Overseas fakers using AI videos to push a narrative of UK decline, BBC finds | Hacker News Reader

Overseas fakers using AI videos to push a narrative of UK decline, BBC finds

bbc.co.uk

58 pointsdijksterhuis47 comments

The CBC recently reported on videos pretending to be from Canadians promoting similar anti-Canada messaging. They used AI generated copies of real Canadians and hired voice actors. They use this divisive content to drive views and ad revenue: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/alberta-separatist-youtube-ch...

Yes, this is story immediately came to mind to me. It also shows that the idea of poor people in the global south doing this for money isn't quite the entire story either. Most of the people exposed seem to be young Dutch people trying to make a quick buck attacking Canada.

Such is the way to radicalize people - convince them with propaganda that their way of life is at risk.

And it's scary how effective it seems to be, scary that an internet-based "reality" can appear more trustworthy that your real life...

It seems the more people spend online the more they trust online picture whatever it is (for most people it's an algorithmically generated feed) and less pay attention to what they can see in person. Smartphone addition is harmful in so many ways.

In the past I think people were equally wrong when assuming their real life was accurately similar to average for the entire society they lived in and not a regional and perhaps class based bubble. I think there was a short period when amateur media was correcting more misconception than adding to it.

It can be the opposite way. I can think of umpteen examples where mainstream media seemed to misrepresent or ignore certain aspects of ordinary life. For example, if a bore is shown in a sitcom or drama, they will usually talk a lot about trains or so called conspiracy theories, not about football (soccer) or the weather... Even though in real life, I've encountered far more football and weather bores. (They are very common all over the UK.) I suspect this is because football is an acceptable thing to drone on about.

Drama writers can also imagine situations which don't derive from real life. Channel 4 had a drama about a Muslim riot grrrl punk band called Lady Parts, something which to my knowledge has never happened in the UK... Because if it had the Guardian etc would be all over it. Maybe it was meant to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. (The drama was written by an upper middle class woman who was sent to private school and lived much of her childhood in Singapore... Not exactly a typical working class British Muslim upbringing.)

I have a friend that is a "Bernie Bro." Basically, everyone sucks; right, left, etc.

He constantly sends me hate-porn videos; much of it obvious fakes; AI or not (It's been going on far longer than AI tools).

People get hooked on anger. It's -literally- an addiction, and they behave like addicts; seeking out the best "hate dealers," selling the "best" anger-inducing content, and savagely attacking anyone that questions the stuff.

I learned to just ignore most of what he sends me. I've asked him not to send it, and he's ignored it (like an addict).

I have friends that are into the far-right and far-left cesspits, too. It's pretty sobering.

What was it that Bill Burroughs said about heroin?

> "Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy."

You could replace "junk" with "hate," and it would apply.

long term recovering addict here and yeah i’ve been trying to work on the “anger” stuff in this last year. you’re right. in the moment it feels good. and it’s very easy to replicate that dopamine hit though getting righteous about stuff — just go on HN and find something about AI (that’s for me anyway - “they’re wrong, must fix the wrong!”).

i guess we are kinda hardwired as humans to react to perceived danger/threats. warm and fuzzy nice feelings seem harder to cultivate and take a lot of persistent effort. so it’s much easier to fall into this anger/hatewatching cycle than the other more compassionate/reasonable/warm and fuzzy side.

dunno, most of this comment is probably pop psych bs, but it feels right for my experience so i dunno.

fwiw, i hope your friends finds their way to something a little more peaceful one day.

45 years, for me.

I see lots of that stuff in the Fellowship. I've seen resentments go on for decades, and metastasize. Since no one is putting a stem in their mouth, it's OK.

I gave up my anger at about the ten-year mark. It was really difficult. Just like giving up the substances.

"I have a friend that is a "Bernie Bro." Basically, everyone sucks; right, left, etc."

That isn't completely wrong. Bernie Sanders was refreshing because he didn't feel such a big part of the machine. I also hate the way everything is being turned into two polar opposites all the time as if there are not other ways and viewpoints, it feels to me as this is one way that the masses are controlled.

One thing I noticed when I set up my current YouTube account was that YouTube was trying to work out which of two routes to send me down... One very pro-Democrat, CNN/MSNBC and so on, and the other very pro-Republican, Fox etc. I was not interested in either of these, and am not an American, so that is not my circus anyway. It constantly shows me far right (and more rarely far left) content... And within a UK context, it's always about Labour, Tories and Reform type content, occasionally the English Greens... Never about the SNP or even Lib Dems, let alone the Scottish Green Party. This is without getting into the non-party political rabbitholes YouTube will try and drag you into.

The best way I could deal with these RepDem ragebait videos was constantly to click "not interested" on such things. I have a friend who is educated and intelligent, but spends an inordinate amount of time on Trumpbait videos and what looks like NATO propaganda (which has been saying the Ukraine war is about to finish for the past four years at least). I am not a fan of Trump, but I'm not going to watch some hack like Jimmy Kimmel rant about him for twenty minutes. They are not serious political analysis and are based more around mudslinging and personality attacks than actual policy and ideology. It has affected my friend's mental health a lot and I've told him off for it. He is totally out of touch with our local and national political scene now.

That's because Internet and apps has largely cut communities. People would rather stay at home and doomscroll tiktok videos, than meet their neighbors at the library and see that they are actually not scary at all

I've noticed a lot of Americans believing the fake stuff about the islamization of England. Living in England it's obvious a lot is fake by looking out of the window and similar. Not that there aren't any issues but it gets hugely exaggerated and some things completely made up.

It really depends where you live. In you live in Norfolk or Devon, then you're not living in an "Islamised" area. However, there are places that feel more that way. I was on the Edgware Road in London around ten years ago, and there was a large visible Arab population (to the extent one or two even wore traditional costumes) and people smoking hookahs outside cafés.

A more reliable guide would be how many women you see wearing hijabs, burqas, niqabs etc. In some areas this is more common than others. You will see more of these in Birmingham than Berwick upon Tweed.

So it really depends where you are.

what I find worst is that not all of this seems to be a work of a nation-state actor.

it seems like quite a lot of these are just made by people in 3rd world countries to make ad revenue. making videos for westerners gives you the richest audience, so the best ad revenue. and anger creates engagement, so making polarizing content gives you most reach.

yeah they cover this in the article. broadly theres like three types of this activity: nation states; individuals / loose groups with an ideological agenda; people who want ad revenue money.

Not what I expected when it was said “we will hang you with the rope you sell us”

Could also be a combination of both, e.g. like Russia's "rent a disposable saboteur" concept, just for misinformation instead of physical sabotage. If it brings in additional ad revenue then that's just the cherry on top.

It does go both way as for example I have seen westeners make videos about developing nations with huge population say India because it would get them more views. Sure the ad revenue per 1000 views would be less but you would just get more views overall and I have seen that there is still anger/polarizing content generated towards Indians as such.

Which also generates hate towards Indian people online too which is definitely quite a problem, so this issue cuts both ways.

In my opinion, I used to think that there used to be nation-state actors involved within the perception of a country but the thing is that you can just have such perverse incentives and you wouldn't even need to create nation-state actors and they can then stay away blame-free even.

Edit: another thing that I remembered is that it shouldn't be a developing nation or developed nation critique but rather an critique of the system in general as I have seen western people critique about for example UK's downfall and I have seen Indian people critique about for example say India's downfall.

My point is, everyone makes rage inducing content nowadays if one looks for it and the algorithm sometimes even pushes it and so the algorithmic structure has created these perverse incentives and is pushing them on all of us basically

On Twitter I think most of the "Decadent West" accounts are for ad share. Elon has a whole harem of these accounts to retweet and ask stupid shit like "But has he actually done something illegal"

Worse, it's often just monetisation without a specific agenda of radicalisation.

> The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

― William S. Burroughs

Interestingly on Facebook, Threads and Instagram, Meta keeps trying to push it's video creation AI to me, with short video clips showing exactly this sort of content. So it seems Meta itself is pushing you to create it also.

The BBC is part of the problem. For example, Nigel Farage is very much their own Frankenstein's monster, because they promoted him heavily long before GB News and AI fake videos. One of its flagship political programmes, QuestionTime had him on a disproportionate amount of the time, to the extent that he almost felt like an industry plant. (To be fair, Farage makes better telly than most of dull workaday politicians, but he still wasn't getting support until the BBC bigged him up.). They even had him on a Scottish independence special back when he had no elected representatives in Scotland. Farage, Brexit, UKIP and Reform are all seeds that the BBC planted fifteen years ago.

As for UK decline, I am afraid that it very much is visible in the 2020s. There was no real debt protection during the lockdown as there should have been (to prevent people's homes and businesses being seized due to non-payment), and the price of everything is sky high. This is attributed to Brexit, but I suspect that is part of the issue. As for migration, it definitely is much higher than it was twenty years ago, and there are elements which are playing both ends of that debate like the BBC itself.

Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. The Eastasians are our best allies.

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. The Eurasians are our best allies.

Part of a larger pattern.

If you're into travel blogs YouTube will serve you an endless barrage of videos with photoshopped thumbnails, exclusively containing fearmongering about whatever country or city they're visiting. This has been going on since pre-AI times.

On social media, you'll see plenty of AI-generated videos of members of $GROUP acting badly. One way to make people hate each other even more.

It's been known for a decade+ that platforms paying by engagement / interaction incentivizes people to post things that cause strong negative emotions. Fear and hate sell in the algorithmic engagement economy.

Don't trust BBC, they are the state propaganda machine. Draw your own conclusions, there's plenty of UK-based channels that provide the current footage from towns and cities around the country.

https://www.youtube.com/@theallornothingpodcastwith4442/vide...

https://www.youtube.com/@ukexplored/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingturnip/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@Turdtowns/videos

no paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20260515071859/https://www.bbc.c...

Propaganda machine saying other sources are propaganda

The decline of personal freedom in the UK is far more troubling than the rise of AI propaganda.

1. Protest rights have become more restricted 2. Online speech is more regulated and more policed 3. Digital privacy has weakened relative to state power

Debateable.

On one hand those 3rd world despair porn accounts are a plague. On the other hand, my god has the UK declined.

How has the UK declined and who is to blame you think?

I mean, it has objectively declined from a point in time where it held dominion over one in four of the world's souls, keeping most of them in poverty as it siphoned resources out of them, and blocked their own economic development, by dumping its own products into their markets at gunpoint.

And that decline is a good thing.

More recently? It's been making some effort towards burning the furniture.

We in the UK are better off in many ways than back then - more GDP per capita, better houses, longer life expectancy and the like. There's more to life than having an empire.

It can be very interesting to read opinions in such places as "Letters to the Editor" in newspapers from the 1800s. The conviction that "things were so much better in the past" and "everything's gone to shit" (in the face of clear evidence to the contrary) is, and always has been, an integral part of the human condition.

Whereas the true story is that since Brexit, Britain has experienced a renaissance and a new golden age of prosperity, human flourishing, and enlightenment.

lol.

That kool-aid must be delicious.

I think it must be some exotic foreign brand of kool-aid, it's called "Sark Asam"

Fake? These viewpoints won the majority in the brexit election. So it's a pushed narrative that won the majority of the public view.

As if Farage bought a cheaper Sri Lanka media consultant to win the next elections.

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