This is old news BUT hasn't reached it's Apex by a long shot. Candidates that are aggressively transparent, speak with brutal truth, and accept it may cost them an election... They will ironically be hard to beat long haul in this environment.
In some ways, that’s what Trump was - he didn’t stick to the predictable talking points and empty platitudes that form the language most other politicians speak in. He spoke much more bluntly and aggressively than we were used to. It seemed to have helped him enormously, even though the things he actually said turned out to be pure falsehoods.
On the other hand, we have had actual honest and realistic candidates, like Larry Lessig. And they were so honest they got squashed by their party apparatus before they ever had a chance.
I never got around to finishing the Muller Report, but from what I recall and what was made public, Russia's influence campaign was largely traditional and human powered.
Here's a bitter pill for everyone. If it turns out that a large fraction of people really can have their opinion changed by bots that wouldn't even pass a Turing test, maybe its time to rethink the idea that everyone gets to vote.
> Here's a bitter pill for everyone. If it turns out that a large fraction of people really can have their opinion changed by bots that wouldn't even pass a Turing test, maybe its time to rethink the idea that everyone gets to vote.
It isn't clear to me if this is necessarily a bitter pill as much as a possible direction for education reform. If unsophisticated bots are able to efficiently disseminate information to a wide audience, would it be possible to (using analogous techniques) vastly decrease the cost and increase the scalability of public education?
I think you're too much an optimist. If some of the most educated people can be anti-vaxx, which is something which affects their families intimately and in the utmost serious way... Moreso that one election cycle. I don't think there is hope for regularly educated people.
Nothing new here though. For as long as I’ve been living, public opinion on any topic is roughly a function of media saturation. You can get the majority of people to believe grass is red and Elvis is still alive if you spend enough money and shout it through enough channels.
> I don't think there is hope for regularly educated people.
Maybe we should start by stopping to conflate being rational and wise with being 'educated'. As if going to college was some sort of panacea for all of our problems.
Lately I've started to think that higher education(particularly undergrad) has more in common with a cargo cult than many would like to admit.
What if I had a bot that merely said the following:
"Democratic candidate XYZ wants to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants with your tax dollars."
Such a bot would not pass the Turing test, but it would be speaking the truth (for many of the candidates) and that truth would be relevant to many voters' interest. So what?
I think people need to understand that the real problem from the media's point of view is that decades ago, they controlled 99 percent of the discourse. Now they control...95 percent. And they don't like it. So...Russia Russia Russia Squirrel! Russia Russia Russia Squirrel!
Yes. Yes it does matter. A bot that isn't passing the Turing test isn't making a logical argument. Therefore a voter voting based on that isn't basing their vote on a logical considerations. If voters aren't voting on facts, the entire premise of Democracy is flawed.
>"Democratic candidate XYZ wants to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants with your tax dollars."
>Such a bot would not pass the Turing test, but it would be speaking the truth (for many of the candidates) and that truth would be relevant to many voters' interest. So what?
Ironically, I'm pretty sure such a statement is exactly False. No serious candidate (polling >1%) has proposed unconditional healthcare for illegal immigrants. So no, such a bot wouldn't be speaking the truth. By all means prove me wrong. Find any written or recorded instance of a Democratic Candidate saying this.
>Now they control...95 percent. And they don't like it. So...Russia Russia Russia Squirrel! Russia Russia Russia Squirrel!
By thinking this is what the media does, aren't you implicitly admitting that crude repetition of non-arguments work? Just a moment ago didn't you say such tactics are perfectly fine so long as the statements are truth that are relevant to many voters interests? Russian interference is relevant to my interests.
The thing about voting is, the purpose is not to increase the quality of the decision. The practical purpose of voting is simply to avoid civil war. Without voting, a large group of people who are being acted against have no choice but to use force to get what they want. Democracy is a pressure release valve (same with free speech).
If I can't use the soapbox I use the ballot box. If I can't use the ballot box, I use the ammo box.
So it doesn't matter how dumb the voters are. What matters if is if they can generate violence.
Seems like the same infrastructure that supports omnipresent chatbots will serve adequately for interdicting and dispensing with the protesters^Wrevolutionaries^Wterrorists.
>The thing about voting is, the purpose is not to increase the quality of the decision. The practical purpose of voting is simply to avoid civil war.
Actually its both. Voting is a legitimacy mechanism (aka avoiding civil war) and a competence mechanism (aka making quality decisions). It is much better at the former, and typically better than historical systems (re: monarchy) at the latter.
It is perfectly reasonable to consider a trade-off that buys us higher competence at a loss of 10%-15% legitimacy. That's a small enough fraction of the population that I wouldn't worry too much about them starting a civil war. Especially if homogeneously distributed.
Wars happen when enough people are willing to sacrifice themselves and others. Leaders sacrifice their own, foot soldiers sacrifice themselves and their enemies.
What makes people willing to sacrifice? An opportunity/threat for a significant shift in quality of life. I don't think democracy, dictatorship or any other form of government or its customs make much of a difference at all.
You can have stable dictatorships and unstable democracies - it's got much more to do with luck and sometimes competence of the people at the top.
Sorry but this is flat out ridiculous. It's no different from saying "if you supported any of the US wars since the Korean war, you fall for propaganda and it's time to rethink the idea that everyone gets a vote." or "if you fall for advertising" or "if you become a slave to a corporation" or "if you live beyond your means" or etc etc you get my drift. Most people are seriously flawed and easily fooled. You are just saying that you don't believe in democracy.
Why don't kids get to vote? Is it not because they are seriously uninformed and easily influenced?
If you agree that one subset of the population shouldn't get to vote for these reasons, why not a wider subset? In fact why not throw out voting age entirely and make a voting test the only barrier? Would not a direct test of civic knowledge have fewer false positives and false negatives than the blunt tool of an arbitrary age cutoff?
Surely there are degrees of flawed, with some people being very gullible and uninformed and some not. And surely there is some way and some benefit to the rest of us if we disenfranchise the most susceptible to propaganda.
You're right. I don't believe in Democracy. I believe in Epistocracy.
The establishment would just set unfair and arbitrary criteria based on their interests as to who meets the knowledge bar.
Anyway it's already sort of an epistocracy. Those "in the know" have more power and already pretty much run things. Ethics and morals are orthogonal to knowledge.
Your counterargument is therefore not with the principle of Epistocracy but rather with the implementation. I've thought about this before and I think I have a way to construct the voting test in a way that is robust to being "hacked". Copy and paste to follow:
1. There is already a de facto voting test for some fraction of Americans. Its called the citizenship test. And I for one find it offensive to basic reasoning that some people get to skip the test by virtue of being born in the right place. From now on let's include 5 questions chosen at random from the citizenship test on every ballot. In order to prevent the citizenship test itself from being politicized, the pool of questions which might appear on the ballot shall be chosen from the version of the citizenship test which existed before the voting test was added to the ballot.
2. Each candidate on the ballot gets to choose 5 multiple choice questions. The questions must be directly relevant to the powers of the office. Eg you cannot use a question about TV sitcoms from 1950 as a proxy to disenfranchise by age. The veracity of the questions must be a matter of public historical record or a provable logical consequence of facts that are verifiable by public historical record. Eg you cannot ask an opinion question like "Will Obamacare destroy America?" but you can ask "In 2009 did blowhard.com publish an article which concluded that Obamacare will destroy America?". Any news source above some number of readers/viewers can submit their works to the Library of Congress in order to make it qualify as a source for the untampered public historical record. Legislative acts and government commissioned works are automatically part of the public historical record, except in cases that they are classified as state secrets. Eg you cannot use a record of a private conversation of FB as a basis for a public historical record, but you could cite an article from a tiny publication like Rotary Club Monthly (provided it also meets the relevance criteria). Questions must have either a numerical, textual, or boolean answer. The potential answers to questions with numerical answers must differ from each other by at least 10%. The potential answers to questions with textual answers must not have more than 50% of the words in common. Boolean questions can be mapped to numerical or textual questions by asking "which of these statements is true" and then making the question one of the answers. The criteria on numerical and textual questions shall apply to the mapped boolean question. The courts shall approve the veracity and relevance and answer set of questions beforehand, and disagreement with the court decision may be rectified by the usual appeals process.
3. The last part is how to make use of the test results. This is a risky challenge as if there is a simple cutoff score then it is easy to make questions that disenfranchise the majority, and then the minority of the voting minority could always vote to empower itself further by raising the cutoff higher still. Thus there's a potential runaway feedback loop where eventually Democracy is abolished. I have two solutions.
3.1 The scores are aggregated and the bottom 20% are disenfranchised no matter the raw score.
3.2 No one is disenfranchised per se. Instead each vote is weighted by its test score. Each correct answer counts for 1 point and each incorrect answer counts for -1/n where n is the number of wrong choices. A voter that is systematically wrong on every question is probably wrong about their choice for president, so their vote counts negative (which is technically not disenfranchisement). A voter that gets a score near zero is no better than a random guesser thus they add no information to the system and so the system ignores them. A voter that gets every question right knows what they are talking about and so the system gives their voice the most weight.
Edit: Currently editing. I'm adding some after thoughts right now on scenarios where cand...
Way too complicated and certainly would be gamed. And it only filters out for lazy people, not intelligent or informed people. In any case why wouldn't you make the questions about the office that the candidate is running for and what they would be responsible for? That seems like the most relevant knowledge to a vote.
The problem with the principle of epistocracy is the implementation. When what's at stake is control of an entire country, huge amounts of resources will be directed towards subverting any system that you create.
What's good enough for the purposes of immigration control isn't necessarily good enough for the purposes of voting. A civics exam would select the most motivated groups who are willing to cram, as well as the knowledgeable, and there's no guarantee that the latter would outnumber the former. You want motivated immigrants who are willing to study in order to enter your country, but you don't necessarily want to restrict voting to the group of people who are most willing to put in effort, because that group includes everyone on the political fringe.
>What's good enough for the purposes of immigration control isn't necessarily good enough for the purposes of voting.
Did you read section 2? The immigration exam is only a third of the questions on my proposed ballot.
>You want motivated immigrants who are willing to study in order to enter your country, but you don't necessarily want to restrict voting to the group of people who are most willing to put in effort, because that group includes everyone on the political fringe.
Did you read section 3.1/3.2? Unless "the fringe" is 80% of people, voting will not be restricted to only the fringe under 3.1. It is less clear how the alternative proposal 3.2 skews the weights of extremists.
If the only difference between the two is that one is said out in the open while the other is said in hushed voiced, then what's wrong with it? Is it not arguably more honest and ethical in a twisted way?
The idea is that something like the (formerly) OpenAI text generator could be used to enhance "boiler room" propaganda operations.
The idea is one person could decide on a message and hundred of articles pushing the message could be generated.
Maybe that would work. Maybe you'd see so much of this people would start to get more selective. Maybe it wouldn't matter because people believe what suits them rather than just being conditioned.
Have a general idea of your life stage, interests, career, personality etc, based on advertising profile and commercial surveillance.
Can tailor each message to the recipient.
Can a/b test the crap out of every message for target groups, optimising for best response.
Can deliver fully customised messages in a natural voice (aka google duplex). Conversational ai not required, but can understand some stock phrases and responses.
The future is robots calling you, messaging you, infiltrating social media groups, probing your personality and beliefs, finding YOUR buttons and pushing them, repeatedly.
'As U.S. policymakers remain indecisive over how to prevent a repeat of the 2016 election interference'
Was this ever proven? all I ever heard about was conspiracy theories around 100k of Facebook ads and Cambridge Analytica being accused of various things. Nothing concrete was ever seriously discussed and the Mueller team findings were inconclusive.
The Mueller team indicted N Russian individuals for that activity. They are not likely to show up for trial.
The intelligence community leadership testified to Congress that this was so.
The leadership of both parties in both houses of Congress believe it was so, though they differ in what if anything should be done, and the level of downplay or up-play differs depending on party and how close or far to leadership a person is. Or if you're Trump.
Rather than opinion polls, I would love to see some specific accusations with specific supporting evidence, that doesn't consist of a 500 page narrative. I've never encountered anyone who could provide this.
Which contain narrative stories, not specific falsifiable evidence, which is why no one, including you, is ever able to link to anything specific. It's like the cafe scene in Inception.
The interference really was only the leaked Clinton emails, the facebook propaganda is just typical propaganda nobody really pays attention to unless it's to confirm their own bias, nobody anywhere changes their political opinion because of something they read on facebook. I doubt Russians had any real influence, the question is those leaked emails, which everybody wants to know the provenance. Personally I think it was just some DNC pro-Bernie activist staffer, who burned from the primary shenanigans decided to leak to Assange and not Russians, (because we all know those radical DNC tech staffers are bernie bros (now Yang shills) from SV) despite the nonsense indicators of compromise that the FBI never saw but was only provided by the DNC themselves. Even if you believe that was a major influencer I don't think so, as a neutral foreign observer of US politics I saw a wild card that the Americans were ready to put into office to 'disrupt' as a protest vote because if anybody remembers, they were only given two choices before the disruptor, Clinton 2.0 or Bush 3.0. They responded accordingly by pushing the maniac into power just to implode the system from what my foreign analysis indicates.
I think the most dangerous propaganda are the news propagandists from MSNBC and other networks who pretend to be from your specific subculture/groups, and then feed you lies and propaganda. That to me is the most dangerous, the Russian bots? nope everybody sees through cruise control shilling but when it's somebody from their own group in a news org and they're spouting lies it's a lot more difficult. I'm old so back in the 1990s news propaganda was just absolutely blatant, any kid could tell Norman General Swartzkopf(spelling) was making up bs about 'precision bombs' we all knew they were just landing wherever and blowing up Mother Theresa's Iraq orphanage by accident, but now it's different. The news corps discovered they need to recruit people from specific identities and use them as a weapon to feed lies to their subculture.
Honestly I’m still prettt unconvinced by the emails too, for the simple reason that I’d expect Russian intelligence to have a load of information much more embarrassing than those DNC emails. If they’d shared the 33,000 “deleted” emails off Clinton’s private server, then that would have been something.
Also I’m interested in the dog that does not bark — Chinese interference in US politics. Does China prefer one side to the other? Which one? What are they doing about it?
Imagine you go to an online forum and that there is a 99.99% chance that a given message was written by a bot. Imagine further they are sufficiently well written you can't tell from the post itself whether it was made by a bot or not How would people respond to that?
Well the obvious consequence is that you have to stop paying attention to random posts. You have to depend on something outside of the forum itself to find a list of people to pay attention to. That will be your friends and your family. And then it will be whatever media tells you to pay attention to.
Getting out of your filter bubble will be impossible because as soon as you step out you are faced by an onslaught of bots.
Maybe you could travel around IRL and acquire a diverse list of voices that way. But realistically only the elite could afford that.
Actually lets be even more cynical. Say you go traveling, meet someone. You add them on a social network. But it's not them it's a bot. And they get a few bucks for selling your eyeballs.
But then we can even further imagine that you follow them with a fake account too, and so the eyeballs were actually worthless.
What you are describing is already ongoing. Many comments in eg widely shared Facebook political posts are likely to be posted by bots, or people paid to be representing a certain agenda (ie human bots).
And in that light I disagree with your “obvious consequence” that people will stop paying attention to forum posts, because we know that people do engage with trolls/bots on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
People are also fine watching cable TV for hours, which is content that is entirely designed by people whose intentions we do not know. What fundamental difference does it make whether candidate Doe’s agenda is pushed by bots on forums vs TV anchors paid to read off a teleprompter, when people are so eager to sit in front of it and engage with it?
Human attention is the new commodity, and the average person just does not have the means to fight the billions of dollars collectively poured into exploiting their eyeballs.
They have the means, they just don't have the discipline, I think. We don't really teach discipline, critical thinking or money management in public schools; all of which are necessary for adult life. The kaleidoscope of chaos is hard to turn your eyes from, but it's worth doing if you set your mind to it.
Kind of ironic that the means of fighting the billions spent is to do nothing, which is totally free and takes less effort than e.g. purchasing a TV, purchasing a subscription, starting a social media account and engaging with it, or even reading an article.
There's still a distinction of quality for reinforcing your world view. Humans have more impact than bots. Bots all lead back a human anyway so taking some meaningless bot chat is still less valuable than a human's perspective.
You would enjoy reading Neal Stephenson's new novel "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell." The middle part imagines how America would change as a consequence of exactly that.
This was the most interesting and realistically prescient part of the novel for me. Coastal elites have "editors" to curate their feed, while the rest of the population are awash with conspiracy theories, cults and extreme libertarianism. The story took the 2016 election shenanigans to its logical conclusion. Definitely worth a read.
Here's a hot take: you shouldn't be trusting intenet comments written by humans anyway. If a bot comment contains something you should actually listen to (sources, evidence) then you should listen to it, and if a human comment is just a Reddit-style popular opinion dogpile it is just as bad as a bot comment.
> Here's a hot take: you shouldn't be trusting intenet comments written by humans anyway.
I remember an old New Yorker cartoon from the 90s that says 'On the internet, no one knows you're a dog'. Lying has been a fundamental feature of the medium since the beginning. Most of the history of the internet pre-smartphone is people trying to figure out how to combat trolls and spammers. It appears that we are having to learn the same lessons all over again.
There seems to be a kind of collective amnesia about the fact that the majority of content on the internet is written by people that are trying to sell you something, trying to get your attention for their own amusement, or are batshit insane. Frequently it's more than one of these things.
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) depicts a galaxy of countless highly advanced civilizations in the far future - and describes its "net" as "the net of a million lies". However, it also depicts every message with an AI's best judgement of its reliability - for example:
>From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living dangerously.]
It seems like the same argument could equally well justify reading the entire contents of your spam folder.
FWIW I agree with your take, but practically speaking I use whatever “metadata” I can (is this a bot, is the writer a pseudoscientist, is this thread a flame war) to help deal with the fact that it’s so much cheaper to create bull%^*t than to critically evaluate an argument or idea.
That's a very 20th century view of propaganda. Modern propaganda doesn't need to be factually incorrect to be effective, it just needs to direct the attention of the audience in a manner that suits the propagandist. You can push pretty much any agenda in a very convincing manner simply by choosing to emphasise or de-emphasise certain facts; we are in many ways more powerfully influenced by what we consider to be important than what we believe to be true.
If you only read reports of vaccine-related harms, it's easy to come to the conclusion that vaccines are a terrible mistake or even a conspiracy, because human brains aren't very good at prioritising the singular fact that vaccines have saved millions of lives over a constant stream of emotive stories. If you only read about the inconsistencies and errors in contemporary reports of the Holocaust, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the whole thing is exaggerated or an outright hoax, because it's just deeply unpleasant to think about six million corpses.
I don't need to lie to you or dictate what you believe, I just need to influence what you pay attention to; if I control your attention, I can guide you towards a conclusion and make you believe that you came to it of your own initiative.
The trouble is, that definition of "modern propaganda" desacribes the entire press. For example, take the FBI's use of the latest mass shootings to push for encryption backdoors - those shootings make up a tiny proportion of deaths, but we prioritize emotive stories that get large amounts of press. This has also lead to some terribly ill-conceived gun control campaigns that downplay the importance of the guns most often used to murder people.
You've described human life since humans were around. Just replace 'bot' with 'human being'.
We're all living in bubbles. It is why travelling is interesting - you get to be in a different bubble, come home and notice the peculiarities of your bubble that you never noticed before.
It is why movies are interesting - we jump into a different bubble, for the same purposes.
There is no problem here, because there is no 'truth' that gets obscured as a result. The human experience is not about uncovering truth, it's just an experience to be had and possibly enjoyed if the universe happens to align for you to do so :)
I believe the age of the anonymous internet is over. It's time for real world identity linked accounts for participating in online conversations.
This is necessary for 2 reasons. First, it gives us confidence the people we are speaking to are (probably) not bots.
Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law. So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.
It is a slippery slope from regulating "hateful garbage" (to be explicit, I interpret this to include speech that is not necessarily hate speech) to censorship of whatever the state determines to be wrongthink.
I'll take my anonymity where I can get it, thanks. And as an aside, it's somewhat ironic you post this on a throwaway.
> It's time for real world identity linked accounts for participating in online conversations.
You might be able to implement this in a small, affluent European country, but nowhere else. Consider the fact that in the USA, it is a standard talking point of the left that the right's continual push to ask for ID to _vote_ has been branded as a racist policy; it seems that we're simply to accept that large swathes of people will simply not have any ID, whether they're legally present in the country or not.
How do you suggest solving that problem, so as to have some actual decent ID on file with which to back the online ID upon?
And, once you've solved that, how are you going to scale it to impoverished countries that barely have the infrastructure to have any internet access at all, never mind vetting everyone's access to it?
Once you have this ID system, how are you going to mandate that all websites validate access against it? Enforce it at the ISP level? How are people going to offer wifi in coffee shops, etc? Force everything through a big proxy? The scale and expense of the infrastructure involved in doing this is immense. Government IT efforts seem to fail more often than not these days - witness the failures to improve the IRS, or the recent Canadian government payroll system implementation scandal with IBM.
> Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law.
In America, you have absolute freedom of speech, save of course for speech that is treasonous (i.e. divulging classified information). There is no requirement to censor by law. If someone wants to issue speech you consider hateful, it is not illegal for them to do so. This is not true many other places, and unfortunately may change in the USA at some point in our lifetimes ending one of the greatest freedoms that anyone has ever possessed out of our fear that somehow freedom is going to be what leads to our oppression, and not the giving of too much power to the state. Ironic; even more ironic that the left is the group most siding with big corporations to push this narrative. Never thought I'd see that; not after Occupy Wall Street, but that spirit is thoroughly dead.
> So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.
Right, because self-imposed censorship where we all go through the day with a fake smile on our faces, only saying the right things, like as though the things we feel safe saying on LinkedIn is sufficient to cover all legitimate human dialogue. Say the wrong thing and disappear into a Kafka-esque nightmare, where you can never get the complete list of all the things you can't say because such a list would be even more dangerous than what you were planning to say in the first place...
No, friend. You're wrong.
Anonymity and free speech are the incredible power to bring light to darkness. They're what enables us to be more than the sum of our parts; what lets those unfortunate in appearance have equal footing to those who are attractive, what lets those who are disabled keep up with athletes. It's what lets us find corruption and root it out more effectively than ever before, and it is this spirit of taking down evil people that is going to be crushed by ideas like yours, not the actual evils that lurk within the hearts of men.
Some of the worst garbage is posted under people's real names and bylines in newspapers. Or on the Presidential Twitter feed.
Mandated real names are just pre-doxing everyone so they can be censored by real world retaliation. If you're already powerful, this has no effect. If you're vulnerable, it's silencing.
This is the best thing to happen to human information processing since the printing press. The democratization of propaganda will mean that no longer will people be slave to the voices that are loudest. Now, all ideas will fight equally.
No longer will Judith Miller be powerful and lead us into war because we will not trust her. Because when everyone is a liar, we will not choose one liar to trust.
This is an interesting take. The equilibrium state is when all player use more or less same tech to flood their propaganda. This should lead to people eventually become more and more skeptic and lean on chain of trust instead of whatever random thing.
The problem is, who controls the medium? The Internet is not simply a free space that everyone can fight for their voice anymore, because the social networks, online spaces, and the people hosting the websites are slowly being more monitored and censored. For China, the censorship is performed by the government, and for the US, this is performed by the corporations and investors.
It covers the underlying strategy of Russian disinformation operations and why/how it works. Mind you this is from 2016, so prior to the Mueller investigation. If nothing else, read the blurbs in the text boxes.
The right wing has their own version of this, a KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, who has powerful (meme) videos about the coming destruction of America and how it would take 3 decades to fulfill, all recorded in the early 80s. 'To change the perception of reality of every American, despite their abundence of information, nobody is able to come to sensible conclusions,... it's a great brainwashing process that takes decades' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA Yuri also claims the Soviet Union never fell, it just reinvented itself. This is pretty standard 'alt-right' materials that people should pay attention to if they wish to understand that reactionary wing of politics
>As U.S. policymakers remain indecisive over how to prevent a repeat of the 2016 election interference, the threat is looming ever more ominous on the horizon.
That interference is specious, I think. In any case, the US interferes in every election it can, so is it unreasonable to believe every other country that can interfere would?
>You probably know enough to avoid following small, suspicious accounts on Twitter or browsing links to sites of which you’ve never heard.
I suppose ''surfing the web'' is truly dead, then. This seems to me like an article written for sheep.
>The second vulnerability is a legal system with numerous blind spots that lawmakers should close. Reddit is the third-most-popular social media site on the Internet, surpassing Facebook among American Internet users. It is also shockingly vulnerable, requiring only an e-mail address to register an account. Consequently, anyone could theoretically register an unlimited number of accounts and, being careful not to stand out to system administrators, effectively control conversations on whatever topics they want.
So, here's the meat of this garbage, then, in which it reveals its ulterior motive. Yes, Reddit is the Wild West, only requiring an email instead of the socially acceptable email, phone, government ID, etc.
>The third vulnerability is online anonymity. While we absolutely do not advocate for de-anonymizing the Internet, it is now so influential over American society that legislators should not leave regulation to social media platforms alone. Congress should put more pressure on social media companies to ensure their users are, at a minimum, who they say they are.
Well, what I was going to write about this issue, after reading just the first few paragraphs, should then be a response to this nonsense. As an aside, there is no ''Who they say they are'' in a truly anonymous system.
I was going to suggest anonymity, true anonymity, as a solution to this issue. I prefer those venues where there are no names attached and one can't tell even if multiple messages are sent by the same person. When you have a discussion in this way, you only judge each message on its own merit. There is no ''Gee, this can't be a bot or government agent, since this guy has a history.'' or any such thing. So, if it seems a great many messages have been made in support of something that isn't usually in the venue, such as a political candidate, say, it seems fair to regard it as astroturfing. When no one or few have a face, it's harder to astroturf, if only because everyone will constantly be on edge and are less likely to be swayed by a few messages. Not only that, but since none or few of the real users have identities, you can't target them with specialized messages or track them or other such things.
Anyway, what a terrible article, ironically submitted by someone with an account less than a day old. I almost wish I could make a living writing such cheap garbage, but I figure it would eventually get to me.
I read a recent article on foreignpolicy.com about a Chinese Bonds/etc rating agency which systematically gave Democratic nations lower ratings than authoritarian ratings. This was taken as a form of Chinese propaganda and ignored as such...but this article makes me wonder, as much as I hate to say it, if they are right...
I don't think automation will work or has worked. Look at emails and robocalls. I still get plenty of spam, even if it gets filtered into a spam folder, there is no reason I should have to peruse my spam folder but still some important emails get labeled as spam. I believe the issue is that corporations as a whole simply can't be trusted, and that the only solution is decentralization with open source technology and making it easy for users to create their own filters and control their own data.
Also, the bots I see on reddit, YouTube and Instagram generally aren't pushing liberal agendas but right-wing. The automation I see are networks of influencers working together to push out the same narratives.
This is mildly related, but it's an interesting data point.
I was at a bar tonight and I chatted with a guy who works for a major cable provider. Apparently they generate 10 petabytes of data an hour on what you watch, when you watch it etc. That's a lot when you take into account that its all text columns in a MSQL database somewhere. I think they have enough room to have it stashed in S3 for a week before it goes into cold storage because otherwise it's just too bloody expensive.
What are they storing you ask? There's a whole tree on what you're demographics are, a tree on what your device is, a tree on what you are watching etc. And they're all cross referenced with what ad you watch, for how long, when in the show etc.
All of this whizbang tech to find out how to make sure you spend that extra dollar on whatever crap they want you to. I'm sure that the coming automation is pretty horrifying, but what we have now is pretty terrible as well.
> While the 2016 election mythologized the power of these influence-actors, such work is slow, costly, and labor-intensive. Humans must manually create and manage accounts, hand-write posts and comments, and spend countless hours reading content online to signal-boost particular narratives. However, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may soon enable the automation of much of this work, massively amplifying the disruptive potential of online influence operations.
All I disagree with is that it's already semi-automated, has been for some time.
A long time ago, I saw a tech support person with a spreadsheet full of formulaic responses for common issues. "We're sorry you're having trouble with _x_ , dear _y_, have you tried _z_. Please accept a $10 discount voucher for your trouble. Thanks, Bobby Techops" kind of thing.
It has progressed, I'm sure. Why wouldn't it? And will progress more.
And the large actors have no incentive to tell everyone how far they have got. The opposite, in fact, they will try to hide it, e.g. Cambridge Analytica being dragged kicking and screaming into the light.
And a small army of clever educated young people isn't that expensive to a large corporate or state actor. Call Centers depend on it.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadOn the other hand, we have had actual honest and realistic candidates, like Larry Lessig. And they were so honest they got squashed by their party apparatus before they ever had a chance.
Here's a bitter pill for everyone. If it turns out that a large fraction of people really can have their opinion changed by bots that wouldn't even pass a Turing test, maybe its time to rethink the idea that everyone gets to vote.
It isn't clear to me if this is necessarily a bitter pill as much as a possible direction for education reform. If unsophisticated bots are able to efficiently disseminate information to a wide audience, would it be possible to (using analogous techniques) vastly decrease the cost and increase the scalability of public education?
Maybe we should start by stopping to conflate being rational and wise with being 'educated'. As if going to college was some sort of panacea for all of our problems.
Lately I've started to think that higher education(particularly undergrad) has more in common with a cargo cult than many would like to admit.
What if I had a bot that merely said the following:
"Democratic candidate XYZ wants to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants with your tax dollars."
Such a bot would not pass the Turing test, but it would be speaking the truth (for many of the candidates) and that truth would be relevant to many voters' interest. So what?
I think people need to understand that the real problem from the media's point of view is that decades ago, they controlled 99 percent of the discourse. Now they control...95 percent. And they don't like it. So...Russia Russia Russia Squirrel! Russia Russia Russia Squirrel!
>"Democratic candidate XYZ wants to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants with your tax dollars."
>Such a bot would not pass the Turing test, but it would be speaking the truth (for many of the candidates) and that truth would be relevant to many voters' interest. So what?
Ironically, I'm pretty sure such a statement is exactly False. No serious candidate (polling >1%) has proposed unconditional healthcare for illegal immigrants. So no, such a bot wouldn't be speaking the truth. By all means prove me wrong. Find any written or recorded instance of a Democratic Candidate saying this.
>Now they control...95 percent. And they don't like it. So...Russia Russia Russia Squirrel! Russia Russia Russia Squirrel!
By thinking this is what the media does, aren't you implicitly admitting that crude repetition of non-arguments work? Just a moment ago didn't you say such tactics are perfectly fine so long as the statements are truth that are relevant to many voters interests? Russian interference is relevant to my interests.
If I can't use the soapbox I use the ballot box. If I can't use the ballot box, I use the ammo box.
So it doesn't matter how dumb the voters are. What matters if is if they can generate violence.
Actually its both. Voting is a legitimacy mechanism (aka avoiding civil war) and a competence mechanism (aka making quality decisions). It is much better at the former, and typically better than historical systems (re: monarchy) at the latter.
It is perfectly reasonable to consider a trade-off that buys us higher competence at a loss of 10%-15% legitimacy. That's a small enough fraction of the population that I wouldn't worry too much about them starting a civil war. Especially if homogeneously distributed.
Wars happen when enough people are willing to sacrifice themselves and others. Leaders sacrifice their own, foot soldiers sacrifice themselves and their enemies.
What makes people willing to sacrifice? An opportunity/threat for a significant shift in quality of life. I don't think democracy, dictatorship or any other form of government or its customs make much of a difference at all.
You can have stable dictatorships and unstable democracies - it's got much more to do with luck and sometimes competence of the people at the top.
If you agree that one subset of the population shouldn't get to vote for these reasons, why not a wider subset? In fact why not throw out voting age entirely and make a voting test the only barrier? Would not a direct test of civic knowledge have fewer false positives and false negatives than the blunt tool of an arbitrary age cutoff?
Surely there are degrees of flawed, with some people being very gullible and uninformed and some not. And surely there is some way and some benefit to the rest of us if we disenfranchise the most susceptible to propaganda.
You're right. I don't believe in Democracy. I believe in Epistocracy.
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-boo...
Anyway it's already sort of an epistocracy. Those "in the know" have more power and already pretty much run things. Ethics and morals are orthogonal to knowledge.
1. There is already a de facto voting test for some fraction of Americans. Its called the citizenship test. And I for one find it offensive to basic reasoning that some people get to skip the test by virtue of being born in the right place. From now on let's include 5 questions chosen at random from the citizenship test on every ballot. In order to prevent the citizenship test itself from being politicized, the pool of questions which might appear on the ballot shall be chosen from the version of the citizenship test which existed before the voting test was added to the ballot.
2. Each candidate on the ballot gets to choose 5 multiple choice questions. The questions must be directly relevant to the powers of the office. Eg you cannot use a question about TV sitcoms from 1950 as a proxy to disenfranchise by age. The veracity of the questions must be a matter of public historical record or a provable logical consequence of facts that are verifiable by public historical record. Eg you cannot ask an opinion question like "Will Obamacare destroy America?" but you can ask "In 2009 did blowhard.com publish an article which concluded that Obamacare will destroy America?". Any news source above some number of readers/viewers can submit their works to the Library of Congress in order to make it qualify as a source for the untampered public historical record. Legislative acts and government commissioned works are automatically part of the public historical record, except in cases that they are classified as state secrets. Eg you cannot use a record of a private conversation of FB as a basis for a public historical record, but you could cite an article from a tiny publication like Rotary Club Monthly (provided it also meets the relevance criteria). Questions must have either a numerical, textual, or boolean answer. The potential answers to questions with numerical answers must differ from each other by at least 10%. The potential answers to questions with textual answers must not have more than 50% of the words in common. Boolean questions can be mapped to numerical or textual questions by asking "which of these statements is true" and then making the question one of the answers. The criteria on numerical and textual questions shall apply to the mapped boolean question. The courts shall approve the veracity and relevance and answer set of questions beforehand, and disagreement with the court decision may be rectified by the usual appeals process.
3. The last part is how to make use of the test results. This is a risky challenge as if there is a simple cutoff score then it is easy to make questions that disenfranchise the majority, and then the minority of the voting minority could always vote to empower itself further by raising the cutoff higher still. Thus there's a potential runaway feedback loop where eventually Democracy is abolished. I have two solutions.
3.1 The scores are aggregated and the bottom 20% are disenfranchised no matter the raw score.
3.2 No one is disenfranchised per se. Instead each vote is weighted by its test score. Each correct answer counts for 1 point and each incorrect answer counts for -1/n where n is the number of wrong choices. A voter that is systematically wrong on every question is probably wrong about their choice for president, so their vote counts negative (which is technically not disenfranchisement). A voter that gets a score near zero is no better than a random guesser thus they add no information to the system and so the system ignores them. A voter that gets every question right knows what they are talking about and so the system gives their voice the most weight.
Edit: Currently editing. I'm adding some after thoughts right now on scenarios where cand...
The rest of point 2 is just defining valid questions in a way that is very hard to game and legally unambiguous enough for a judge to enforce fairly.
What's good enough for the purposes of immigration control isn't necessarily good enough for the purposes of voting. A civics exam would select the most motivated groups who are willing to cram, as well as the knowledgeable, and there's no guarantee that the latter would outnumber the former. You want motivated immigrants who are willing to study in order to enter your country, but you don't necessarily want to restrict voting to the group of people who are most willing to put in effort, because that group includes everyone on the political fringe.
Did you read section 2? The immigration exam is only a third of the questions on my proposed ballot.
>You want motivated immigrants who are willing to study in order to enter your country, but you don't necessarily want to restrict voting to the group of people who are most willing to put in effort, because that group includes everyone on the political fringe.
Did you read section 3.1/3.2? Unless "the fringe" is 80% of people, voting will not be restricted to only the fringe under 3.1. It is less clear how the alternative proposal 3.2 skews the weights of extremists.
The idea is one person could decide on a message and hundred of articles pushing the message could be generated.
Maybe that would work. Maybe you'd see so much of this people would start to get more selective. Maybe it wouldn't matter because people believe what suits them rather than just being conditioned.
Imagine campaigns that:
Have a general idea of your life stage, interests, career, personality etc, based on advertising profile and commercial surveillance.
Can tailor each message to the recipient.
Can a/b test the crap out of every message for target groups, optimising for best response.
Can deliver fully customised messages in a natural voice (aka google duplex). Conversational ai not required, but can understand some stock phrases and responses.
The future is robots calling you, messaging you, infiltrating social media groups, probing your personality and beliefs, finding YOUR buttons and pushing them, repeatedly.
Am I wrong ? I hope so.
The intelligence community leadership testified to Congress that this was so.
The leadership of both parties in both houses of Congress believe it was so, though they differ in what if anything should be done, and the level of downplay or up-play differs depending on party and how close or far to leadership a person is. Or if you're Trump.
I think the most dangerous propaganda are the news propagandists from MSNBC and other networks who pretend to be from your specific subculture/groups, and then feed you lies and propaganda. That to me is the most dangerous, the Russian bots? nope everybody sees through cruise control shilling but when it's somebody from their own group in a news org and they're spouting lies it's a lot more difficult. I'm old so back in the 1990s news propaganda was just absolutely blatant, any kid could tell Norman General Swartzkopf(spelling) was making up bs about 'precision bombs' we all knew they were just landing wherever and blowing up Mother Theresa's Iraq orphanage by accident, but now it's different. The news corps discovered they need to recruit people from specific identities and use them as a weapon to feed lies to their subculture.
Also I’m interested in the dog that does not bark — Chinese interference in US politics. Does China prefer one side to the other? Which one? What are they doing about it?
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute and https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/02/of...
Well the obvious consequence is that you have to stop paying attention to random posts. You have to depend on something outside of the forum itself to find a list of people to pay attention to. That will be your friends and your family. And then it will be whatever media tells you to pay attention to.
Getting out of your filter bubble will be impossible because as soon as you step out you are faced by an onslaught of bots.
Maybe you could travel around IRL and acquire a diverse list of voices that way. But realistically only the elite could afford that.
Actually lets be even more cynical. Say you go traveling, meet someone. You add them on a social network. But it's not them it's a bot. And they get a few bucks for selling your eyeballs.
But then we can even further imagine that you follow them with a fake account too, and so the eyeballs were actually worthless.
And in that light I disagree with your “obvious consequence” that people will stop paying attention to forum posts, because we know that people do engage with trolls/bots on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
People are also fine watching cable TV for hours, which is content that is entirely designed by people whose intentions we do not know. What fundamental difference does it make whether candidate Doe’s agenda is pushed by bots on forums vs TV anchors paid to read off a teleprompter, when people are so eager to sit in front of it and engage with it?
Human attention is the new commodity, and the average person just does not have the means to fight the billions of dollars collectively poured into exploiting their eyeballs.
If you instead want your assumptions reinforced, you pay attention to whatever source does that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell
Amusing to read.
This is such an interesting way to refer to an author.
I remember an old New Yorker cartoon from the 90s that says 'On the internet, no one knows you're a dog'. Lying has been a fundamental feature of the medium since the beginning. Most of the history of the internet pre-smartphone is people trying to figure out how to combat trolls and spammers. It appears that we are having to learn the same lessons all over again.
There seems to be a kind of collective amnesia about the fact that the majority of content on the internet is written by people that are trying to sell you something, trying to get your attention for their own amusement, or are batshit insane. Frequently it's more than one of these things.
>From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living dangerously.]
More examples here: https://hur.st/afutd.html (spoilers if you read more than the From lines)
FWIW I agree with your take, but practically speaking I use whatever “metadata” I can (is this a bot, is the writer a pseudoscientist, is this thread a flame war) to help deal with the fact that it’s so much cheaper to create bull%^*t than to critically evaluate an argument or idea.
If you only read reports of vaccine-related harms, it's easy to come to the conclusion that vaccines are a terrible mistake or even a conspiracy, because human brains aren't very good at prioritising the singular fact that vaccines have saved millions of lives over a constant stream of emotive stories. If you only read about the inconsistencies and errors in contemporary reports of the Holocaust, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the whole thing is exaggerated or an outright hoax, because it's just deeply unpleasant to think about six million corpses.
I don't need to lie to you or dictate what you believe, I just need to influence what you pay attention to; if I control your attention, I can guide you towards a conclusion and make you believe that you came to it of your own initiative.
We're all living in bubbles. It is why travelling is interesting - you get to be in a different bubble, come home and notice the peculiarities of your bubble that you never noticed before.
It is why movies are interesting - we jump into a different bubble, for the same purposes.
There is no problem here, because there is no 'truth' that gets obscured as a result. The human experience is not about uncovering truth, it's just an experience to be had and possibly enjoyed if the universe happens to align for you to do so :)
This is necessary for 2 reasons. First, it gives us confidence the people we are speaking to are (probably) not bots.
Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law. So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.
I'll take my anonymity where I can get it, thanks. And as an aside, it's somewhat ironic you post this on a throwaway.
You might be able to implement this in a small, affluent European country, but nowhere else. Consider the fact that in the USA, it is a standard talking point of the left that the right's continual push to ask for ID to _vote_ has been branded as a racist policy; it seems that we're simply to accept that large swathes of people will simply not have any ID, whether they're legally present in the country or not.
How do you suggest solving that problem, so as to have some actual decent ID on file with which to back the online ID upon?
And, once you've solved that, how are you going to scale it to impoverished countries that barely have the infrastructure to have any internet access at all, never mind vetting everyone's access to it?
Once you have this ID system, how are you going to mandate that all websites validate access against it? Enforce it at the ISP level? How are people going to offer wifi in coffee shops, etc? Force everything through a big proxy? The scale and expense of the infrastructure involved in doing this is immense. Government IT efforts seem to fail more often than not these days - witness the failures to improve the IRS, or the recent Canadian government payroll system implementation scandal with IBM.
> Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law.
In America, you have absolute freedom of speech, save of course for speech that is treasonous (i.e. divulging classified information). There is no requirement to censor by law. If someone wants to issue speech you consider hateful, it is not illegal for them to do so. This is not true many other places, and unfortunately may change in the USA at some point in our lifetimes ending one of the greatest freedoms that anyone has ever possessed out of our fear that somehow freedom is going to be what leads to our oppression, and not the giving of too much power to the state. Ironic; even more ironic that the left is the group most siding with big corporations to push this narrative. Never thought I'd see that; not after Occupy Wall Street, but that spirit is thoroughly dead.
> So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.
Right, because self-imposed censorship where we all go through the day with a fake smile on our faces, only saying the right things, like as though the things we feel safe saying on LinkedIn is sufficient to cover all legitimate human dialogue. Say the wrong thing and disappear into a Kafka-esque nightmare, where you can never get the complete list of all the things you can't say because such a list would be even more dangerous than what you were planning to say in the first place...
No, friend. You're wrong.
Anonymity and free speech are the incredible power to bring light to darkness. They're what enables us to be more than the sum of our parts; what lets those unfortunate in appearance have equal footing to those who are attractive, what lets those who are disabled keep up with athletes. It's what lets us find corruption and root it out more effectively than ever before, and it is this spirit of taking down evil people that is going to be crushed by ideas like yours, not the actual evils that lurk within the hearts of men.
Mandated real names are just pre-doxing everyone so they can be censored by real world retaliation. If you're already powerful, this has no effect. If you're vulnerable, it's silencing.
No longer will Judith Miller be powerful and lead us into war because we will not trust her. Because when everyone is a liar, we will not choose one liar to trust.
It covers the underlying strategy of Russian disinformation operations and why/how it works. Mind you this is from 2016, so prior to the Mueller investigation. If nothing else, read the blurbs in the text boxes.
That interference is specious, I think. In any case, the US interferes in every election it can, so is it unreasonable to believe every other country that can interfere would?
>You probably know enough to avoid following small, suspicious accounts on Twitter or browsing links to sites of which you’ve never heard.
I suppose ''surfing the web'' is truly dead, then. This seems to me like an article written for sheep.
>The second vulnerability is a legal system with numerous blind spots that lawmakers should close. Reddit is the third-most-popular social media site on the Internet, surpassing Facebook among American Internet users. It is also shockingly vulnerable, requiring only an e-mail address to register an account. Consequently, anyone could theoretically register an unlimited number of accounts and, being careful not to stand out to system administrators, effectively control conversations on whatever topics they want.
So, here's the meat of this garbage, then, in which it reveals its ulterior motive. Yes, Reddit is the Wild West, only requiring an email instead of the socially acceptable email, phone, government ID, etc.
>The third vulnerability is online anonymity. While we absolutely do not advocate for de-anonymizing the Internet, it is now so influential over American society that legislators should not leave regulation to social media platforms alone. Congress should put more pressure on social media companies to ensure their users are, at a minimum, who they say they are.
Well, what I was going to write about this issue, after reading just the first few paragraphs, should then be a response to this nonsense. As an aside, there is no ''Who they say they are'' in a truly anonymous system.
I was going to suggest anonymity, true anonymity, as a solution to this issue. I prefer those venues where there are no names attached and one can't tell even if multiple messages are sent by the same person. When you have a discussion in this way, you only judge each message on its own merit. There is no ''Gee, this can't be a bot or government agent, since this guy has a history.'' or any such thing. So, if it seems a great many messages have been made in support of something that isn't usually in the venue, such as a political candidate, say, it seems fair to regard it as astroturfing. When no one or few have a face, it's harder to astroturf, if only because everyone will constantly be on edge and are less likely to be swayed by a few messages. Not only that, but since none or few of the real users have identities, you can't target them with specialized messages or track them or other such things.
Anyway, what a terrible article, ironically submitted by someone with an account less than a day old. I almost wish I could make a living writing such cheap garbage, but I figure it would eventually get to me.
The Democrat bots are triggering the Republican bots, and the Russian bots are fighting the Chinese bots for mindshare. Googlebot cannot save us.
I could totally see bots writing most of the YouTube, reddit, and Instagram me-too-style content.
What about your average HN post?
If people want to not look like spam, they're going to have to start being more insightful. This is good.
Also, the bots I see on reddit, YouTube and Instagram generally aren't pushing liberal agendas but right-wing. The automation I see are networks of influencers working together to push out the same narratives.
I was at a bar tonight and I chatted with a guy who works for a major cable provider. Apparently they generate 10 petabytes of data an hour on what you watch, when you watch it etc. That's a lot when you take into account that its all text columns in a MSQL database somewhere. I think they have enough room to have it stashed in S3 for a week before it goes into cold storage because otherwise it's just too bloody expensive.
What are they storing you ask? There's a whole tree on what you're demographics are, a tree on what your device is, a tree on what you are watching etc. And they're all cross referenced with what ad you watch, for how long, when in the show etc.
All of this whizbang tech to find out how to make sure you spend that extra dollar on whatever crap they want you to. I'm sure that the coming automation is pretty horrifying, but what we have now is pretty terrible as well.
All I disagree with is that it's already semi-automated, has been for some time.
A long time ago, I saw a tech support person with a spreadsheet full of formulaic responses for common issues. "We're sorry you're having trouble with _x_ , dear _y_, have you tried _z_. Please accept a $10 discount voucher for your trouble. Thanks, Bobby Techops" kind of thing.
It has progressed, I'm sure. Why wouldn't it? And will progress more.
And the large actors have no incentive to tell everyone how far they have got. The opposite, in fact, they will try to hide it, e.g. Cambridge Analytica being dragged kicking and screaming into the light.
And a small army of clever educated young people isn't that expensive to a large corporate or state actor. Call Centers depend on it.