll likely get new MAGA nutjobs.
The collapse is actually bipartisan, with different dysfunctions in each major party.
The US is not particularly close (at least, not highly probable) to a societal collapse; that's, in a sense, an overly optimistic position. Government, order, and structured society are not in imminent danger of collapse.
It is very close to a transition away from liberal democratic government in favor of something very different. [0]
[0] Arguably, past that point, but close to the point where it becomes widely accepted that the it wasn't a temporary aberration where the basic cultural and institutional supports were still intact and capable of snapping things back.
We can notice in this article the conspicuous absence of the mature adults in the room using these tactics. We don't see a whole lot of party-sponsored AI memes trying to sell universal healthcare, enhanced public services and education, ending poverty and homelessness, addressing cost of living crisis, ending gasoline dependency, etc.
It's the age of AI propaganda for people with no good ideas, because AI is a substitute for good ideas.
Not gonna happen. The best outcome is there's an organic impulse to recoil in horror to the flood of AI content, which overrides normal moral considerations and causes mobs to go burn down some datacenters (or support politicians who'd do something equally brash).
What's not going to happen is the majority gets brain-rotted for a decade and then somehow reforms because they had a couple hours of "media awareness training."
“Winning” means you have successfully manipulated a person who has so little capacity for reasoning that they will react to and make decisions from propaganda
If the plurality of humans have no ability or desire to actively resist manipulation then they are living in the world they are satisfied with
This is important because it lets pluralities build from people who are not aware they are being manipulated. Pluralities can lead to majorities and majorities, in a democratic system, create power. All this to say: I don't think those who have fallen for propaganda are living in a world they are satisfied with but instead that they are living in a world they've been told they are satisfied with and a lack of counter narratives have not shown them a better way. Consider that propaganda gets busted out whenever something isn't naturally popular or beneficial to most people, that is why we see propaganda most used around military efforts.
The idea that people cannot have agency while being subjected to propaganda is totally fucking absurd and demonstrably not true
there are millions of examples of people who can discern propaganda and make decisions based on ground truth data
Ah, yes, most of us are independently wealthy and have the financial freedom to avoid working in lobbies blasting fox news all day.
Yes, people can have agency if they choose to, most choose not to because it takes a massive fuckton of energy to do so. But you created society all by yourself from first principles right? Oh you didn't.
The thing is, especially in the modern world with so much media everywhere all the time, we are being subjected to propaganda in nearly everything we do. News, advertizing, lifestyle, all are imbued with propaganda. Some of it's obvious to you and you can quickly discount it. Other parts of it are something you've grown up with and you don't even have the first clue that it is propaganda.
Simply put your feeble human mind cannot comprehend nor perceive the ground truth of all reality and therefore we're subject to the biased and filtered information we receive from others.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Almost everybody I know has a tendency to not overly check the statements that broadly align with their world view, and be dismissive (as propaganda, without doing the work to check the ground truth data) of statements that are contrary.
The topics are usually chosen for them (editor or algorithm). The news is packaged up for them to form an opinion at a glance (headline/social media post). They lack a deep understanding and so most things pass as largely believable, if at times a bit of a stretch. Topics they know deeply are almost always "covered poorly," but not the topics they don't know deeply.
I’m very well aware of a lot of people who are not subject to propaganda - you wouldn’t consider them particularly “fun “to be around because usually they are dedicated and focused on something that they actually believe in like being a monk
I know literally zero monks especially in the tibetan tradition that cannot clock propaganda immediately - you could make a strong argument that Buddhism itself is propaganda and I would actually largely concur with you there in the broad sense however in the sense that we’re describing it is a context that you find yourself overwhelmed by
Oh and then if you actually are that smart then you would have read the following quote:
“ If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”
Your bar for “smart people” is probably way lower than it should be if you include people who can’t discriminate between measurable repeatible data and propaganda
https://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain/if-you-don...
This is false.
> I’m very well aware of a lot of people who are not subject to propaganda ... [for example] a monk
This supports my point. Monks are not known for trying to "stay informed" the way many people (yes, including intelligent people) do.
This is just being a scientist at all possible levels of your life and it’s achievable
It doesn’t take any special capabilities to do
Monks are regular people too
You severely underestimate the cost and effort involved in finding and processing "measurable repeatable data". In fact, for most politically important issues such don't exist, be it for reasons of impossible or insufficient repeatability or lack of access to the few places that may have it.
The vast majority of smart people cannot have access to, or process such data, in amount of time that doesn't risk their existence.
Besides, historical repeatability is kind of a moot point, history doesn't really repeat although farces are common.
> I know literally zero monks especially in the tibetan tradition that cannot clock propaganda immediately
That only shows that you don't quite have an idea how ubiquitous propaganda is, and you accept a lot of it as truth.
> you could make a strong argument that Buddhism itself is propaganda
OK, so they don't "clock propaganda immediately". Moreover, the whole of Buddhism isn't propaganda, the world is quite complicated compared to the abilities of the individual human mind, the long and arduous history of science should tell you that much.
'stevenwoo' below wrote something you might benefit from:
"the post hoc analysis in Jacques Ellul’s book Propaganda makes several compelling arguments that propaganda is omnipresent and difficult for the great part of public to counter and misplaced confidence in one’s own judgment is often the Achilles heel that allows propaganda to insinuate itself in one’s brain."
One that is more skeptical as a general concept.
However this comes at a significant cost most people choose not to bear
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3347626/wh... https://files.catbox.moe/jv7tdp.mp4