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It's ultimately a gradient, some countries are more aggressive with their astroturfing effort. China's astroturfing for example has gotten so bad, that the "50
by andreilys 5y ago
It's ultimately a gradient, some countries are more aggressive with their astroturfing effort.
China's astroturfing for example has gotten so bad, that the "50 cent army" meme has become pervasive and well-known to mostly anyone that spends time online.
I honestly worry that with the development around language models like GPT-3, the internet as we know it will be completely blanketed with astro-turfed content by language models and low-paid contractors.
- foepys 5y agoI am very certain that within 10 years we will all fail at distinguishing bots from real people posting online. What that future holds is scary and I hope that humanity will be smart enough to not destroy democracy just because Russia, China, et cetera told them lies via those bots.
- hutzlibu 5y agoThe turing test is still far away from solving. And generic troll posts are nothing new and the comment sections under most news articles not worth reading as of today already. And if wars could be started because of shitposting bots - then there is something very wrong with the decision making of when to start wars.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoA bot doesn't have to be Turing passing for a one off post to be passing
- foverzar 5y ago> It's ultimately a gradient It's actually not. In global politics actors rarely engage in things their peers don't. It seems to me that this is rather ultimately something more like finding the most wildly looking thing about how other culture manages information flows and PR and focusing optics on it. > I honestly worry that with the development around language models like GPT-3, the internet as we know it will be completely blanketed with astro-turfed content by language models and low-paid contractors. Tbh I think that we had already passed this point, with all the low-grade SEO and myriads of copy-paste clickbait internet-tabloids. The internet has already drowned in low-grade media-content and language models would hardly change anything fundamentally in that matter.
- dirtyid 5y ago>focusing optics on it. Basically. Western reporting trying to overindex PRC influence campaigns as part of manufacturing consent has gotten so bad that useful idiots in the west start to reflexively accuse 50C everywhere. And brainwashed enough to genuinely believe it. Official 50C operates domestically, not abroad. Even then, 50c posting is characterized by spamming low effort platitudes instead of high effort engagement. PRC isn't wasting valuable human capita with English proficiency to argue/troll on platforms like HN or Reddit. Millions sympathetic to PRC opinions like diaspora / VPN users do that on their own free time. To date, PRC influence campaigns are limited to a hundreds / low thousands of accounts boosting discourse of official accounts on Twitter and Facebook. So far, they've been low effort campaigns with poor reach. But repetitive headlines tries to insinuate otherwise. PRC will probably harness GPT-3 to exploit asymmetry in censorship ability. They just haven't yet.
- trasz 5y agoIt certainly looks like this, until you look at facts. What did the "50 cent army" actually achieve? Anything even close to manufacturing American consent to invade Middle East and kill million random people?
- analyst74 5y ago> China's astroturfing for example has gotten so bad, that the "50 cent army" meme has become pervasive and well-known to mostly anyone that spends time online Just because a meme got popular on the internet doesn't make it true. In the case of 50 cent army, it got popular because it's the easiest way to shut down pro-China argument without refuting their points.