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> the existence of these models can have a very real, negative effect on the world (affecting you even if you yourself never come into contact with any of the m

> the existence of these models can have a very real, negative effect on the world (affecting you even if you yourself never come into contact with any of the models or its outputs, since you'll have to deal with the puppet government elected due to it) Can you evidence this belief? Because I'm aware of a paper in which the authors attempted to find an actual proven example of someone trying this, and after a lot of effort they found one in South Korea. There was a court case that proved a bunch of government employees in an intelligence agency had been trying this tactic. But the case showed it had no impact on anything. Because, surprise, people don't actually choose to follow bot networks on Twitter. The conspirators were just tweeting into a void. The idea that you can "influence" (buy) elections using bots is a really common in one the entirely bogus field of misinformation studies, but try and find objective evidence for this happening and you'll be frustrated. Every path leads to a dead end.

fallingknife 2y ago
There isn't any because it doesn't work. There are two groups of people this argument appeals to: 1. Politicians/bureaucrats and legacy media who have lost power because the internet has broken their monopoly on mass propaganda distribution and caused them to lose power. 2. People who don't believe in democracy but won't admit it to themselves. They find a way to simultaneously believe in democracy and that they should always get their way by hallucinating that their position is always the majority position. When it is made clear that it is not a majority position they fall back to the "manipulation" excuse thereby delegitimizing the opinion of those who disagree as not really their opinion.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Yep, pretty much. The great thing about this belief is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enough years of stories in the media about elections being controlled by Twitter bots and people in the government-NGO-complex start to believe it must be true because why would all these respectable media outlets and academics mislead them? Then they start to think, gosh our political opponents are awful and it'd be terrible if they came to power by manipulating people. We'd better do it first! So now what you're seeing is actual attempts to use this tactic by people who have apparently read claims that it works. Because there's no direct evidence that it works, the existence of such schemes is itself held up as evidence that it works because otherwise why would such clever people try it? It's turtles all the way down.

fallingknife 2y ago

There isn't any because it doesn't work. There are two groups of people this argument appeals to: 1. Politicians/bureaucrats and legacy media who have lost power because the internet has broken their monopoly on mass propaganda distribution and caused them to lose power. 2. People who don't believe in democracy but won't admit it to themselves. They find a way to simultaneously believe in democracy and that they should always get their way by hallucinating that their position is always the majority position. When it is made clear that it is not a majority position they fall back to the "manipulation" excuse thereby delegitimizing the opinion of those who disagree as not really their opinion.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Yep, pretty much. The great thing about this belief is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enough years of stories in the media about elections being controlled by Twitter bots and people in the government-NGO-complex start to believe it must be true because why would all these respectable media outlets and academics mislead them? Then they start to think, gosh our political opponents are awful and it'd be terrible if they came to power by manipulating people. We'd better do it first! So now what you're seeing is actual attempts to use this tactic by people who have apparently read claims that it works. Because there's no direct evidence that it works, the existence of such schemes is itself held up as evidence that it works because otherwise why would such clever people try it? It's turtles all the way down.