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I really wish this kind of thing was more talked about, and better understood. Most people have no idea how these "bots" or "trolls" actually influence conversa

I really wish this kind of thing was more talked about, and better understood. Most people have no idea how these "bots" or "trolls" actually influence conversation online, and what impact their actions have. One thing that frustrates me most is that even if people do reach the point of understanding the power these people have, it still won't matter much. We still trust online media such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and even this website, as being the fountain of the mythical phenomenon known as "public opinion". I can see in real life that people are becoming fatigued by the uncertainty of our modern existence, but everyone is unsure of how to pinpoint and react to the source of their tension. My expectation/hope/fear is that the younger generation who grow up in this environment will eventually form a nu-luddite movement. My bigger expectation/fear is that they won't

dragontamer 5y ago
History always provides context. In the late 1700s, the "printing press" gave new freedoms to publishers never before seen in all of history. How did our lawmakers react? Yes, they passed the 1st Amendment, protecting the right to free press. But just a few years later, they also passed... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts > [The Sedition Act] criminalized making 'false statements' critical of the federal government And an example of prosecution of people through the Sedition Act is Mr. David Brown. Here's his story: > In November 1798, David Brown led a group in Dedham, Massachusetts, including Benjamin Fairbanks, in setting up a liberty pole with the words, "No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax, downfall to the Tyrants of America; peace and retirement to the President; Long Live the Vice President."[17][19][20] Brown was arrested in Andover, Massachusetts, but because he could not afford the $4,000 bail, he was taken to Salem for trial.[19] Brown was tried in June 1799.[17] Brown pleaded guilty, but Justice Samuel Chase asked him to name others who had assisted him.[17] Brown refused, was fined $480 (equivalent to $7,300 in 2020),[19][21] and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, the most severe sentence imposed under the Sedition Act.[17][19] ----------- Our 2rd President said at the time: > “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798” ---------- EDIT: It should be noted that Ben Franklin himself engaged in the creation of literal fake news, as a propaganda / negotiation tactic against the English Monarchy. Ben Franklin created a false story about Native Americans "Scalping" US Citizens on behalf of orders from the English Crown. Our founding fathers were no strangers to propaganda, fake-news, and other techniques to rile up populations and/or control the dialog. Indeed, they themselves took advantage of it to successfully launch the Revolution!
seph-reed 5y ago
I really, really wish there were spaces that required some sort of proof of critical thinking to enter. The harder the test to get in, the better. Maybe even a non-refundable 50+$ fee. I would give a lot to have a single space on Earth where mere popularity is not the metric of correctness.
- tbrownaw 5y ago
  Unfortunately, universities aren't looking so hot in this regard at the moment. Maybe the rationalist community?
- admonii 5y ago
  The fundamental problem of online "discourse" is that critical thinking is applied selectively according to emotional biases, not that participants are intellectually incapable of it. Malicious actors, doubly so. An attempt to control that can only devolve into testing for the "correct bias", and communities with sufficient moderator:post ratio or upvote/downvote type community moderation already perform that sort of self-selection. As for monetary fees - demographic skew aside, that would significantly reduce the overall user population the more you charge, so a malicious actor would need correspondingly fewer sock-puppets to create the appearance of X% of the population saying Y, limiting its effectiveness as a deterrent. Amplifying minority views by a large factor or seeding new claims/statements doesn't require that many unique accounts in the first place.
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    > The fundamental problem. You lost me. If some context was in there (as in "the current fundamental problem on my known platforms"), then everything else you said would follow. But there must be a way to do better. I can personally think of many tactics currently unused by any social platform -- all of which would need testing to verify their efficacy -- but they leave the question open none-the-less.
xkeysc0re 5y ago
Interesting podcast covering the influence of these computational propaganda campaigns and their effect on the human mind https://soundcloud.com/inpatientradio/neural-narratives-computational-propaganda-memetic-warfare-and-emotional-contagions https://soundcloud.com/inpatientradio/neural-narratives-comp...
kongin 5y ago
>One thing that frustrates me most is that even if people do reach the point of understanding the power these people have, it still won't matter much. We still trust online media such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and even this website, as being the fountain of the mythical phenomenon known as "public opinion". I'm much more interested in who the moderators of social media are and who pays them. Going after 'trolls' is to think we still live in 2011 when this was the way to astroturf. Reddit for example, on average has none of the content users post on their site reach and stay on the front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/ HN is fairly straightforward in moderation: what dang doesn't like gets deleted, but the user flags have also been weaponised recently. Twitter and FB I have no idea about. But I can't imagine it's hard to find out who the paid moderators are and pay them some more to delete content you disagree with and not delete content you agree with. The majority of them are paid peanuts to begin with.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  For most big forums, Twitter, reddit, and Facebook, it's probably 2$ an hour workers in 24/7 facilities in India, the Philippines, and other low wage parts of the world. Automation is being used at an accelerating pace, and there's so much data being pumped online that only a vanishingly small percentage of flagged media gets reviewed by an actual human. A dozen or so motivated and clever humans is all it takes to get a person or channel suspended on any of the big platforms because automation is so embedded. Situations that a human world recognize as an error usually get corrected, but almost all social media is too much data by far to include humans at a meaningful scale. Moderation at scale is currently a very blunt instrument, compared to a well curated, civil forum. Transformers and other recent models have enabled very nuanced classification of text, so we're going to see a confluence of economic factors - the quality to cost ratio of humans vs software at all levels of moderation and curation. Eventually the bots will be just barely good enough and cheap enough to run at scale that humans will be removed from the loop, from first pass sorting all the way up the chain. The humans will only set the parameters, and then we'll have a whole new bag of problems. It'll be easier to manipulate software to trigger censorship than to manipulate humans following a set of guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918763 Because of worker protections, minimum wage, and legal liabilities, it's better to find cheap multilingual offshore moderation farms than to hire in the US. It's a race to the bottom. The problem of moderation at global scale may prove to be intractable without human level ai.
jcun4128 5y ago
Is there like a "truth" repository ha, snopes... who's truth. Take some noun/term, look up the sentiment in the thread against "the truth". But it's fast like a lookup vs. finding white papers/something considered the truth that you could cite.

dragontamer 5y ago

History always provides context. In the late 1700s, the "printing press" gave new freedoms to publishers never before seen in all of history. How did our lawmakers react? Yes, they passed the 1st Amendment, protecting the right to free press. But just a few years later, they also passed... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts > [The Sedition Act] criminalized making 'false statements' critical of the federal government And an example of prosecution of people through the Sedition Act is Mr. David Brown. Here's his story: > In November 1798, David Brown led a group in Dedham, Massachusetts, including Benjamin Fairbanks, in setting up a liberty pole with the words, "No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax, downfall to the Tyrants of America; peace and retirement to the President; Long Live the Vice President."[17][19][20] Brown was arrested in Andover, Massachusetts, but because he could not afford the $4,000 bail, he was taken to Salem for trial.[19] Brown was tried in June 1799.[17] Brown pleaded guilty, but Justice Samuel Chase asked him to name others who had assisted him.[17] Brown refused, was fined $480 (equivalent to $7,300 in 2020),[19][21] and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, the most severe sentence imposed under the Sedition Act.[17][19] ----------- Our 2rd President said at the time: > “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798” ---------- EDIT: It should be noted that Ben Franklin himself engaged in the creation of literal fake news, as a propaganda / negotiation tactic against the English Monarchy. Ben Franklin created a false story about Native Americans "Scalping" US Citizens on behalf of orders from the English Crown. Our founding fathers were no strangers to propaganda, fake-news, and other techniques to rile up populations and/or control the dialog. Indeed, they themselves took advantage of it to successfully launch the Revolution!

seph-reed 5y ago

I really, really wish there were spaces that required some sort of proof of critical thinking to enter. The harder the test to get in, the better. Maybe even a non-refundable 50+$ fee. I would give a lot to have a single space on Earth where mere popularity is not the metric of correctness.

tbrownaw 5y ago
Unfortunately, universities aren't looking so hot in this regard at the moment. Maybe the rationalist community?
admonii 5y ago
The fundamental problem of online "discourse" is that critical thinking is applied selectively according to emotional biases, not that participants are intellectually incapable of it. Malicious actors, doubly so. An attempt to control that can only devolve into testing for the "correct bias", and communities with sufficient moderator:post ratio or upvote/downvote type community moderation already perform that sort of self-selection. As for monetary fees - demographic skew aside, that would significantly reduce the overall user population the more you charge, so a malicious actor would need correspondingly fewer sock-puppets to create the appearance of X% of the population saying Y, limiting its effectiveness as a deterrent. Amplifying minority views by a large factor or seeding new claims/statements doesn't require that many unique accounts in the first place.
- seph-reed 5y ago
  > The fundamental problem. You lost me. If some context was in there (as in "the current fundamental problem on my known platforms"), then everything else you said would follow. But there must be a way to do better. I can personally think of many tactics currently unused by any social platform -- all of which would need testing to verify their efficacy -- but they leave the question open none-the-less.

xkeysc0re 5y ago

Interesting podcast covering the influence of these computational propaganda campaigns and their effect on the human mind https://soundcloud.com/inpatientradio/neural-narratives-computational-propaganda-memetic-warfare-and-emotional-contagions https://soundcloud.com/inpatientradio/neural-narratives-comp...

kongin 5y ago

>One thing that frustrates me most is that even if people do reach the point of understanding the power these people have, it still won't matter much. We still trust online media such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and even this website, as being the fountain of the mythical phenomenon known as "public opinion". I'm much more interested in who the moderators of social media are and who pays them. Going after 'trolls' is to think we still live in 2011 when this was the way to astroturf. Reddit for example, on average has none of the content users post on their site reach and stay on the front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/ HN is fairly straightforward in moderation: what dang doesn't like gets deleted, but the user flags have also been weaponised recently. Twitter and FB I have no idea about. But I can't imagine it's hard to find out who the paid moderators are and pay them some more to delete content you disagree with and not delete content you agree with. The majority of them are paid peanuts to begin with.

robbedpeter 5y ago
For most big forums, Twitter, reddit, and Facebook, it's probably 2$ an hour workers in 24/7 facilities in India, the Philippines, and other low wage parts of the world. Automation is being used at an accelerating pace, and there's so much data being pumped online that only a vanishingly small percentage of flagged media gets reviewed by an actual human. A dozen or so motivated and clever humans is all it takes to get a person or channel suspended on any of the big platforms because automation is so embedded. Situations that a human world recognize as an error usually get corrected, but almost all social media is too much data by far to include humans at a meaningful scale. Moderation at scale is currently a very blunt instrument, compared to a well curated, civil forum. Transformers and other recent models have enabled very nuanced classification of text, so we're going to see a confluence of economic factors - the quality to cost ratio of humans vs software at all levels of moderation and curation. Eventually the bots will be just barely good enough and cheap enough to run at scale that humans will be removed from the loop, from first pass sorting all the way up the chain. The humans will only set the parameters, and then we'll have a whole new bag of problems. It'll be easier to manipulate software to trigger censorship than to manipulate humans following a set of guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918763 Because of worker protections, minimum wage, and legal liabilities, it's better to find cheap multilingual offshore moderation farms than to hire in the US. It's a race to the bottom. The problem of moderation at global scale may prove to be intractable without human level ai.

jcun4128 5y ago

Is there like a "truth" repository ha, snopes... who's truth. Take some noun/term, look up the sentiment in the thread against "the truth". But it's fast like a lookup vs. finding white papers/something considered the truth that you could cite.