LOL, I got down-voted to hell for speaking bad on "masta Israel" - it literally adds credence to the idea that this is all a simulation because how could an entity and its people be so comically evil.
PG: No facts should be unsaid...until Israel comes up. Then its... watch your mouth or feel the wrath of dang.
It's not dang, it's just a bunch of users flagging things. Most of the time, if you email them (no such thing as a ping like @dang), they will actually turn off flagging for a post. Especially if there's a clear technological aspect like this
It's not surprising to see any number of players running these kinds of campaigns. LLMs are already influencing people at scale.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
It’s not “the Jews” it’s Israel, and I suspect the greater attention is due to the greater crimes being perpetrated by the Israeli government compared to those other states.
We've banned this account for evidently being a single-topic account that posts almost nothing that's within HN's guidelines. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines. Plenty of people criticize Israel's policies and actions in these threads, which is acceptable under the guidelines, but continuous shitposting like this has to incur a consequence eventually, otherwise the site would be overrun by it.
I think it may get a bit more attention in the US due to Section 219 of NDAA 2027, which does add more layers to the situation than say, Turkiye. The implications are on a different level. And with all four frontier models having contracts with the Pentagon, it has me thinking too.
I think the difference is probably related to the ends being pursued by each of those states at the moment. Only one is engaged in what the UN, HRW, and most legal experts call a genocide. So influence operations in support of an ongoing genocide are just more noteworthy than your run-of-the-mill authoritarianism/corruption.
The difference is that they are not doing these things. This is just hasbara against other enemies that Israel is targeting. They believe that the entire Middle East was promised to them by God, and they call other people jihadis.
It wasn't Smotrich that said this. It was Ben Gvir. And he said kill 30-40 terrorists (Militants, combatants, Hamas) which seems to be omitted from the reporting. But what do facts have to do with anything on this topic.
The specific comment was: ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
So specifically terrorists. Generally challenging why Israel is not being more offensive against Hamas in Gaza. Nothing about going beyond those who pose danger and specific to armed combatants.
And I'm not fan of Ben Gvir or Smotrich. They are fanatic morons. But the reporting on this statement is biased and false just like most reporting on this conflict.
Generally the Israeli extreme right wants Palestinians to be removed/expelled from Gaza and most or all of the West Bank. I seriously doubt you will find an explicit call from them to murder civilians. Yes there were calls for siege to force surrender. There are calls to conquer all of Gaza. There were calls to completely destroy Gaza. There's definitely a lot of "All Gazans are responsible for the attack on Israel." But you are not going to find an explicit call to go and murder civilians and the Israeli far right doesn't think that way. What you will find is disregard to civilian casualties that are "collateral" damage.
I'm pretty sure that for both Ben Gvir and Smotrich having dozens of civilians killed when the target is a combatant is justified but intentionally attacking dozens of civilians when there is no combatant is not. They also do not represent the official government position though presumably their voters (something like 5% maybe of the public) would also hold similar opinions. They are also religious so they view a lot of this and their morality through a religious lens which I don't fully understand.
Not to compare but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have and do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor. They prefer to go after civilians. They are also not that "extreme" in the public opinion. Their religious lens is also quite different.
Also yes, Israel has ended up killing a lot more Palestinian civilians while "not targeting" them and Palestinians ended up killing a large (%) of civilians but also some combatants while targeting civilians. I think the ratio on both sides is somewhere around 70% civilians (I'm sure who counts and how you count matters. Israel has always consistently reported details of all casualties including whether or not they are soldiers, their ranks, roles etc. Hamas reports all casualties as civilians.
> But you are not going to find an explicit call to go and murder civilians and the Israeli far right doesn't think that way.
This is exactly what happens in the West Bank every single day. Settlers and IDF soldiers will go shoot up schools, murder random passerby, etc., and then the Israeli state will give them more weapons and supplies to do it again the next day.
There are settlers in the west bank who go out of their way to intimidate and use violence against Palestinians. Outright random murdering of civilians is rare and unusual. (e.g. the Goldstein massacre in Hebron many years ago). What does happen is friction that leads to more violence that leads to deaths. An example might be settlers entering a Palestinian village, people throwing stones at them or a general brawl/violence, that leads to shooting and deaths. These are terrible stories, the settlers are looking for trouble, and yes often when the IDF or the police intervenes they will take the side of the settlers.
If you look at media reports you're going to find some relatively large number of Palestinian casualties in the west bank. But those reports generally conflate a lot of different things. "Settlers randomly murder Palestinians" is really not a thing in the big picture. The total number will include things like someone trying to stab a policeman and getting shot. Hamas or PIJ members shot during military confrontation. Collateral damage during those confrontations. Palestinians shot while e.g. throwing rocks or otherwise attacking Israeli soldiers or civilians. And yes some deaths that are a result of settler altercations of some sort (the vast minority) mostly in some specific hot spots.
Again I am totally opposed to settlements in the west bank and certainly to violence against innocent Palestinian civilians but there is a more complex story here than you'd think. It's true that some subset of settlers are lawless, armed, and more aggressively assert themselves "in the face" of the Palestinian population. It's not great. Hopefully the upcoming elections in Israel will change things a little bit. I would say that most Israelis agree with my position and many actively try to help the Palestinians but the government being so right wing and the general mood after the war makes things harder.
> There is some law enforcement but very much not enough under the current government
There is exactly enough "law enforcement" to keep up appearances for the international community and the liberals in Tel Aviv who prefer to live in denial. There have been 0 (yes, zero) convictions of Israeli citizens for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, for several years now.
> People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered.
Yes, threatened to leave on pain of being murdered. The Israeli right understands that Holocaust-style mass extermination is far more trouble than it's worth; you just need to kill enough people to scare away the rest.
Israelis in Tel Aviv know exactly what's going on. Even reporters from Israeli mainstream media have been beaten by settlers. Your first statement is really incorrect.
A minor (at the time) who killed a Palestinian woman (Aisha al-Rabi) by throwing a stone on her car was convicted on the offense of "terrorist manslaughter".
So far we have 0 correct statements out of 2.
The last one is more of a judgement. Israeli right has no interest and never has had interest in "Holocaust-style" extermination of anyone. That bit I'd file under blood libel. There's right and there's far right and this is not on the agenda of either (unlike what others want to do to Jews e.g. in Israel and other places). Most of the far right actually has no problem with Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank in general. Some elements do indeed want to have them all leave. I think most Israelis know that's not gonna happen. The wave of suicide attacks in the early 2000's and now the Oct 7th attacks have however convinced many Israelis that there is no future to something like a two state solution and generally that there will be no peace at least in this generation.
>do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor.
Settlers occupying Palestinian land, especially that land immediately adjacent to Gaza really aren't civilians in the normal sense, more like an armed militia with their families along as human shields. Comparison point I usually see are armed homesteaders in most colonial scenarios.
Edit: Actually I should mention this also applies in the west bank, and golan heights. Not to leave Syrians moved on for Israels "Buffer Zone" finding out they have been settled out of the bargain. They also have a right to return.
I think the time where Palestinians could be reasonably expected to rehome themselves to their land peacefully has long since passed.
Israeli settlers are just as welcome as always to just get out of the way and permit the resettlement to happen peacably.
how could israel possibly be any more offensive in gaza? are you serious? would you agree everyone alive in gaza is a terrorist? because ben gvir would.
> ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
When I search for that quote and translate articles it seems Ben-Givir is talking about using helicopters to attack funerals instead of targeted operations.
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Yeah, sorry- it's a repeating theme from Ben Gvir and he made multiple similar mentions. He is asking the military to go aggressively after gunmen both in the west bank and in Gaza. Most recently in came up in a podcast hosted by someone who was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. My initial quote was sort of random and possibly not what the OP was referring to. But the message is sort of repeating/the same. My beef is that these things are not really reported accurately and some (very limited but still) nuance is lost and then the new report turns into the truth (and often expands beyond the random opinion of one fanatic who is unfortunately in the Israeli government). We even see the statements get assigned to other, re-interpreted, as they make their rounds on the Internet.
I think "helicopters to attack funerals" is really not the correct interpretation of the original statement. Funerals for Hamas members often include massive amounts of armed combatants. The (dumb maybe) point is to go after those combatants. And yes, there is a potential risk for other people to get hurt which is why Israel does not tend to do this... and Ben Gvir would like Israel to still do it. But the target and the scenario are important and the new cycle turns this into "kill random people for the fun of it".
So to bring this back to influencing "AI" chatbots presumably the inaccurate/biased reporting is going to dominate over this "Hanover Institute" articles plus ofcourse responsiblestatecraft.org a left leaning organization is doing their own influencing. There are many who are doing their own form of influencing on people and AI chatbots.
You're not going to believe me but they do see that difference. That's not to say there's no hate or racism towards the average non-combatant ... but they definitely do not mean "all Palestinians" when they say "terrorist" in this specific context. Again, not that they have any love for the non-combatants but they are referring specifically to combatants/members of the specific organizations.
You are bent on defending the morons. And want to defame the media which correctly took his “kill 30-40 every night” to mean every random person. You say “believe me he means terrorists” but none of his actions actually speak to treating Palestinians differently. He made no calls to end starvation. He wants the Palestinians to leave. Both want to make life for Palestinians unbearable.
It is obvious that if he was misquoted he would have definitely corrected his statement. But he wants the army to hear his words in a confusing manner. And you are on his side when you are defending him and trying to sow doubt in how his words sound.
is that how ben-gvir defines terrorist? as part of them being fanatic morons i wouldnt trust they share that definition. iirc theyve also talked about wanting to kill children because theyll grow up to be terrorists?
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
Regarding flagging, I have seen, over the last 12 hours, each of my comments in a tug of war, oscillating up and down, which often prevents flagged/dead.
The point behind the Rabin comment was that, if one knows anything of him and his heroic efforts to attain actual, tangible steps toward peace; if that discussion results in the same vitriol, it would serve as proof to me, that any subject involving Israel in this FOV is futile. I see much vitriol toward Israel, which I refer to as 'vitriol' because it often seems out of context however true, and also, I see a distinctly growing anti-Israel public sentiment that seems to omit critical parts of history, eg Rabin -- someone widely supported and revered at the time, by Israelis, and someone one could argue, even by some Palestinians. Arafat snuck across the boarder to give condolences to Rabin's family immediately after the assassination. Very different times, and seemingly, maybe conveniently forgotten. I never see this mentioned in the flame wars. Not that it would demean all of the many legitimate grievances, but it seems to me a very necessary balance-factor that I have yet to see applied.
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
I am trying to understand your points. But claiming there is no direct nor potential relation here is a new way of thinking for me, and I am struggling to compartmentalize. If we have:
We can see that at least some sources are covering the topic of using AI to influence the public on political topics, which regardless of any particularly nation, suggests there is an active interest in manipulating the epistemic integrity of AI systems for purposes of biasing outputs.
And please allow me to make something very clear: I do not care who, nor what is influencing the output of AI, so long as the output is as close to honest as possible, and so long as the the process behind the arrival of final output is the result of the systems doing unhindered work and applying probability over programmed bias. This is the whole point for me. My own research has shown, repeatably, that institutional capture is becoming a repeatable and well established factor behind LLM output on certain topic areas.
The Futures Act integrates military intel, from directed energy weapons (read the docs) to cyber and notably, AI. < Yes, AI. That is the very topic under consideration here. Claiming that it has "nothing to do with LLM development" is potentially an enormous stretch of common sense. We see, already, the US government aiming to become deeply involved in pre-release vetting. Assuming that's the end of the story seems too improbable to me.
I think a little digging will reveal more than you suggest. When I recover from my daily prelude to death, I will recover supporting data. But I can barely function presently. From what I have seen, Anthropic is having and eating its cake on this one. There are peripheral connections that are left un-advertised.
I am confident I will find higher quality material soon. But if not, we can allow you to be acknowledged as to having corrected me on a technicality. But I would urge honest readers not to consider this the only potential connection point here, nor an accurate model for future arrangements. I would bet all I have that you will see closer and more intimate connections and operations between the two, or at the very least, other directly related contractors, eg Palantir, etc. And all other three of four have active contracts along with much discussion on closer ties in the future. In my opinion, that is the future, and I have been saying such since 2024, on the record.
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
The scale of a war is more often decided by who decides to unexpectedly jump in moreso than the initial party. WW1 starts when a Bosnian Serb assassinates an Austro-Hungarian royal leading to Austro-Hungary invading Serbia. The the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it.
There are endless border clashes. Even in very recent times we have Armenia-Azerbaijan, Afghanistan-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia, and many more. Wiki gives more than 60 in the 21st century [1], and we're just getting started! And if other parties had decided to get involved and start jamming up the escalation ladder, any of those could have easily turned into a much bigger war, instead of being just yet another relatively inconsequential border conflict.
Or imagine if another country (perhaps Russia or China) had decided to 'pull a US' when the US invaded any of the countless countries we've invaded over the years - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Yemen, and so on just in quite recent times. That could very well have led to WW3, but it didn't because they didn't.
Not sure it is true. If it was true that all Russians know it’s just propaganda and that they are just engaged in an illegal genocide then less Russians would sign up for the army.
Maybe that is the rationale. It's the only thing that'd make sense, but for problem that it doesn't. When somebody, or some entity, lies to you - that entity becomes the liar. People may not want to believe 'the enemy', but that's going to be because of their own ideological reasons, and not because they now refuse to believe anybody. On the contrary non-ideologues may even be ever more swayed towards your enemy as a result of this.
Personally I think the issue is that after WW2 we were left with a large scale and ever growing intelligence apparatus, but with ever fewer appropriate tasks for them. That led directly to the era of recklessly overthrowing nations, often to our detriment, and gradually transitioned to the modern era of aimless 'information warfare' which I think will ultimately be shown to be very much to our detriment, once again.
> after WW2... That led directly to the era of recklessly overthrowing nations
This started much earlier. United Fruit Company knocking over governments of "banana republics" was so well known that O'Henry wrote a funny novel about it in 1904.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
It's more likely Qatar and Iran create fake news sites like "responsiblestatecraft.org" to try to destabilize the West. And foolish people on Hacker News fall for it.
Yeah I think Wiz was overvalued, and anytime you see a move that seems more poltitically driven eg. Benchmark opening a Isreal office, you probably should stay away.
Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
Yes, he is totally powerless, he merely controls the police and prison system. (BTW, the Israeli government just announced it plans to transfer law enforcement in the West Bank over to Ben-Gvir's police: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/israeli-milita...)
I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
I have no doubt that Ben-Gvir has a similar segment of haters in Israel. They want the same things, but they don't want to do it in the style of a leering hooligan fishing for a fistfight.
> I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
A bit of an extraordinary belief to hold, to be honest
From what I can see, most people hate trump as a solid bloc. The fact that he, as every populist everywhere in past centuries, pointed out to some real problems but didn't do a squat about it when he came to power and in his case massively worsened the situation, is hard to escape from. He certainly didn't rise above other populists in this.
His form is just a tiny cherry on top of very big rotting cake. Make form smooth and underlying crap won't change a bit. Hating trump ain't emotional, purely rational approach is sufficient.
Definitively not a solid block. It's tempting to believe that, but no, John Bolton probably hates quite different things about Trump from you (and definitively from me). A lot of the opposition both outside the republican party and inside (such as it is), is probably entirely fine with bombing Iran for instance. Not mad he's bombing it, mad he's bungling it.
The fact you're posting this exact same comment multiple times, while ignoring that Ben Gvir was talking about Hamas, is telling.
I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest but you're using something he said to twist the narrative, which ironically is exactly what the Hanover think-tank was supposedly meant to remedy.
The OP literally wrote "not defending Ben Gvir" and "I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest", yet this is the best thing you could come up with for a comment?
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
This would still be bad even if they had perfect information and only killed confirmed terrorists. Setting a target for number of people killed is an extermination campaign not a war. All it does is turn the locals even more against you like in Vietnam.
If it was "secure X amount of land from Hamas" it would be way better because that would give them the option to surrender or run away, and give IDF an incentive to avoid violence. What Israel is doing means soldiers feel pressure to kill on sight even if the enemy is unarmed and ready to give up so they can meet their quota for the night. That is a war crime.
Posting this three times on this thread alone doesn't make it true. The fact that any Hebrew speaker would confirm that this is simply not what he said, regardless of the fact that he is a disgusting human being, is telling more about you than about the quote.
I'm assuming you're asking genuinely so I will answer. For context, I'm originally Israeli, but I only heard about this from this HN thread.
He was apparently on a podcast with a released hostage from Gaza. He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person. He indeed said that we should target not only those that are an "immediate threat". I'm guessing he meant people who took part in October 7th's attack but are not currently fighting, for example prisoners of the hostage he was talking with.
Many in Israel thinks the US forced Israel to stops many of its operations in Gaza, and he was basically saying he thinks some operations should continue.
To clarify, I disagree with him, I'm glad IDF operations in Gaza largely stopped and I wish they stopped completely. I wish the best for ordinary citizens of Gaza and I am longing for the day Ben Gvir will be behind bars. But he did not say we should randomly kill 30-40 Palestinians per day. There is an armed conflict, and many people on both sides would unfortunately love to see tens of deaths on the other side per day, especially armed people.
Fwiw I appreciate this context. My national news site (usually pretty trustworthy, and scary neutral wrt the Israel/Palestine situation, which I know because they’re constantly under fire from both sides) pulled this out of context in exactly the same way.
> He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person.
Quite apart from anything else, I don't think these statements hang together, and we wouldn't accept them in any other context. Being targeted is not the same as being guilty.
I'm sorry but I can you elaborate? What exactly isn't hanging together? I'm assuming you don't mean that in other contexts is is okay to target an innocent person, but I'm not sure what you do mean.
Being targeted is indeed not the same as being guilty. One is being used in the context of war, and the other is used in the Justice system.
My god how many „Israeli snipers are shooting children in the head“ statements from non-profits and doctors do we need before people finally stop peddling this „only evil hamas members are targeted“.. Just look at satellite pictures of Gaza man. Every palestinian is a target, which is why we are calling it genocide.
My point is that the Israeli government has been claiming, in every way imaginable, that their actions are „targeted“, when the evidence clearly shows that they are not. So when someone like Gvir says „targeted assassinations“, what he means (based on previous evidence) is „let’s kill some Palestinians“. What people say needs to be put in context of how they have behaved in the past.
We might as well just ignore completely what he said, and just say "look at him and his previous actions!" then. I agree this guy is an racist scum, I just don't think it justifies saying something like "Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly."
Hitler was terrible too but I don't go around telling people "He said kill all Jews on national television!!!" even if that's pretty clearly what he believed in.
So if eg Trump said “evil Spain, we will never trade with them again, as they are terrorist-lovers” your only option is to just repeat that verbatim?
Or would you have the ability to say “in response to Spain denying US access to military bases and air space for Iran war, Trump retaliates with economic sanctions”?
If I think this is exactly what Ben Gvir is saying, and if I can make a sound argument to back that up, why would I not claim that he said exactly that? Is piercing through veiled bullshit that politicians say now frowned upon?
I believe what they are saying is that "He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person" seems to imply a logical fallacy:
(1) Person X is targeted -> (2) innocent people don't get targeted -> (3) therefore person X must not be innocent
The problem is that (2) contains too many bad assumptions: that the person doing the targeting is benevolent, that there's sufficient due process to ensure the targeter is correct, that there's a universally agreed definition of "innocent", etc.
History has proven that innocent people DO get targeted, so even from a common sense perspective your statement doesn't withstand scrutiny.
Thank you for explaining. I did not mean to say the innocent people in Gaza were not targeted. Of course they did, and many times. I meant to say that in Hebrew (and I believe that in other languages too), when someone calls for "targeted assassinations", it precisely means targeting non-innocent people. The term is literally used as the opposite of "carpet bombing", collective punishment etc. The fact that innocent people were targeted during the war is clearly a crime, but again, it is not what was being called for in the aforementioned quote.
I can't comment on the Hebrew, but in English the phrase "targeted assassination" says nothing whatsoever qualitative about the person being targeted. It merely says:
Targeted -> this will be a specifically identified person
Assassination -> they will be killed
For example, a dictator might perform a targeted assassination on a rival, in order to stay in power. Innocence or non-innocence has nothing to do with it. Or to give a more relevant example, someone might target and kill a Palestinian so that settlers can take their land. Whether the Palestinian was innocent or not doesn't matter. The land was the objective.
> One doesn't "target" an innocent person. He indeed said that we should target not only those that are an "immediate threat". I'm guessing he meant people who took part in October 7th's attack but are not currently fighting.
That's a lot of leeway for Ben Gvir, a guy that clearly doesn't mind killing innocent civilians. For years he proudly hung the portrait of the israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein in his living room, the terrorist who in 1994 entered a mosque and killed 29 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 more.
I was aiming to translate what he said, not to guess we he deeply believes. The OP suggested he was saying this on television, hinting that this would be some kind of acceptable opinion in Israel. Ben Gvir's history, while I too believe still plays a big role in his ideas, is something that at least publicly he had to apologize for in order to get into the position he's at.
For what it is worth, I agree with you. So there is at least one other person out there who would like statements to remain factual. When the entire topic is already so emotionally charged, it seems even more important to attempt to just stick to being factual.
30-40 per day means between 10,000 and 15,000 Palestinians killed per year. Just think about that number for a minute. I think that you're giving Ben Gvir way too much benefit of the doubt here.
Do you believe that 30 to 40 Palestinians per night pose an immediate threat? Elsewhen in history, genocidal acts have been justified by claiming a non existent immediate threat (of disease, of economics, of fifth columnists, of terrorism).
The point still stands, he is discussing taking out members of Hamas. These people are mass murderers and rapists, intending on planning more attacks, and are not worthy of life.
Not just “a minister”, but the Minister of National Security. I mean, yeah, the “you can’t judge the intent of Israel’s security policy by Ben-Gvir” would maybe hold some water if he was, say, Minister of Tourism (though if a Tourism minister was telegraphing genocidal intent that wasn’t that of thr government, you still wouldn't expect them to stay around long, either) but...
When such statements/actions are attributed to Ben-Gvir, I assume they and the objective nuanced truth are basically the same. I find it wild how people who are not like him defend him.
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even human."
Sorry, but there's absolutely no way to defend such a disgusting person. Considering how much they pull the Nazi card for sympathy, they are the closest to genuine Nazis that I've ever seen in terms of hatred and brutality.
I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not.
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
There’s a bot that automatically downvotes certain topics on HN. I post at times that often coincide with the middle of the night in North America, and I get 3–5 downvotes within the next 5 minutes.
> Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
Agreeing with something doesn’t make it 100% unambiguously true/correct. There are also many reasons people downvote, you don’t know the nature of the objections. It’s not worth getting upset over.
this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties.
brand defence,
nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
the particular danger now is not that the outside influence is new, but that more and more people are depending almost entirely on the information communication systems for all of their information.
the war against in person gathering and the family unit has been pretty successful, as they were pretty sloppy ways to exchange information to begin with. but at the very least you knew you were getting an actual opinion from someone, and you had context of their personhood and background for which to base that opinion.
I mean, the US has always done this. Look at the atrocities in Indonesia. Just 10 years after saying "never again" to the Holocaust and we have Goodyear using actual slave labor from death camps. It was the US doing too. The "Jakarta Method" was then exported all around the world, especially in South America.
> Indeed, seeing how slanted online discussion was, I suspect one side had many more bots, and I'm not sure if the other side had any.
I think your bias is showing. From what I recall, both sides employed the exact same tactics, and we often saw blatantly inorganic discussions popping up in random subreddits on how $(SIDE_A) was the real villain and $(SIDE_B) only had supports because they were paid bots driven by their PR firm.
Things reached a point where I'm sure the same template was used by each counterpart.
On a bigger picture, I'm not sure why anyone still goes to places like reddit and believes anything showing up in the mainpage is still organic.
Is there any writing outside of your recollection that says the Heard side was using bots? Afaik all reporting suggested it was one sided, and not her side
> there any writing outside of your recollection that says (...)
That's a rather disingenuous attempt to cast doubt on something. You are free to ignore what I said, but your sudden interest in upholding high standards on certifying observations this deep in the chat, while ignoring any step in between, is already telling.
It's not disingenuous? The person you responded to linked to articles which said it was one sided. You said the other opposite, but provided no sources. I asked for some. It's a simple request that was made politely
I haven't heard about Heard Bots myself, only the Depp Fakes. It's not an unreasonable question to ask for external corroboration when someone claims that something happened and their source is that they saw it.
Sadly, I am not invested enough to do research on this matter and uninterested in having an LLM convincingly tell me whatever it reads on the internet is the truth about this.
Depp's bot army was clearly more widespread and more successful. The reality is that it was a mixture of bot armies and the hive mind taking off by itself. A sort of organic-synthetic cyborg
I'll be completely honest with you about what I believe: I think the the UK trial unequivocally proved that Johnny Depp is a violent and abusive. The US trial, which was only about defamation, was clearly a sham trial and did not address the legitimacy of the evidence (UK's case found clear evidence for 12 of the 14 alleged incidences of violence. It also established a clear pattern of abuse).
Depp's behavior during the US trial is textbook DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) and any abuse expert would be able to immediately recognize it.
The reason I "both sides"'d it is because
A) I remember reading about evidence that Heard's team also used bots (obviously much less successfully). I could not find that evidence this time. I am not personally critical of her using bots to defend herself but, if she did, it would still be a notable feature of modern highly public debates.
B) When it was all going down, I remember something like 97% of tiktoks being pro-Depp (I wasn't on TikTok, just read a study). My main goal was to get people to accept the reality that even legal teams are working with PR firms that run massive bot farms to influence public opinion. Regardless of my opinion on who is in the right and who is in the wrong. I thought if I took an explicit side, the male-leaning demographics of HN would be less likely to engage with my actual main point
> was clearly a sham trial and did not address the legitimacy of the evidence
I'm curious what you mean by this. It was famously the UK trial that relied on copies of photos relayed via The Sun, while the US trial looked at the originals, including the EXIF data:
I have been yelling about the thinktank "truth laundering" industry for years now.
They were instrumental in the whole "Uyghur genocide" thing where the only proof was Adrien Zenz suggesting there would be a possible future decline in population growth and called it a "cultural genocide".
The US State department has been running things like "Radio Free Asia" as state propaganda mills for decades. This has broken out into an industry of insiders getting board seats on various think tanks and churning out essentially policy desires as "studies". These studies are then used as citations for actual news articles to launder the policy desires into something that seems like a reliable source. Then people say "Look! this is really happening!" while 100s of articles are written citing the same untrustworthy sources, laundered through dozens of thinktanks funded by the DoD and state dept.
I think the big difference is that before the internet you'd need to be a Murdoch to be able to do something like this. A good PR firm could fool a number of news outlets into thinking something is legit, but it was a lot harder to convince a professional journalist than it is to convince the average Faux News watcher.
I used to believe that, but too many times I have been proven wrong. Remember when the "professional journalists" were screaming about a terrorist plot against the UN last year and it was just a garden variety SIM farm running fraud?
even with the internet you need a marketing company with the reach and ability, and social media platforms to use and abuse
the maturity of those platforms, their "we need to make big money" drive to allow obviously bad actors to work their magic, and the ability to automate is what has weaponized it
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
Mostly because they already are responsible for systematizing documents that are needed to recognize us as citizens, land or car owners, etc.
Some laid back countries might allow companies to take and manage that function, but I don't think most of them would. Especially not in current landscape where people heard "you are the product" from all tech companies for the last 10 or so years.
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
> Throughout Europe in the 16th century, printed tracts were used to argue religious doctrine and foment support for religious causes. In England, Henry VIII used print literature to justify his break from the Catholic Church. During the subsequent reigns of Edward and Mary, print polemics escalated into propaganda warfare, as print media gained enormous potential to sway common opinion.
> Over the next century, the pamphlet became the principal means of garnering support for a cause or an idea, and was particularly influential during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Their current reach is unprecedented though, and the reach of governments or political parties engaging in mass disinformation campaigns has proved almost an existential risk.
The whole hysteria about 'fake news' 10 years ago was apparently an outrage against the public being duped, whereas is was in fact frustration that spreading fake news has been democratised.
But it absolutely wasn’t he was the most famous critic but everyone saw this who looked. Since most people didn’t dive too deep it was/is easy to post things with a spin and little real substance and people would take it is a fact because they really trusted the news outlets
Don't get me wrong, fake news is real. Obviously, always was. But the hysteria and the way "fake news" is used to this day to discredit everything someone doesn't like is definitely forever associated with trump (for me)
If "democratised" meant the same amount of power got spread out among the populace that wouldn't be a problem. But when disinfo becomes massively easier and we face floods from all directions, yeah that version of "democratised" sucks!
But this also means there’s more competition for attention, because now all lunatics can post from their bedrooms. The institutional media (including legacy) still maintain strong presence.
Of course, a great deal of panic over fake news wasn’t necessarily over fake news per se, but whose fake news and the loss of control over the “official narrative” that legacy media used to have a monopoly over. This isn’t a vindication of the heaps of slop published on the internet, just a more synoptic take IMO.
People miss Cronkite, because that style of media made them feel certain in their opinions and in “official consensus reality”, regardless of whether it was true or not and whether it was a trustworthy authority or not.
what's different is that the misinformation is designed to be ingested by LLMs to influence _their_ outputs, which are then presented to users as "knowledge" without necessarily attribution of sources. This is worse that the current state where you might enter a search term "morality of the Israeli army" and see a list of websites that are influenced by SEO-wrangling and paid ad word placement, but at least you can click on each website and sometimes get an idea of the bias of the website (if you read the small print) or maybe do a search about the website to see what others might say. All that is either impossible or much more difficult with AI generated content so 99% of users won't bother, but instead will go with "ChatGPT said that xxx".
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
It has been happening since people have existed. It used to be called propaganda before these, and rumor spreading since before the written word even existed.
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
That's tomorrow's problem. Losing the PR war is an existential crisis for Israel, so they'll try to "patch the leak" by any means necessary before the boat sinks.
> AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information
Everything else is already enshittified, and accurate information will just be the next victim. You will have to be rich to be able to afford accurate information.
This is new? There were tons of fake news sites, fake blogs, and sock puppet and troll farm accounts before AI.
I guess the new angle might be that AI scrapers have even less discernment than humans, so you don’t have to put much effort into creating a fake front online to sell it. Humans have at least a little bit of radar for this.
… which means the AI companies now have to run input through existing models to audit it before training on it? That’s interesting.
> At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
Whining about AI is a red herring. If anything, LLMs lowered the cost of producing this type of propaganda.
What's novel about this approach is that the emphasis on building up a facade of authority and credibility is not a central part of the propaganda effort. They can get away with outputting the content in a way thats invested by other LLMs,and then they lean upon people's gullibility towards LLM output as some sort of credibility laundering.
There is a reason why one of Wikipedia's central policy is requiring reputable primary sources to support content.
An important nitpick: Wikipedia requires reputable secondary sources, not primary sources. You can't cite a politician's personal social media, for example, you have to cite reporting on those statements. This is part of Wikipedia's defense against novel research - it's supposed to be a record of what is commonly known, not a replacement for, say, Reuters or arxiv.
I'm kind of hopeful AI some wikipedia-inspired AI "oracle" will happen in the future. Why not use some central AI to separate fact from fiction (faster than trolls and griefers can come to muddy the debate).
I mean, a big RAG setup with a smart LLM ought to do it, right? Or even just locally provided knowledge database - given the size of LLMs, what's a clone of wikipedia and whatever else you'd need?
Imo it can support the separation in meaningful ways. There are many political topics where opinions are flooding online forums much quicker than anyone with informed opinion can answer or digest them Having a quick reference for "verifying" statements would be useful. Sure LLMs are probabilistic but we don't have any issues using them for building software which runs as part of society infrastructure nowadays.
True, but software is very different to general knowledge. For example, it's easier to obtain reference documentation from the person who wrote the language. It's much easier to run tests to validate a given attempt. And the general discourse about how to implement a given solution or architecture is leagues apart from, say, the general discourse around the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This is based on the assumption of facts existing.
There are many studies, but each can be wrong and they can collectively show a bias. Even things of which are the most non-political of facts can have very strong biases. Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property that has absolutely no real world significance to the things people are tribalistic about (aka, no political relevance). Now imagine the same applied to fields like economics or psychology which do have massive legal/political implications.
For a different example, ask the question if X committed crime Y. There are cases where they weren't found guilty but it is reasonable to assume they did. But being found guilty doesn't make it a fact either, as some people are wrongly convicted. Some eventually are overturned, but even if it isn't, it still isn't a fact they committed a crime.
Then there is the simple ambiguity of statements. Language generally can't support facts. It is why legalize, and programming code, and math's are effectively their own languages. For a simple example, consider the Betrand paradox(1).
>Consider an equilateral triangle that is inscribed in a circle. Suppose a chord of the circle is chosen at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of the triangle?
Is the answer 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4? Well, it is all three at once, depending upon what you meant by random. Now, imagine how this impacts things like research studies, where the randomness is much harder to quantify and there is constant pressure to p hack a result.
> Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property
Could you elaborate on this please?
But yes, the underlying argument is sound: extracting facts from the messy phenomenological reports about the world is extremely difficult, and cannot be done by simply taking a brain in a jar and having it think extremely hard.
Incorrect calculation led to some wrong value, I think electric charge. Subsequent findings showed a general trend towards a correct value. The general trend indicates that findings that were too far off were scared to be published for being wrong and contradicting existing studies, thus only small refinements were published, causing the slow drift.
Thus, the first well accepted study anchors a value and it takes much more work to get a new value established as correct after the anchor is set. Especially in a case where the experiment design itself is still solid and it was more with specific experiment (measurements slightly off, other values not quite correct).
yes, but at least you know what Grokipedia is, just like you know what you're going to get if you read Truth Social, or the Jacobin.
but because the content is assimilated by GPT/Claude/Gemini and then mixed in with everything else, the bias is much much difficult to spot, making it much more effective and reaching a much wider audience (i.e., those who never visit Grokipedia)
It's already been everywhere for years. The most obvious one is any time someone says something bad about Russia or China, a load of comments pop up to say "Yeah but what about when america does <x>?". Never actually attempting to discredit the statement, just to steer it towards the US
The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious when it happens compared to normal conversation
> The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious...
Does it though? Remember that the Global South outnumbers the west in terms of population. And the west isn't really as politically popular as westerners like to believe:
As more and more of these nations come online (Redditors already complain about Indians "hijacking" the whole of Reddit), many in the west are experiencing the cognitive dissonance between what you've been told of how the rest of the world think about you vs what they actually think. (Of course, I am not discounting the role State actors in trying to shape the discourse online, and I agree with you that is also a factor).
This is a terrible topic, but if you can’t understand where the Nazi reference comes from with regards to the Ukrainian conflict, you need to read some history books. Start with Stepan Bandera who is still considered an idol by many in the current Ukrainian government.
Yeah but the bias on Reddit and Twitter was the other way around when that war started. Suddenly 20 billion Ukrainians online, all of them holding PhDs in Ukrainian history.
The weirdness is how quickly and randomly those comments show up. Back when I used Reddit, I could mention some sensitive topic in a random place and there'd instantly be what I think are bots voting and commenting on it, sometimes huge comments with tons of links that looked canned.
Also it's possible those are from some insanely online people possibly running brigaiding groups on Discord, but that's not much better. It's best to be away from that. Let them "win" their online arguments against each other.
Hi I am a human for sure and I can say we humans like to point out USA hypocrisy every time others are accused of doing things the US has done countless times while pretending to be on a moral high ground. Please don’t be offended by that. Just try to look at yourself before throwing stones at others. Beep boop .
You may be misunderstanding some of those comments. It's not changing the subject, it's pointing out that you don't actually care about that bad thing or you don't actually think it's bad, because if you did then you'd also think it's bad when the US does it.
One of the things that I took away from reading about the history of the transatlantic slave trade was that rich people always get the ideas they need circulated.
I don't want to call all of those people liars, although I'm sure some are. But the incentive structures at least select and reinforce the people espousing whatever notions support and justify a profitable status quo.
Previously, the cost of that was quite high. You had to find a bunch of reasonably smart people and fund them for years to go around and say what you liked. From royal patronage to modern think tanks, it cost real money to shift a lot of minds.
But now given the incredible concentration in "AI" chatbots and their nature as text averagers, I suspect the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude. So I think we'll see a lot more of this.
> the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude.
This is a really interesting take.
You don't need an entire organized religion in order to disseminate your desired belief system anymore… you don’t even need billions of dollars. Hard to say what the cost of disseminating an ideology to a nation is now, but likely somewhere between a few bucks a whole lot of luck to tens of millions.
If that bar drops low enough, there is potential for a lot more ideological competition, and things will get interesting.
>the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority
not authority but circles of trust from real life connections. we had a nice brief moment of centralized asynchronous information exchange with strangers that was relatively trustworthy but we are going to go back to needing to talk to an actual human being in real time in order to receive an actual human opinion from strangers, and then on top of that we can built local caches that explicitly are not able to be contributed to by strangers but that your circle of friends and family may be able to use.
ive been toiling over some designs/implementations for making it digital but ultimately its a process adherence more than a tool thats needed. any old notepad and emails would work fine
This has been happening since Gamergate. (Or am I showing my age by bringing that up?).
Gamer gate was a fully manufactured cultural outrage by some very bad actors over nothing. Unfortunately, that marked the first time an online platform was massively used to drive a wedge between humans. And the bad side sadly won. That set the precedent for all the bad things that came after:
1. Bots on social media commenting on divisive or contentious issues in a country
2. Rise of online incel/red pill culture
3. Rise of stochastic terrorism
4. Cambridge analytica causing a complete shift in the 2016 US elections
5. The gang of 12 who spread nearly 90% of the misinformation during the pandemic
Today, most people can't even tell if a song they like on the major platforms was made by AI. People read less. People spend less time in nature. People are more lonely and less likely to be in a relationship or have deep meaningful friendships.
There are already some niche technical questions that Google's AI mode will answer based on a single Reddit or Hackernews comment. I've even seen my own comments used as sources.
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
>>When Obama used social networks, he was called a genius, but when it’s someone you don’t like
Obama used social networks to spread a milquetoast 'yes we can' message, not to justify an ongoing genocide. How is that even a comparison. Israel is closer to Triumph des Willens than it is to promoting the Affordable Care Act, you do realize that right?
It's not 'far from being a perfect state', it's waging old testament wars of extermination on its neighbors and towns
It has been attacked by a Palestinian militia terrorist group. Is it waging old testament wars? No, but it is retaliating at a rate the western world refuses to accept because the western world has different, much much milder kind of problems.
That kind of euphemism is just a joke in light of the racist and fascist rhetoric by Israeli pundits and politicians, how they call even babies terrorists, while at the same time making shit up about beheaded babies and whatnot. Even just the sheer cruelty and stupidity IDF soldiers put on display proudly, voluntarily, would wholly refute it. Israelis making their joke videos about Palestinians by itself would suffice. Only a deeply sick, deeply evil and deeply stupid society can create such artifacts. You may come to a different conclusions, but you may not gloss over all the input into that judgement.
You're not wrong that there's an element of self-defense. What makes it harder to accept is the lack of effort or willingness to de-escalate the conflict.
Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
Who knew that Hitler would rise to power and Europe won’t back Jews until 6 million of them were slaughtered and then won’t even allow them to immigrate to Israel after that?
Who knew that the Iranian revolution will happen and force 650,000 jews out of Iran?
If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
But I suspect you know nothing about Jews besides social media.
Next thing you’ll say we’re not native to that land right? We only lived in the middle east forever, but our food is cultural appropriation too, right?
No, Hamas uses actual child soldiers. It is very easy to deny genocide when the genocide has been made up by racist people. I’m going to go genocide this chicken salad now.
> If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
Note that I said ethnic cleansing and genocide, both go on and went on for years. Also, it is Israel who is expanding, putting settlers in places where they should not be. The idea that the ethnic group being pushed away is not allowed to defend themselves and if they do they should be subject of genocide is literally fascist.
Israel is not engaged in self defence as much as they are engaged in aggression.
Explain to me like I'm 5, how a nation capable of such propaganda to install bombs in communication devices, hacked to be bought by leaders of terrorist organizations, capable of bombing the leader of Iran did NOT know about this attack? And if they did know, didn't do anything to prepare for it?
When you get a bit older you will realize that just because someone does amazing things doesn’t mean they are omnipotent and omniscient.
Also, there was a strong political will to try a peaceful approach to Gaza (with thousands of Gazans coming in to Israel for work every day), and with the belief that Hamas wants a peaceful approach as well.
Hamas is planning further attacks now, what do you suggest Israel do about it?
And when we both get a bit older, it may come to light that a state leader let this happen, hopefully history will show reality for what it was.
Still, that doesn't absolve Hamas from any actions done, they are terrorists at it's core and the worst type, they are willing to use civilians(and babies) to further their agenda, I don't condone them and personally and think the world would be a better place without them(as any other extremist)
And you still did not answer the question posed in the first place, "omnipotent" is completely deflecting any possibility of that happening, when the issue happened over a holiday, time that is prime for issues, take for example, Christmas markets attacks on Germany. While yes, it's speculation "today", I've asked in the main question.
I don't believe this is victim blaming, it's clear that what hamas did is unforgivable, my previous post states so, then again, you'd not be a good parent if you let your child go to Epstein island knowing what will happen to it, yes, the victims are still victims, same as the Christmas market but the government is failing it's population, when it otherwise is capable of taking measures for it.
This all said, I'll stop engaging with you as I've had enough to debate against a "throw" account.
> Hamas is planning further attacks now, what do you suggest Israel do about it?
Remove the grievances that lead Palestinians to support armed attacks on Israel.
Israel has held millions of Palestinians under military occupation for decades. Palestinians have no rights, no future, and no hope of getting anything through negotiation.
Israel could withdraw from all of the occupied territories (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza), which, after all, do not belong to Israel in the first place.
If it's unwilling to do that, then there's only one just and moral alternative: grant full and equal citizenship to all the Palestinians who live under Israeli rule.
Israel wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to keep the land, refuse the Palestinians who live there any rights, ruthlessly repress any Palestinian resistance, and then play the victim.
> Next thing you’ll say we’re not native to that land right? We only lived in the middle east forever
There were very few Jews in Palestine for nearly 2000 years. The founders of Israel were almost all Europeans, and their families had been European for almost 2000 years.
This would be like the Italians showing up today and claiming that they are the rightful owners of France, because Gaul was a Roman province before 500 AD.
About equal numbers of Palestinians were displaced from the new, UN sanctioned state of Israel, as Jews from adjoining states. And many many more people have been displaced since then. While undoubtedly tragic, most displaced people at some point move on with their lives, and stop terrorising their neighbours and the world.
"Okay, we stole the country and expelled the native population, but they should just get over it and move on."
It would be easier for the Palestinians to just move on if millions of them didn't live under 59 years of Israeli military occupation, with no end in sight. They have no way of moving on, because the IDF controls their lives, and Israeli settlers are taking their land piece-by-piece.
> Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
Of course we could argue any country try to defend itself, but an ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
> People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
The end of a State doesn't mean the end of its citizens.
It simply mean that a state apparatus and power structure is taken down and replaced by something else.
By that token though, there is a much stronger argument for Columbus committing genocide and for USA to give back all land to native americans. And most US liberals agree with the sentiment.
Yet it does not ever happen. LOL.
Your liberal US bullshit ideals are all talk and no action until you show the rest of the world you can put your money where your mouth is. And we know that will never happen, so STFU!!!
> ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
Asides from the idea that Jews can colonise Judea, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt and left Gaza in 2005 only returning after the recent Hamas murder/rape rampage, which shows ‘ever expanding’ to be an obvious lie.
Not really - the green map famously pretends that all government land owned by the British by the Ottomans belonged to the Arab people that called themselves Palestinians in 1960. It also equates people that lived in British and Ottoman Palestine to those people, whereas both those places were multi ethnic states. It also ignores the proposed 23rd Arab state that was rejected by the Arabs.
this is the Green map. It’s widely known to be a hoax. It’s based on assuming all the government land that belonged to the British government and the Ottomans belonging only to the Palestinian Arabs (which it did not), British Palestine being a state only for Arabs (which it was not), an Arabs accepting partitioning (which they did not)
Depend of the state, could be internal turmoil (revolution), peaceful change with new constitution and ideal, or external force imposing change (like Germany post-WW2, being split between alors).
I would hope for a truly secular state with a multicultural population, paid reparation to displaced Palestinian families and farmers and a memory duty (museum, memorial, documentaries and school teaching) to counter the years of propaganda.
And mass prosecution of head of State and army top brass.
Truly secular states simply don't exist anywhere in the middle east so it seems wild to expect it there of all places and a multicultural population simply means barelling towards a monocultural future for much of the israelis I think. aka Lebanon's drastic demographic shift (https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-e...) but much worse for various reasons.
And it's not like that rapidly decline of their share of the population (which let's be real is somewhat incompatible with an at least a temporarily required Millet system or something like lebanon's gov sectarianism) necessarily means they get a managed peacefull decline. Not a single minority in the wider region has actually gotten that. Kurds, copts, fur, zaghawa, masalit, azeris, asyrians. None. It's all a slow managed decline with gov discrimination and occasional brutalisation or outright killings. Druze might be the only expception to it but they don't relate to power or the rest of islam in quite the same way.
I believe they're very much aware of this. (especially the mizrahi who are more adverserial to the palestinians) So given that they're never going to willingly accept or roll with it if forced....they'll either bail the country faster than the christian lebanese have been doing and/or fight to the death prior.
The thing is nobody wants to be South Africa.
Decline, corruption, sectarian parties and a general bleak long term outlook for the population who gave up control.
The jews in this picture would likely see a much bleaker fate due to their current standing of having brutalised the palestinians in a repeating game of mutual retaliation and escalation but also the diaspora and sheer prevalence of arabs around them.
Think how Lebanon went from a christian country to a muslim one in no time with hezbollah calling a deceptive amount of the shots but... worse.
>with more returning of ancestrally owned land I reckon.
A huge part of the black population of SA wasn't there before the boers so the sins of the father or 'blood and soil' rethoric makes a lot more sense for the palestinians. I think it's a valid feeling but also one that cuts on both sides. However the biggest growing group in israel and a big part of the later migration and thus settlement are the mizrahi who have defined a lot of the current hard line stance and to them this western/christianity morality idea of atonement makes no sense. They'd be giving up this land the most but also wouldn't be given their ancestrally owned land back and are also the most adversarial to the palestinian population.
You don't start an international terrorist movement, bomb british colonial authorities, use money to influence british colonial authorities, create armed miliciais and massively finance migration to a land that is owner by other people, kill and expell them by violent means from their cities, homes and farms, use your influence to force the UN to partition the land giving the majority and the best land for you, and then ignores this partition wanting even more land and then you get to call it defense.
By owned by other people you meant the Ottomans, right?
Cause they seemed to be just fine selling that land.
Also “ignoring the partition”? Literally the day the partition was adopted, the Arab league attacked Israel. 6 nations to 1, yet Israelis outsmarted them all (which is why you keep hating us).
Like Islamic terrorist organizations, dictatorships, democracies et al have never tried to influence anything either, my point isn't that you're wrong you just sound like a fool trying to pretend this is some "Israeli" thing.
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadFlagged, this topic is not allowed and should be removed promptly.
PG: No facts should be unsaid...until Israel comes up. Then its... watch your mouth or feel the wrath of dang.
Do you have evidence?
Because what I think and read is any flamewar topic gets removed - and this surely qualifies.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
This is what a think tank is for.
A better headline would be "Israel fails to adequately paperwork their low-rent think tank".
“kill 30 or 40” people in Gaza every night and go beyond “those who pose a danger … at that particular moment”.
Why bother trying to influence public and online discourse when it's this blatant.
The specific comment was: ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
So specifically terrorists. Generally challenging why Israel is not being more offensive against Hamas in Gaza. Nothing about going beyond those who pose danger and specific to armed combatants.
And I'm not fan of Ben Gvir or Smotrich. They are fanatic morons. But the reporting on this statement is biased and false just like most reporting on this conflict.
I'm pretty sure that for both Ben Gvir and Smotrich having dozens of civilians killed when the target is a combatant is justified but intentionally attacking dozens of civilians when there is no combatant is not. They also do not represent the official government position though presumably their voters (something like 5% maybe of the public) would also hold similar opinions. They are also religious so they view a lot of this and their morality through a religious lens which I don't fully understand.
Not to compare but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have and do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor. They prefer to go after civilians. They are also not that "extreme" in the public opinion. Their religious lens is also quite different.
Also yes, Israel has ended up killing a lot more Palestinian civilians while "not targeting" them and Palestinians ended up killing a large (%) of civilians but also some combatants while targeting civilians. I think the ratio on both sides is somewhere around 70% civilians (I'm sure who counts and how you count matters. Israel has always consistently reported details of all casualties including whether or not they are soldiers, their ranks, roles etc. Hamas reports all casualties as civilians.
This is exactly what happens in the West Bank every single day. Settlers and IDF soldiers will go shoot up schools, murder random passerby, etc., and then the Israeli state will give them more weapons and supplies to do it again the next day.
(Yes, shoot up schools: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/22/middleeast/west-bank-settler-.... Overview of how the system works: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-organized-settler-mili...)
There is some law enforcement but very much not enough under the current government: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/west-bank-israeli-settler-char...
But this is not what we're talking about here.
If you look at media reports you're going to find some relatively large number of Palestinian casualties in the west bank. But those reports generally conflate a lot of different things. "Settlers randomly murder Palestinians" is really not a thing in the big picture. The total number will include things like someone trying to stab a policeman and getting shot. Hamas or PIJ members shot during military confrontation. Collateral damage during those confrontations. Palestinians shot while e.g. throwing rocks or otherwise attacking Israeli soldiers or civilians. And yes some deaths that are a result of settler altercations of some sort (the vast minority) mostly in some specific hot spots.
Again I am totally opposed to settlements in the west bank and certainly to violence against innocent Palestinian civilians but there is a more complex story here than you'd think. It's true that some subset of settlers are lawless, armed, and more aggressively assert themselves "in the face" of the Palestinian population. It's not great. Hopefully the upcoming elections in Israel will change things a little bit. I would say that most Israelis agree with my position and many actively try to help the Palestinians but the government being so right wing and the general mood after the war makes things harder.
There is exactly enough "law enforcement" to keep up appearances for the international community and the liberals in Tel Aviv who prefer to live in denial. There have been 0 (yes, zero) convictions of Israeli citizens for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, for several years now.
> People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered.
Yes, threatened to leave on pain of being murdered. The Israeli right understands that Holocaust-style mass extermination is far more trouble than it's worth; you just need to kill enough people to scare away the rest.
The zero conviction statement is also incorrect. Here's a conviction from this year: https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/defense/1013279/
A minor (at the time) who killed a Palestinian woman (Aisha al-Rabi) by throwing a stone on her car was convicted on the offense of "terrorist manslaughter".
So far we have 0 correct statements out of 2.
The last one is more of a judgement. Israeli right has no interest and never has had interest in "Holocaust-style" extermination of anyone. That bit I'd file under blood libel. There's right and there's far right and this is not on the agenda of either (unlike what others want to do to Jews e.g. in Israel and other places). Most of the far right actually has no problem with Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank in general. Some elements do indeed want to have them all leave. I think most Israelis know that's not gonna happen. The wave of suicide attacks in the early 2000's and now the Oct 7th attacks have however convinced many Israelis that there is no future to something like a two state solution and generally that there will be no peace at least in this generation.
So I call 0 out of 3.
Settlers occupying Palestinian land, especially that land immediately adjacent to Gaza really aren't civilians in the normal sense, more like an armed militia with their families along as human shields. Comparison point I usually see are armed homesteaders in most colonial scenarios.
Edit: Actually I should mention this also applies in the west bank, and golan heights. Not to leave Syrians moved on for Israels "Buffer Zone" finding out they have been settled out of the bargain. They also have a right to return.
I think the time where Palestinians could be reasonably expected to rehome themselves to their land peacefully has long since passed.
Israeli settlers are just as welcome as always to just get out of the way and permit the resettlement to happen peacably.
When I search for that quote and translate articles it seems Ben-Givir is talking about using helicopters to attack funerals instead of targeted operations.
Context from https://www.jdn.co.il/news/2210880/ as translated by Firefox 153.0.1 on Fedora 44:
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations.
I think "helicopters to attack funerals" is really not the correct interpretation of the original statement. Funerals for Hamas members often include massive amounts of armed combatants. The (dumb maybe) point is to go after those combatants. And yes, there is a potential risk for other people to get hurt which is why Israel does not tend to do this... and Ben Gvir would like Israel to still do it. But the target and the scenario are important and the new cycle turns this into "kill random people for the fun of it".
So to bring this back to influencing "AI" chatbots presumably the inaccurate/biased reporting is going to dominate over this "Hanover Institute" articles plus ofcourse responsiblestatecraft.org a left leaning organization is doing their own influencing. There are many who are doing their own form of influencing on people and AI chatbots.
It is obvious that if he was misquoted he would have definitely corrected his statement. But he wants the army to hear his words in a confusing manner. And you are on his side when you are defending him and trying to sow doubt in how his words sound.
is that how ben-gvir defines terrorist? as part of them being fanatic morons i wouldnt trust they share that definition. iirc theyve also talked about wanting to kill children because theyll grow up to be terrorists?
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
The point behind the Rabin comment was that, if one knows anything of him and his heroic efforts to attain actual, tangible steps toward peace; if that discussion results in the same vitriol, it would serve as proof to me, that any subject involving Israel in this FOV is futile. I see much vitriol toward Israel, which I refer to as 'vitriol' because it often seems out of context however true, and also, I see a distinctly growing anti-Israel public sentiment that seems to omit critical parts of history, eg Rabin -- someone widely supported and revered at the time, by Israelis, and someone one could argue, even by some Palestinians. Arafat snuck across the boarder to give condolences to Rabin's family immediately after the assassination. Very different times, and seemingly, maybe conveniently forgotten. I never see this mentioned in the flame wars. Not that it would demean all of the many legitimate grievances, but it seems to me a very necessary balance-factor that I have yet to see applied.
1. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hya411vqezg
2. https://www.wsj.com/politics/israels-50-million-experiment-t...
3. https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...
4. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-funded-465m-camp...
We can see that at least some sources are covering the topic of using AI to influence the public on political topics, which regardless of any particularly nation, suggests there is an active interest in manipulating the epistemic integrity of AI systems for purposes of biasing outputs.
And please allow me to make something very clear: I do not care who, nor what is influencing the output of AI, so long as the output is as close to honest as possible, and so long as the the process behind the arrival of final output is the result of the systems doing unhindered work and applying probability over programmed bias. This is the whole point for me. My own research has shown, repeatably, that institutional capture is becoming a repeatable and well established factor behind LLM output on certain topic areas.
The Futures Act integrates military intel, from directed energy weapons (read the docs) to cyber and notably, AI. < Yes, AI. That is the very topic under consideration here. Claiming that it has "nothing to do with LLM development" is potentially an enormous stretch of common sense. We see, already, the US government aiming to become deeply involved in pre-release vetting. Assuming that's the end of the story seems too improbable to me.
[0] - https://breakingdefense.com/2026/05/pentagon-clears-7-tech-f...
I think a little digging will reveal more than you suggest. When I recover from my daily prelude to death, I will recover supporting data. But I can barely function presently. From what I have seen, Anthropic is having and eating its cake on this one. There are peripheral connections that are left un-advertised.
I am confident I will find higher quality material soon. But if not, we can allow you to be acknowledged as to having corrected me on a technicality. But I would urge honest readers not to consider this the only potential connection point here, nor an accurate model for future arrangements. I would bet all I have that you will see closer and more intimate connections and operations between the two, or at the very least, other directly related contractors, eg Palantir, etc. And all other three of four have active contracts along with much discussion on closer ties in the future. In my opinion, that is the future, and I have been saying such since 2024, on the record.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
There are endless border clashes. Even in very recent times we have Armenia-Azerbaijan, Afghanistan-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia, and many more. Wiki gives more than 60 in the 21st century [1], and we're just getting started! And if other parties had decided to get involved and start jamming up the escalation ladder, any of those could have easily turned into a much bigger war, instead of being just yet another relatively inconsequential border conflict.
Or imagine if another country (perhaps Russia or China) had decided to 'pull a US' when the US invaded any of the countless countries we've invaded over the years - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Yemen, and so on just in quite recent times. That could very well have led to WW3, but it didn't because they didn't.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_conflicts#21st_...
Yes, but they will also not believe my enemies. Making people not believe anything anymore is a classic strategy of propaganda.
Personally I think the issue is that after WW2 we were left with a large scale and ever growing intelligence apparatus, but with ever fewer appropriate tasks for them. That led directly to the era of recklessly overthrowing nations, often to our detriment, and gradually transitioned to the modern era of aimless 'information warfare' which I think will ultimately be shown to be very much to our detriment, once again.
This started much earlier. United Fruit Company knocking over governments of "banana republics" was so well known that O'Henry wrote a funny novel about it in 1904.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
https://s-1.vercel.app/
So it is hilarious that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like that is out in the open.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-06/israel-court-battle-o...
Maybe that 90% number is for Tel Aviv. In national polls, they both have roughly the same approval rating.
I have no doubt that Ben-Gvir has a similar segment of haters in Israel. They want the same things, but they don't want to do it in the style of a leering hooligan fishing for a fistfight.
A bit of an extraordinary belief to hold, to be honest
His form is just a tiny cherry on top of very big rotting cake. Make form smooth and underlying crap won't change a bit. Hating trump ain't emotional, purely rational approach is sufficient.
The one exception that comes to mind is his policy of flooding the country with untrained, unrestrained ICE agents, and I do not approve of that one.
I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest but you're using something he said to twist the narrative, which ironically is exactly what the Hanover think-tank was supposedly meant to remedy.
Hamas is the worst of the worst in humanity.
Let's start educating the public about the Dahiya Doctrine now to change the subject (slightly).
https://www.ft.com/content/f6b953fc-a6ad-48cd-bed1-d42619b57...
The quote is definitely about Hamas, PIJ and other militant groups in Gaza.
To reiterate, I don't support Ben Gvir. But I also strongly oppose disinformation which seems to be the case here.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
Not sure how the full quote is supposed to help.
>Hamas is the worst of the worst in humanity.
IDF documenting war crimes against civilians, targetting children by snipers is fine because "protecting country" but Hamas is the bad guy?
What metric outside of Israeli propaganda are you using? Because those same metrics call IDF worse than anyone
If it was "secure X amount of land from Hamas" it would be way better because that would give them the option to surrender or run away, and give IDF an incentive to avoid violence. What Israel is doing means soldiers feel pressure to kill on sight even if the enemy is unarmed and ready to give up so they can meet their quota for the night. That is a war crime.
[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ben-gvir-calls-killing-30-04422310...
He was apparently on a podcast with a released hostage from Gaza. He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person. He indeed said that we should target not only those that are an "immediate threat". I'm guessing he meant people who took part in October 7th's attack but are not currently fighting, for example prisoners of the hostage he was talking with.
Many in Israel thinks the US forced Israel to stops many of its operations in Gaza, and he was basically saying he thinks some operations should continue.
To clarify, I disagree with him, I'm glad IDF operations in Gaza largely stopped and I wish they stopped completely. I wish the best for ordinary citizens of Gaza and I am longing for the day Ben Gvir will be behind bars. But he did not say we should randomly kill 30-40 Palestinians per day. There is an armed conflict, and many people on both sides would unfortunately love to see tens of deaths on the other side per day, especially armed people.
Quite apart from anything else, I don't think these statements hang together, and we wouldn't accept them in any other context. Being targeted is not the same as being guilty.
Being targeted is indeed not the same as being guilty. One is being used in the context of war, and the other is used in the Justice system.
Hitler was terrible too but I don't go around telling people "He said kill all Jews on national television!!!" even if that's pretty clearly what he believed in.
Or would you have the ability to say “in response to Spain denying US access to military bases and air space for Iran war, Trump retaliates with economic sanctions”?
If I think this is exactly what Ben Gvir is saying, and if I can make a sound argument to back that up, why would I not claim that he said exactly that? Is piercing through veiled bullshit that politicians say now frowned upon?
(1) Person X is targeted -> (2) innocent people don't get targeted -> (3) therefore person X must not be innocent
The problem is that (2) contains too many bad assumptions: that the person doing the targeting is benevolent, that there's sufficient due process to ensure the targeter is correct, that there's a universally agreed definition of "innocent", etc.
History has proven that innocent people DO get targeted, so even from a common sense perspective your statement doesn't withstand scrutiny.
Targeted -> this will be a specifically identified person
Assassination -> they will be killed
For example, a dictator might perform a targeted assassination on a rival, in order to stay in power. Innocence or non-innocence has nothing to do with it. Or to give a more relevant example, someone might target and kill a Palestinian so that settlers can take their land. Whether the Palestinian was innocent or not doesn't matter. The land was the objective.
This is the term in Hebrew, as it appears on Wikipedia: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A1%D7%99%D7%9B%D7%95%D7%9C...
I will leave it to you to translate the first paragraph and see what it means in the Israeli, Hebrew context.
That's a lot of leeway for Ben Gvir, a guy that clearly doesn't mind killing innocent civilians. For years he proudly hung the portrait of the israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein in his living room, the terrorist who in 1994 entered a mosque and killed 29 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 more.
"For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!"
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”[1]
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/ben-gvir-israel-gaza-hamas-netany...
Please stop spreading Muslim propaganda!
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221027-israel-s-far-...
Also interfering to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein
Sorry, but there's absolutely no way to defend such a disgusting person. Considering how much they pull the Nazi card for sympathy, they are the closest to genuine Nazis that I've ever seen in terms of hatred and brutality.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-19/...
[2] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/02/26/depp-v-heard-who-tr...
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
There are many Ivorians and Senegalese promoting the CCP’s ‘Community of Nations’ on Reddit, for example.
Agreeing with something doesn’t make it 100% unambiguously true/correct. There are also many reasons people downvote, you don’t know the nature of the objections. It’s not worth getting upset over.
brand defence, nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
the war against in person gathering and the family unit has been pretty successful, as they were pretty sloppy ways to exchange information to begin with. but at the very least you knew you were getting an actual opinion from someone, and you had context of their personhood and background for which to base that opinion.
Neither of these sources support this claim as none of them include any discussion on Amber Heard('s legal team) using bots?
I think your bias is showing. From what I recall, both sides employed the exact same tactics, and we often saw blatantly inorganic discussions popping up in random subreddits on how $(SIDE_A) was the real villain and $(SIDE_B) only had supports because they were paid bots driven by their PR firm.
Things reached a point where I'm sure the same template was used by each counterpart.
On a bigger picture, I'm not sure why anyone still goes to places like reddit and believes anything showing up in the mainpage is still organic.
That's a rather disingenuous attempt to cast doubt on something. You are free to ignore what I said, but your sudden interest in upholding high standards on certifying observations this deep in the chat, while ignoring any step in between, is already telling.
This is what you'd expect to see if the poster were a bot linked to the same PR network.
I haven't heard about Heard Bots myself, only the Depp Fakes. It's not an unreasonable question to ask for external corroboration when someone claims that something happened and their source is that they saw it.
Sadly, I am not invested enough to do research on this matter and uninterested in having an LLM convincingly tell me whatever it reads on the internet is the truth about this.
Depp's behavior during the US trial is textbook DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) and any abuse expert would be able to immediately recognize it.
The reason I "both sides"'d it is because
A) I remember reading about evidence that Heard's team also used bots (obviously much less successfully). I could not find that evidence this time. I am not personally critical of her using bots to defend herself but, if she did, it would still be a notable feature of modern highly public debates.
B) When it was all going down, I remember something like 97% of tiktoks being pro-Depp (I wasn't on TikTok, just read a study). My main goal was to get people to accept the reality that even legal teams are working with PR firms that run massive bot farms to influence public opinion. Regardless of my opinion on who is in the right and who is in the wrong. I thought if I took an explicit side, the male-leaning demographics of HN would be less likely to engage with my actual main point
I'm curious what you mean by this. It was famously the UK trial that relied on copies of photos relayed via The Sun, while the US trial looked at the originals, including the EXIF data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoQK1iAza9M
> I am not personally critical of her using bots to defend herself, if she did
Heh.
They were instrumental in the whole "Uyghur genocide" thing where the only proof was Adrien Zenz suggesting there would be a possible future decline in population growth and called it a "cultural genocide".
The US State department has been running things like "Radio Free Asia" as state propaganda mills for decades. This has broken out into an industry of insiders getting board seats on various think tanks and churning out essentially policy desires as "studies". These studies are then used as citations for actual news articles to launder the policy desires into something that seems like a reliable source. Then people say "Look! this is really happening!" while 100s of articles are written citing the same untrustworthy sources, laundered through dozens of thinktanks funded by the DoD and state dept.
the maturity of those platforms, their "we need to make big money" drive to allow obviously bad actors to work their magic, and the ability to automate is what has weaponized it
The word you're looking for is "reputation". It's been a critical part of society since forever.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
Mostly because they already are responsible for systematizing documents that are needed to recognize us as citizens, land or car owners, etc.
Some laid back countries might allow companies to take and manage that function, but I don't think most of them would. Especially not in current landscape where people heard "you are the product" from all tech companies for the last 10 or so years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_war#History_of_the_pa...
> Throughout Europe in the 16th century, printed tracts were used to argue religious doctrine and foment support for religious causes. In England, Henry VIII used print literature to justify his break from the Catholic Church. During the subsequent reigns of Edward and Mary, print polemics escalated into propaganda warfare, as print media gained enormous potential to sway common opinion.
> Over the next century, the pamphlet became the principal means of garnering support for a cause or an idea, and was particularly influential during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War
> Casualties: Parliamentarians 34,130 killed; Royalists 50,700 killed; 127,000 non-combat deaths (including some 40,000 civilians)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamite_War_in_Ireland
> Casualties: Williamites: 10,000 killed or died of disease; Jacobites: 15,293 killed or died of disease
But that's just a stupid central Europeans POV
COVID was a lab leak (according to FBI and DOE). PizzaGate was real, or close enough to the truth (Epstein files dropped soon after). etc.
All fervently denounced/reviled by the media.
(never mind the fact that he didn't even have the full truth available to him but you get the point)
Of course, a great deal of panic over fake news wasn’t necessarily over fake news per se, but whose fake news and the loss of control over the “official narrative” that legacy media used to have a monopoly over. This isn’t a vindication of the heaps of slop published on the internet, just a more synoptic take IMO.
People miss Cronkite, because that style of media made them feel certain in their opinions and in “official consensus reality”, regardless of whether it was true or not and whether it was a trustworthy authority or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zLCZ_Ic1hI
I rolled my eyes when I first saw the title, but damn it was a bit of a rabbit hole.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
Everything else is already enshittified, and accurate information will just be the next victim. You will have to be rich to be able to afford accurate information.
I guess the new angle might be that AI scrapers have even less discernment than humans, so you don’t have to put much effort into creating a fake front online to sell it. Humans have at least a little bit of radar for this.
… which means the AI companies now have to run input through existing models to audit it before training on it? That’s interesting.
Whining about AI is a red herring. If anything, LLMs lowered the cost of producing this type of propaganda.
What's novel about this approach is that the emphasis on building up a facade of authority and credibility is not a central part of the propaganda effort. They can get away with outputting the content in a way thats invested by other LLMs,and then they lean upon people's gullibility towards LLM output as some sort of credibility laundering.
There is a reason why one of Wikipedia's central policy is requiring reputable primary sources to support content.
There are many studies, but each can be wrong and they can collectively show a bias. Even things of which are the most non-political of facts can have very strong biases. Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property that has absolutely no real world significance to the things people are tribalistic about (aka, no political relevance). Now imagine the same applied to fields like economics or psychology which do have massive legal/political implications.
For a different example, ask the question if X committed crime Y. There are cases where they weren't found guilty but it is reasonable to assume they did. But being found guilty doesn't make it a fact either, as some people are wrongly convicted. Some eventually are overturned, but even if it isn't, it still isn't a fact they committed a crime.
Then there is the simple ambiguity of statements. Language generally can't support facts. It is why legalize, and programming code, and math's are effectively their own languages. For a simple example, consider the Betrand paradox(1).
>Consider an equilateral triangle that is inscribed in a circle. Suppose a chord of the circle is chosen at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of the triangle?
Is the answer 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4? Well, it is all three at once, depending upon what you meant by random. Now, imagine how this impacts things like research studies, where the randomness is much harder to quantify and there is constant pressure to p hack a result.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability)
Could you elaborate on this please?
But yes, the underlying argument is sound: extracting facts from the messy phenomenological reports about the world is extremely difficult, and cannot be done by simply taking a brain in a jar and having it think extremely hard.
Thus, the first well accepted study anchors a value and it takes much more work to get a new value established as correct after the anchor is set. Especially in a case where the experiment design itself is still solid and it was more with specific experiment (measurements slightly off, other values not quite correct).
> Grokipedia appears not to have updated any articles since April 24
but because the content is assimilated by GPT/Claude/Gemini and then mixed in with everything else, the bias is much much difficult to spot, making it much more effective and reaching a much wider audience (i.e., those who never visit Grokipedia)
The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious when it happens compared to normal conversation
Does it though? Remember that the Global South outnumbers the west in terms of population. And the west isn't really as politically popular as westerners like to believe:
- Why do some people support Russia's war in Ukraine? - https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/81254/why-do-so...
- Why isn't the Global South pro-Israel like the West? - https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/82511/why-isnt-...
As more and more of these nations come online (Redditors already complain about Indians "hijacking" the whole of Reddit), many in the west are experiencing the cognitive dissonance between what you've been told of how the rest of the world think about you vs what they actually think. (Of course, I am not discounting the role State actors in trying to shape the discourse online, and I agree with you that is also a factor).
disconnect. limit social media.
do some key signing parties in person and make sure you know who you're talking to
I don't want to call all of those people liars, although I'm sure some are. But the incentive structures at least select and reinforce the people espousing whatever notions support and justify a profitable status quo.
Previously, the cost of that was quite high. You had to find a bunch of reasonably smart people and fund them for years to go around and say what you liked. From royal patronage to modern think tanks, it cost real money to shift a lot of minds.
But now given the incredible concentration in "AI" chatbots and their nature as text averagers, I suspect the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude. So I think we'll see a lot more of this.
This is a really interesting take. You don't need an entire organized religion in order to disseminate your desired belief system anymore… you don’t even need billions of dollars. Hard to say what the cost of disseminating an ideology to a nation is now, but likely somewhere between a few bucks a whole lot of luck to tens of millions. If that bar drops low enough, there is potential for a lot more ideological competition, and things will get interesting.
not authority but circles of trust from real life connections. we had a nice brief moment of centralized asynchronous information exchange with strangers that was relatively trustworthy but we are going to go back to needing to talk to an actual human being in real time in order to receive an actual human opinion from strangers, and then on top of that we can built local caches that explicitly are not able to be contributed to by strangers but that your circle of friends and family may be able to use.
ive been toiling over some designs/implementations for making it digital but ultimately its a process adherence more than a tool thats needed. any old notepad and emails would work fine
Gamer gate was a fully manufactured cultural outrage by some very bad actors over nothing. Unfortunately, that marked the first time an online platform was massively used to drive a wedge between humans. And the bad side sadly won. That set the precedent for all the bad things that came after:
1. Bots on social media commenting on divisive or contentious issues in a country 2. Rise of online incel/red pill culture 3. Rise of stochastic terrorism 4. Cambridge analytica causing a complete shift in the 2016 US elections 5. The gang of 12 who spread nearly 90% of the misinformation during the pandemic
Today, most people can't even tell if a song they like on the major platforms was made by AI. People read less. People spend less time in nature. People are more lonely and less likely to be in a relationship or have deep meaningful friendships.
What a mess.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
I’ve yet to see a single one identify that on its own, rather than only reluctantly when confronted when documented facts it was objectively wrong.
So no, I doubt LLMs will do anything but promoted propaganda.
We already know that the pro-Palestinian movement is a fertile ground for fake antisemitic material.
Saying that Israel “lies” is exactly why Jews need Israel to exist and fight for Jews rights.
Qatar lies, Egypt lies, Iran lies, Iraq lies, Palestinians lie, but some people just can’t let go with their obsessions of Jews and Israel.
I think this is a brilliant move that outsmarts those who want to force a narrative on the Jewish people and the Israeli state.
It’s far from being a perfect state, but so do all the people that criticize it.
Netanyahu said that "Qatar is not an enemy country". Is he wrong about that? https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-14/ty-article/.p...
Obama used social networks to spread a milquetoast 'yes we can' message, not to justify an ongoing genocide. How is that even a comparison. Israel is closer to Triumph des Willens than it is to promoting the Affordable Care Act, you do realize that right?
It's not 'far from being a perfect state', it's waging old testament wars of extermination on its neighbors and towns
People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
Who knew that the Iranian revolution will happen and force 650,000 jews out of Iran?
Who knew?
Israeli leadership is as fascist as it gets. Openly so.
But I suspect you know nothing about Jews besides social media.
Next thing you’ll say we’re not native to that land right? We only lived in the middle east forever, but our food is cultural appropriation too, right?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lapid-says-netanyahu-knew-for-...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/24/middleeast/palestinians-h...
Genocide denial is not cool. Do you really think Hamas, who has 40000 fighters, had 20000 kid soldiers? You're crazy!
Note that I said ethnic cleansing and genocide, both go on and went on for years. Also, it is Israel who is expanding, putting settlers in places where they should not be. The idea that the ethnic group being pushed away is not allowed to defend themselves and if they do they should be subject of genocide is literally fascist.
Israel is not engaged in self defence as much as they are engaged in aggression.
Also, there was a strong political will to try a peaceful approach to Gaza (with thousands of Gazans coming in to Israel for work every day), and with the belief that Hamas wants a peaceful approach as well.
Hamas is planning further attacks now, what do you suggest Israel do about it?
Still, that doesn't absolve Hamas from any actions done, they are terrorists at it's core and the worst type, they are willing to use civilians(and babies) to further their agenda, I don't condone them and personally and think the world would be a better place without them(as any other extremist)
What you are actually doing is trying to blame the victim for “allowing” it to happen.
I don't believe this is victim blaming, it's clear that what hamas did is unforgivable, my previous post states so, then again, you'd not be a good parent if you let your child go to Epstein island knowing what will happen to it, yes, the victims are still victims, same as the Christmas market but the government is failing it's population, when it otherwise is capable of taking measures for it.
This all said, I'll stop engaging with you as I've had enough to debate against a "throw" account.
Remove the grievances that lead Palestinians to support armed attacks on Israel.
Israel has held millions of Palestinians under military occupation for decades. Palestinians have no rights, no future, and no hope of getting anything through negotiation.
Israel could withdraw from all of the occupied territories (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza), which, after all, do not belong to Israel in the first place.
If it's unwilling to do that, then there's only one just and moral alternative: grant full and equal citizenship to all the Palestinians who live under Israeli rule.
Israel wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to keep the land, refuse the Palestinians who live there any rights, ruthlessly repress any Palestinian resistance, and then play the victim.
There were very few Jews in Palestine for nearly 2000 years. The founders of Israel were almost all Europeans, and their families had been European for almost 2000 years.
This would be like the Italians showing up today and claiming that they are the rightful owners of France, because Gaul was a Roman province before 500 AD.
The irony is that this statement (which I disagree with) could be applied equally well to both Israel and the Palestinians.
It would be easier for the Palestinians to just move on if millions of them didn't live under 59 years of Israeli military occupation, with no end in sight. They have no way of moving on, because the IDF controls their lives, and Israeli settlers are taking their land piece-by-piece.
Of course we could argue any country try to defend itself, but an ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
> People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
The end of a State doesn't mean the end of its citizens. It simply mean that a state apparatus and power structure is taken down and replaced by something else.
Yet it does not ever happen. LOL.
Your liberal US bullshit ideals are all talk and no action until you show the rest of the world you can put your money where your mouth is. And we know that will never happen, so STFU!!!
Asides from the idea that Jews can colonise Judea, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt and left Gaza in 2005 only returning after the recent Hamas murder/rape rampage, which shows ‘ever expanding’ to be an obvious lie.
This is the more correct version:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Israeli_territorial_...
Very different story told here...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mandatory_Palestine_...
Specifically debunking the green map: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/msnbc-israel-map-pales...
Corrected: https://imgur.com/a/igHvxLF
And mass prosecution of head of State and army top brass.
And it's not like that rapidly decline of their share of the population (which let's be real is somewhat incompatible with an at least a temporarily required Millet system or something like lebanon's gov sectarianism) necessarily means they get a managed peacefull decline. Not a single minority in the wider region has actually gotten that. Kurds, copts, fur, zaghawa, masalit, azeris, asyrians. None. It's all a slow managed decline with gov discrimination and occasional brutalisation or outright killings. Druze might be the only expception to it but they don't relate to power or the rest of islam in quite the same way.
I believe they're very much aware of this. (especially the mizrahi who are more adverserial to the palestinians) So given that they're never going to willingly accept or roll with it if forced....they'll either bail the country faster than the christian lebanese have been doing and/or fight to the death prior.
The jews in this picture would likely see a much bleaker fate due to their current standing of having brutalised the palestinians in a repeating game of mutual retaliation and escalation but also the diaspora and sheer prevalence of arabs around them. Think how Lebanon went from a christian country to a muslim one in no time with hezbollah calling a deceptive amount of the shots but... worse.
>with more returning of ancestrally owned land I reckon.
A huge part of the black population of SA wasn't there before the boers so the sins of the father or 'blood and soil' rethoric makes a lot more sense for the palestinians. I think it's a valid feeling but also one that cuts on both sides. However the biggest growing group in israel and a big part of the later migration and thus settlement are the mizrahi who have defined a lot of the current hard line stance and to them this western/christianity morality idea of atonement makes no sense. They'd be giving up this land the most but also wouldn't be given their ancestrally owned land back and are also the most adversarial to the palestinian population.
Cause they seemed to be just fine selling that land.
Also “ignoring the partition”? Literally the day the partition was adopted, the Arab league attacked Israel. 6 nations to 1, yet Israelis outsmarted them all (which is why you keep hating us).
Read more here (not TikTok) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War
Because the partition was forced upon them. If a foreign entity forced you to split your land you will fight back too.
> which is why you keep hating us
Oh, of course, they hate you because you are so smart. Seem you (singular) suffer from a superiority complex.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
I honestly don't know where we go from here.
Why is this one in particular different? — besides “muh Jews!”
The article answers this: For one, the 'papers' are entirely AI-generated.