5 ms·

Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation (2022)

87 points by xyzal 7mo ago

dluan 7mo ago
We have a massive poisoning of the commons catastrophe coming, driven by further authoritarian government overreach and control. I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. I don't just mean half solutions like tor or social protocols that let you in and out of walled gardens. There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me feels like that window is already slammed shut.
- mmooss 7mo ago
  There were many disinformation research organizations in the US, including at major institutions such as Harvard and Stanford, that were forced to close by conservatives through lawfare or apparently through donor pressure. (It's interesting that conservatives saw it as a partisan cause.)
- Mistletoe 7mo ago
  To quote The Cable Guy, there’s only one answer, someone has to kill the babysitter (tv, social media, Big Tech). It’s hard to kill the babysitter when everyone in Congress is invested balls deep in the babysitter. Eisenhower warned of the coming overreaching powers of the Military Industrial Complex, but no one is attacking the Government Stock Market Tech Complex (GSMTC).
  - mannanj 7mo ago
    It’s beyond that. It’s the CIA deeply embedded in all the scary uncomfortable ways you would have hoped never possible. Presidents win and turn their stance and run around in the other direction, they don’t what to be another assassinated Kennedy (and imo today they would have other fears worse than dying). Congressmen and women are definitely also aware of the deep presence and power of that agency and its perversion into American life and politics. They don’t want to be the ones to be the sacrificial pawn sparking an outright violent American revolution and tear down of the agency. I was surveilled, experimented on and followed by them for being American-Pakistani and speaking out against them from 2022-2023. It was a scary time and I wish I were making this up. I wonder sometimes if they really are the good guys, and I just got things backwards. I also heard when you are kidnapped and in hostile territories for long enough, you fall in love with the kidnappers. Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious.
    - redeeman 7mo ago
      so what you're saying is that the US government is an illegitimate regime and everyone can fully justify destroying it as an enemy of the people?
      - mannanj 7mo ago
        The CIA is not the US government.
    - AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
      How were you experimented on?
      - mannanj 7mo ago
        They put things in my food and beverage - leading to symptoms I hadn’t experienced before. I didn’t expect nor placebo myself into it as only upon further reflection and scrutiny did their activity line up with the cause. I would be experimented also with advanced psychological and confusion tactics. The theme where I would suddenly feel ill, reflect on it later and notice the presence of someone who was certainly matching agent vibes and tactics was frequent afterwards. One time it was the offering of a drink by a woman who had no business popping up there in that circumstance as Though she knew “I dropped my wallet” (rode on a motorcycle with her earlier) and was too high for coincidence ready to offer me something of practical value. This lines with others accounts online of targeted individuals and CIA classified programs of experimentation.
- kubb 7mo ago
  It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread. It's hard to distinguish who's a bot, who's a narrative pusher and who's an enthusiast. Which is exactly what you'd want from an astroturfing campaign. There's a clear benefit: people in the industry are reading this, and in doing so they're granting mindshare. There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support campaigns - personal key signature. But judging by how afraid people, especially in the US, need to be of their government surveilling them, this isn't going to catch on.
  - coffeefirst 7mo ago
    Yes. I’ve also been asking every engineer I know what they’re doing with AI and there’s a lot of people doing a lot of different things, but it’s a deep mismatch with the online rhetoric. This phenomenon appears to be incrementally coming for every single topic and public platform.
    - SoftTalker 7mo ago
      I feel the same way. Most people I've talked to are using AI for better search. I don't know anyone using it heavily to do their main job (writing code). I think a lot of the accounts bragging about how much they are doing with AI are bots.
      - pessimizer 7mo ago
        I'm even shocked when I hear people are using it for better search. I've found it to be terrible for search, and constantly fabricating things. It's distilled everything that is bad about new Google, where it prefers popular results to accurate ones - but with actual fabrication that becomes infinitely worse. I literally ask it to look for something, and immediately afterwards (before reading the long-winded result), ask it if the results were real or fabricated. It's just how the cost-benefit analysis works out, and I didn't learn until a ton of times reading the results, getting suspicious of a few, doing websearches to verify them, not finding them, then coming back to ask if they were real. "Sorry! It's absolutely fair that you called me out on that... It's important that you hold me to a high standard... You're absolutely right..." I'm finding it valuable for compressing all of the docs in the world, so I don't have to look up what a function does or how to accomplish something in some framework or CLI. I find it capable of writing code if I move an inch at a time; build copious verbose debugging output that I feed back into it every time it screws up; and when it goes into a stupid loop being stupid, just debugging by hand before wasting hours trying to get it to see something that it doesn't want to see.
- RobRivera 7mo ago
  Its already here.
- calibas 7mo ago
  > I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. It's against the HN guidelines to insinuate that astroturfing happens on HN.
  - cwillu 7mo ago
    Discussion of astroturfing on a post that is specifically about astroturfing is such an obvious exception that I'm having a hard time taking your reply in good faith, but this is me trying to do so anyway instead of just downvoting and flagging like the guidelines suggest I do in such cases.
    - calibas 7mo ago
      I'm confused, you think I'm saying he's breaking guidelines? I should have been more clear, but I was trying to skirt the guidelines. I'm sure that astroturfing happens on HN, and I think that not allowing people to talk about it actually helps enable astroturfing.
- mhitza 7mo ago
  If you can point me at someone that would fund such projects (not VCs), would be happy to apply. Projects like NLNet aren't keen on funding larger scope projects. At least if you do not have the thought leader influencer clout.
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    What are your ideas for this?
    - mhitza 7mo ago
      Decentralized platform, with traceable decisions, mixing direct web of trust, delegated, and community moderated content labeling. Content servers with pay to post submissions, to allow sustainable hosting and hosting delegated moderation.
- alwa 7mo ago
  I agree that it feels like the tiny window of opportunity hasn't quite shut yet, and it's a problem space I know I should take more interest in. What do you see as the viable technical directions? Something along the lines of what Altman was trying to do with his Orb? Something along the lines of the C2PA's Content Credentials? [0] e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanity-startup-culture-hardcore-2025-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanit... and the feature piece at https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/ https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/ [1] https://contentcredentials.org https://contentcredentials.org and https://c2pa.org https://c2pa.org
  - whatshisface 7mo ago
    Instead of collecting biometric info from humans and IDing all of their online movements, you could mandate that LLM output be watermarked (using a technology that Scott Arronson was hired by OpenAI to help develop, after which the project was shut down under Altman right after proving that it could work) so that their online movement would be IDed. The implication in this story that it was shut down to keep the Orb around in principle (telling humans they had to be tagged to distinguish them from machines that could more easily be tagged) is very easy to pick up.
    - alwa 7mo ago
      Is that viable given the proliferation of open-weight LLMs that don't apply that sort of watermarking? If somebody with malign intent can skip the attestation, presumably they will, right?
      - whatshisface 7mo ago
        If every major LLM producer did it, it would not be easy for malicious actors to remove it. That's on top of the fact that most of the issue is coming from careless actors.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ajkjk 7mo ago
strong agree, I feel like it poisons the fabric of society somehow when everything you interact with is fake or even just has a good chance of being fake, regardless of the also-shitty fact that it is also often trying to influence you.
- apsurd 7mo ago
  Also how the being fake doesn't even have to be malicious. now every tom, dick, and harry wants to create content. All the world's a stage, follower count go up.
- pessimizer 7mo ago
  I held a hope that it would create an evolutionary pressure that would weed out people who fall for foolish arguments i.e. arguments without any sort of structure that should be capable of convincing anyone of anything. But that's just wishful thinking. People fall for anything as long as it's flattering and it allows them to do what they want to do when they want to do it. Every propagandistic argument is going to be like that for 80% of people, and 40% of people are going to be within that 80% about 99% of the time. They think the biggest issue of our time is how much people complain.
walterbell 7mo ago
My browser highlights a few hundred accounts. For HN and other comment-oriented sites, local userscripts are supported by browser plugins, including mobile Safari. These can highlight known usernames and implement blocklists. Most LLMs can generate a userscript on demand for non-obfuscated sites, including userid list for manual edit.
Bridged7756 7mo ago
This is notorious in platforms like reddit, with people jumping in to suggest no name products in response to questions. It doesn't help that reddit allows private profiles, thus allowing astroturfers to get away with it. Also, another case is LLM astroturfing, we're bombarded with doomerism and obituaries about programming, some of said opinions are subtler, short comments, the most dangerous ones, because little by little they jab you, though the most conspicuous ones are easy to identify. And then there's the political astroturfing. In my country smokescreens are the defacto tool, but it is suspicious of the amount of high quality edits and memes that came out about the Epstein files, essentially cementing him as a "meme" and not a monster that abused minors.
- plun9 7mo ago
  Here is an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/dty9nd/comment/f89v2z8 https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/dty9nd/com... Here, PM_ME_UR_LIDAR uses the pronoun "their" referring to Ouster, the lidar company. But PM_ME_UR_LIDAR was working at Ouster, Inc. at the time the comment was written.
  - AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
    Recently I've been seeing this every day (yes, every). See for example: https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_search&author=nian2326076&limit=10&sort=desc https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_s... User plugs "PracHub" constantly, but their profile page doesn't show those comments. Sometimes they post lazily, just pasting a link. Other times though they post as if they've stumbled upon this service by accident.
cwillu 7mo ago
(2022)
- dang 7mo ago
  It's there now. Thanks!
bpavuk 7mo ago
related: https://doublespeed.ai/ https://doublespeed.ai/ - basically astroturfing as a service. their landing page stops short of saying that Doublespeed would be "a good fit for your political campaign." I'd prefer fighting an AI-powered drone over becoming a victim of "Dead Internet-aaS" startup. at least, flying lawnmowers are honest
- droidjj 7mo ago
  Wow… that’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve seen in a while.
  - bpavuk 7mo ago
    right???? especially that "never pay a human again" at the end... Palantir is a sweetheart on Doublespeed backdrop
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  I have one of those 'flying lawnmowers' here and I'm not sure you would like to get up close and personal with them. They are super dangerous even when they are nominally under your control. But I agree with you that on the larger canvas the astroturfing will in spite of being more bloodless will do far more damage. People are just not ready for being skeptical against this, they've barely gotten used to phone scams and now they have astroturfing and deepfakes to contend with.
  - bpavuk 7mo ago
    well, I had one fly above my head in 2025, too. I know what compare against
    - jacquesm 7mo ago
      Ugh, that sucks, I hope it was not a combat situation. I've got a couple of them here mostly smaller ones (3", 5") and one large one (9") and I'm super respectful of those props and the ones here obviously don't have any kind of payload. Even so I'd hate to see one come at me, I've seen what they can do to pieces of hardwood.
SilverElfin 7mo ago
> Recent events in the world have highlighted just how influential social media can be, both in a national context and internationally. To list a few examples: platforms like Twitter and Facebook played a prominent role in the events surrounding the recent US presidential elections; social media and messaging platforms made possible the many decentralized mass protests that have popped up around the globe, from the pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, Thailand and Belarus to the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States; and of course, the whole of the internet, for better or worse, played a role in shaping how the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic. But with great power comes the great potential for manipulation and misuse. I think everyone would agree with this but is there any formal evidence of how Twitter and TikTok affect elections or legislation?
useftmly 7mo ago
[dead]
Lerc 7mo ago
I recently did some looking into how public perception campaigns work. I found it amazing that I could not find any organisation that tracks these campaigns. These are often very well funded and those funds go to people. Part of the problem is a successful public opinion campaign results in something that most people believe, we probably only get to see the failures. Challenging something that is widely held is not well received, whether or not you are right or wrong. Some things I did find out. Fake news stories don't change people's opinions very much. They enable media to shape narratives because people will reject genuine stories outside the narrative because they know that fake news stories exist. Fake news exists to be seen as fake to establish that the things you disagree with could also be fake. There are companies that specialise in this. Reputation management companies might tell you who their clients are or what they do, but never at the same time. I suspect the best ones do neither.
rrhjm53270 7mo ago
As an individual, this paper suggests that I must move beyond "Is this news true?" to "Why does it look like everyone agrees with this?"
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  It is much worse than that: it is: is anybody I interact with real?

87 points by xyzal 7mo ago

dluan 7mo ago

We have a massive poisoning of the commons catastrophe coming, driven by further authoritarian government overreach and control. I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. I don't just mean half solutions like tor or social protocols that let you in and out of walled gardens. There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me feels like that window is already slammed shut.

mmooss 7mo ago
There were many disinformation research organizations in the US, including at major institutions such as Harvard and Stanford, that were forced to close by conservatives through lawfare or apparently through donor pressure. (It's interesting that conservatives saw it as a partisan cause.)
Mistletoe 7mo ago
To quote The Cable Guy, there’s only one answer, someone has to kill the babysitter (tv, social media, Big Tech). It’s hard to kill the babysitter when everyone in Congress is invested balls deep in the babysitter. Eisenhower warned of the coming overreaching powers of the Military Industrial Complex, but no one is attacking the Government Stock Market Tech Complex (GSMTC).
- mannanj 7mo ago
  It’s beyond that. It’s the CIA deeply embedded in all the scary uncomfortable ways you would have hoped never possible. Presidents win and turn their stance and run around in the other direction, they don’t what to be another assassinated Kennedy (and imo today they would have other fears worse than dying). Congressmen and women are definitely also aware of the deep presence and power of that agency and its perversion into American life and politics. They don’t want to be the ones to be the sacrificial pawn sparking an outright violent American revolution and tear down of the agency. I was surveilled, experimented on and followed by them for being American-Pakistani and speaking out against them from 2022-2023. It was a scary time and I wish I were making this up. I wonder sometimes if they really are the good guys, and I just got things backwards. I also heard when you are kidnapped and in hostile territories for long enough, you fall in love with the kidnappers. Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious.
  - redeeman 7mo ago
    so what you're saying is that the US government is an illegitimate regime and everyone can fully justify destroying it as an enemy of the people?
    - mannanj 7mo ago
      The CIA is not the US government.
  - AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
    How were you experimented on?
    - mannanj 7mo ago
      They put things in my food and beverage - leading to symptoms I hadn’t experienced before. I didn’t expect nor placebo myself into it as only upon further reflection and scrutiny did their activity line up with the cause. I would be experimented also with advanced psychological and confusion tactics. The theme where I would suddenly feel ill, reflect on it later and notice the presence of someone who was certainly matching agent vibes and tactics was frequent afterwards. One time it was the offering of a drink by a woman who had no business popping up there in that circumstance as Though she knew “I dropped my wallet” (rode on a motorcycle with her earlier) and was too high for coincidence ready to offer me something of practical value. This lines with others accounts online of targeted individuals and CIA classified programs of experimentation.
kubb 7mo ago
It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread. It's hard to distinguish who's a bot, who's a narrative pusher and who's an enthusiast. Which is exactly what you'd want from an astroturfing campaign. There's a clear benefit: people in the industry are reading this, and in doing so they're granting mindshare. There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support campaigns - personal key signature. But judging by how afraid people, especially in the US, need to be of their government surveilling them, this isn't going to catch on.
- coffeefirst 7mo ago
  Yes. I’ve also been asking every engineer I know what they’re doing with AI and there’s a lot of people doing a lot of different things, but it’s a deep mismatch with the online rhetoric. This phenomenon appears to be incrementally coming for every single topic and public platform.
  - SoftTalker 7mo ago
    I feel the same way. Most people I've talked to are using AI for better search. I don't know anyone using it heavily to do their main job (writing code). I think a lot of the accounts bragging about how much they are doing with AI are bots.
    - pessimizer 7mo ago
      I'm even shocked when I hear people are using it for better search. I've found it to be terrible for search, and constantly fabricating things. It's distilled everything that is bad about new Google, where it prefers popular results to accurate ones - but with actual fabrication that becomes infinitely worse. I literally ask it to look for something, and immediately afterwards (before reading the long-winded result), ask it if the results were real or fabricated. It's just how the cost-benefit analysis works out, and I didn't learn until a ton of times reading the results, getting suspicious of a few, doing websearches to verify them, not finding them, then coming back to ask if they were real. "Sorry! It's absolutely fair that you called me out on that... It's important that you hold me to a high standard... You're absolutely right..." I'm finding it valuable for compressing all of the docs in the world, so I don't have to look up what a function does or how to accomplish something in some framework or CLI. I find it capable of writing code if I move an inch at a time; build copious verbose debugging output that I feed back into it every time it screws up; and when it goes into a stupid loop being stupid, just debugging by hand before wasting hours trying to get it to see something that it doesn't want to see.
RobRivera 7mo ago
Its already here.
calibas 7mo ago
> I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. It's against the HN guidelines to insinuate that astroturfing happens on HN.
- cwillu 7mo ago
  Discussion of astroturfing on a post that is specifically about astroturfing is such an obvious exception that I'm having a hard time taking your reply in good faith, but this is me trying to do so anyway instead of just downvoting and flagging like the guidelines suggest I do in such cases.
  - calibas 7mo ago
    I'm confused, you think I'm saying he's breaking guidelines? I should have been more clear, but I was trying to skirt the guidelines. I'm sure that astroturfing happens on HN, and I think that not allowing people to talk about it actually helps enable astroturfing.
mhitza 7mo ago
If you can point me at someone that would fund such projects (not VCs), would be happy to apply. Projects like NLNet aren't keen on funding larger scope projects. At least if you do not have the thought leader influencer clout.
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  What are your ideas for this?
  - mhitza 7mo ago
    Decentralized platform, with traceable decisions, mixing direct web of trust, delegated, and community moderated content labeling. Content servers with pay to post submissions, to allow sustainable hosting and hosting delegated moderation.
alwa 7mo ago
I agree that it feels like the tiny window of opportunity hasn't quite shut yet, and it's a problem space I know I should take more interest in. What do you see as the viable technical directions? Something along the lines of what Altman was trying to do with his Orb? Something along the lines of the C2PA's Content Credentials? [0] e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanity-startup-culture-hardcore-2025-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanit... and the feature piece at https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/ https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/ [1] https://contentcredentials.org https://contentcredentials.org and https://c2pa.org https://c2pa.org
- whatshisface 7mo ago
  Instead of collecting biometric info from humans and IDing all of their online movements, you could mandate that LLM output be watermarked (using a technology that Scott Arronson was hired by OpenAI to help develop, after which the project was shut down under Altman right after proving that it could work) so that their online movement would be IDed. The implication in this story that it was shut down to keep the Orb around in principle (telling humans they had to be tagged to distinguish them from machines that could more easily be tagged) is very easy to pick up.
  - alwa 7mo ago
    Is that viable given the proliferation of open-weight LLMs that don't apply that sort of watermarking? If somebody with malign intent can skip the attestation, presumably they will, right?
    - whatshisface 7mo ago
      If every major LLM producer did it, it would not be easy for malicious actors to remove it. That's on top of the fact that most of the issue is coming from careless actors.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

ajkjk 7mo ago

strong agree, I feel like it poisons the fabric of society somehow when everything you interact with is fake or even just has a good chance of being fake, regardless of the also-shitty fact that it is also often trying to influence you.

apsurd 7mo ago
Also how the being fake doesn't even have to be malicious. now every tom, dick, and harry wants to create content. All the world's a stage, follower count go up.
pessimizer 7mo ago
I held a hope that it would create an evolutionary pressure that would weed out people who fall for foolish arguments i.e. arguments without any sort of structure that should be capable of convincing anyone of anything. But that's just wishful thinking. People fall for anything as long as it's flattering and it allows them to do what they want to do when they want to do it. Every propagandistic argument is going to be like that for 80% of people, and 40% of people are going to be within that 80% about 99% of the time. They think the biggest issue of our time is how much people complain.

walterbell 7mo ago

My browser highlights a few hundred accounts. For HN and other comment-oriented sites, local userscripts are supported by browser plugins, including mobile Safari. These can highlight known usernames and implement blocklists. Most LLMs can generate a userscript on demand for non-obfuscated sites, including userid list for manual edit.

Bridged7756 7mo ago

This is notorious in platforms like reddit, with people jumping in to suggest no name products in response to questions. It doesn't help that reddit allows private profiles, thus allowing astroturfers to get away with it. Also, another case is LLM astroturfing, we're bombarded with doomerism and obituaries about programming, some of said opinions are subtler, short comments, the most dangerous ones, because little by little they jab you, though the most conspicuous ones are easy to identify. And then there's the political astroturfing. In my country smokescreens are the defacto tool, but it is suspicious of the amount of high quality edits and memes that came out about the Epstein files, essentially cementing him as a "meme" and not a monster that abused minors.

plun9 7mo ago
Here is an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/dty9nd/comment/f89v2z8 https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/dty9nd/com... Here, PM_ME_UR_LIDAR uses the pronoun "their" referring to Ouster, the lidar company. But PM_ME_UR_LIDAR was working at Ouster, Inc. at the time the comment was written.
- AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
  Recently I've been seeing this every day (yes, every). See for example: https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_search&author=nian2326076&limit=10&sort=desc https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_s... User plugs "PracHub" constantly, but their profile page doesn't show those comments. Sometimes they post lazily, just pasting a link. Other times though they post as if they've stumbled upon this service by accident.

cwillu 7mo ago

(2022)

dang 7mo ago
It's there now. Thanks!

bpavuk 7mo ago

related: https://doublespeed.ai/ https://doublespeed.ai/ - basically astroturfing as a service. their landing page stops short of saying that Doublespeed would be "a good fit for your political campaign." I'd prefer fighting an AI-powered drone over becoming a victim of "Dead Internet-aaS" startup. at least, flying lawnmowers are honest

droidjj 7mo ago
Wow… that’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve seen in a while.
- bpavuk 7mo ago
  right???? especially that "never pay a human again" at the end... Palantir is a sweetheart on Doublespeed backdrop
jacquesm 7mo ago
I have one of those 'flying lawnmowers' here and I'm not sure you would like to get up close and personal with them. They are super dangerous even when they are nominally under your control. But I agree with you that on the larger canvas the astroturfing will in spite of being more bloodless will do far more damage. People are just not ready for being skeptical against this, they've barely gotten used to phone scams and now they have astroturfing and deepfakes to contend with.
- bpavuk 7mo ago
  well, I had one fly above my head in 2025, too. I know what compare against
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    Ugh, that sucks, I hope it was not a combat situation. I've got a couple of them here mostly smaller ones (3", 5") and one large one (9") and I'm super respectful of those props and the ones here obviously don't have any kind of payload. Even so I'd hate to see one come at me, I've seen what they can do to pieces of hardwood.

SilverElfin 7mo ago

> Recent events in the world have highlighted just how influential social media can be, both in a national context and internationally. To list a few examples: platforms like Twitter and Facebook played a prominent role in the events surrounding the recent US presidential elections; social media and messaging platforms made possible the many decentralized mass protests that have popped up around the globe, from the pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, Thailand and Belarus to the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States; and of course, the whole of the internet, for better or worse, played a role in shaping how the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic. But with great power comes the great potential for manipulation and misuse. I think everyone would agree with this but is there any formal evidence of how Twitter and TikTok affect elections or legislation?

useftmly 7mo ago

[dead]

Lerc 7mo ago

I recently did some looking into how public perception campaigns work. I found it amazing that I could not find any organisation that tracks these campaigns. These are often very well funded and those funds go to people. Part of the problem is a successful public opinion campaign results in something that most people believe, we probably only get to see the failures. Challenging something that is widely held is not well received, whether or not you are right or wrong. Some things I did find out. Fake news stories don't change people's opinions very much. They enable media to shape narratives because people will reject genuine stories outside the narrative because they know that fake news stories exist. Fake news exists to be seen as fake to establish that the things you disagree with could also be fake. There are companies that specialise in this. Reputation management companies might tell you who their clients are or what they do, but never at the same time. I suspect the best ones do neither.

rrhjm53270 7mo ago

As an individual, this paper suggests that I must move beyond "Is this news true?" to "Why does it look like everyone agrees with this?"

jacquesm 7mo ago
It is much worse than that: it is: is anybody I interact with real?