Foreign influence campaigns, or information operations, have been widespread in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Influence campaigns are large-scale efforts to shift public opinion, push false narratives or change behaviors among a target population. Russia, China, Iran, Israel and other nations have run these campaigns by exploiting social bots, influencers, media companies and generative AI.
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[Influence campaigns include] which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. [They] identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions.
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[Researchers] have uncovered many examples of coordinated inauthentic behavior. For example, we found accounts that flood the network with tens or hundreds of thousands of posts in a single day. The same campaign can post a message with one account and then have other accounts that its organizers also control “like” and “unlike” it hundreds of times in a short time span. Once the campaign achieves its objective, all these messages can be deleted to evade detection. Using these tricks, foreign governments and their agents can manipulate social media algorithms that determine what is trending and what is engaging to decide what users see in their feeds.
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One technique increasingly being used is creating and managing armies of fake accounts with generative artificial intelligence. [Researchers] estimate that at least 10,000 accounts like these were active daily on the platform, and that was before X CEO Elon Musk dramatically cut the platform’s trust and safety teams. We also identified a network of 1,140 bots that used ChatGPT to generate humanlike content to promote fake news websites and cryptocurrency scams.
In addition to posting machine-generated content, harmful comments and stolen images, these bots engaged with each other and with humans through replies and retweets.
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These insights suggest that social media platforms should engage in more – not less – content moderation to identify and hinder manipulation campaigns and thereby increase their users’ resilience to the campaigns.
The platforms can do this by making it more difficult for malicious agents to create fake accounts and to post automatically. They can also challenge accounts that post at very high rates to prove that they are human. They can add friction in combination with educational efforts, such as nudging users to reshare accurate information. And they can educate users about their vulnerability to deceptive AI-generated content.
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These types of content moderation would protect, rather than censor, free speech in the modern public squares. The right of free speech is not a right of exposure, and since people’s attention is limited, influence operations can be, in effect, a form of censorship by making authentic voices and opinions less visible.
No. It was a shortcut I took to shortcircuit your argument that Biden is fascist. Not all dictators are fascists, but all fascists are dictators.
The U.S. government is set up in a way that makes it extremely resistant to change, both good and bad. This means that the Democrats, who at least make a token effort towards progress, face an uphill battle. Republicans, on the other hand, just want to stymie progress and roll back everything they can, and it’s always a lot easier to tear things down than build things up. Couple this with compromises made in the 1700s for small states and the electoral college, which hasn’t been abolished despite it making absolutely zero sense in this modern age, and yeah, of course it’s hard for Democrats to do much. With how polarized things have gotten over the past few decades, the ancient Constitution that we have that we’ve basically ducttaped over a few times is unable to cope. Our system is inherently dysfunctional, with many of the advances in progress that we’ve made lately have been due to Supreme Court decisions, and, well, the Republicans seized control of it and are now using it to roll back those advances. In fact, now that they’re obviously in the bag for Trump, they’re making nonsensical and unconstitutional decisions that will hand Trump a lot of power that will make things a lot worse for all of us.
If Trump gets in, it’s game over. What little power we do have will be gone. If we can deny Trump the Presidency, there are some things we can do. The Republican Party has become fully reactionary, which means they’ll be fighting the system to make changes for the worse. We can then use the system against them by electing enough Democrats to play defense against their horrifying Project 2025 agenda. When you’re operating in a system that makes it so hard to change, the absolute last thing you should do is let things get worse, because that just makes our predicament even more dire. Now, the Supreme Court is a massive problem, and they absolutely are going to make the country worse because they’re on the bench for life, and there’s no realistic way to remove any of them, because the Republicans will protect their own no matter how criminal and corrupt they are. But the answer is not to let the Republicans back in power, and give the older Republican justices an excuse to retire so that they’re replaced by younger judges that damns us into having a reactionary court for generations. I know that “keeping Republicans from nominating more Supreme Court justices until a couple of the conservative justices pass away” is not exactly an inspiring strategy. There are deep systemic problems involved here that will require us to stay disciplined and vote strategically to deny the reactionaries as much regression as possible. But that requires actually holding your nose and voting Democrat. We are fundamentally not in a position where we can be picky.
The corporatism problem is the U.S. is, admittedly, a much harder nut to crack. The biggest issue is, of course, the voting populace is vehemently pro-capitalist, and things will not fundamentally change until this changes. Corporatist politicians get voted into office because that’s what people will actually vote for. The Citizens United decision by the right-wing Supreme Court basically lets billionaires bribe politicians even more brazenly than before. Again, there really isn’t much we can do here until it gets struck down. If we can get a movement going to deny politicians that accept corporate donations votes in the primaries, maybe we can start to make some inroads.
Okay, first off, you’re completely failing in your endeavor. This only makes you look hyperbolic when you call Biden a fascist, and it makes people disregard your point. There are so, so, so many ways you can criticize and condemn the government from a leftist perspective. The hyperbole is completely unnecessary, and it makes people more likely to write you off as a kook. If you’re actually trying to change someone’s mind, you need to do so in a way that doesn’t make people simply dismiss you.
It is not “very unserious” to point out that your lack of understanding undermines virtually all of your arguments. You advocate for a massive tactical blunder because you simply do not get it. It sounds like you have read up on leftist theory(which is great! everybody should!), but your weak grasp on how the American government works means that you aren’t able to propose realistic and practical strategies to actually achieve your goals. I’m not under the delusion that I have everything all figured out, but I do know that we need to do something actionable, and not throw our hands up and go “we’ve tried everything and we’re all out of ideas”. Your idealism clouds your mind to the point where you’re actively working against what you’re professing to believe, by offering useless strategies like “don’t vote” and “vote third party”. For a left-leaning person, voting this way only stands to benefit the reactionaries. Just because we don’t have much power doesn’t mean we have no power, and we’re in deep enough shit that if we’re not doing everything we can to at least slow and thwart the reactionaries, we don’t have a chance of building a better world.
continued from the last comment
This is such a ridiculously bad argument that I’m absolutely stunned that someone would actually think this would work. You’re wrong on this, full stop. I am begging you to step out of your bubble and compare and contrast Harris’s proposed policy agenda and Trump’s Agenda 47/Project 2025 and tell me that they’re the same. Like, this take is so atrociously foolish that it must have been formed by uncritically parroting the Russian propaganda promoting apathy and despair that is infesting leftist corners of the internet. Like, if you can’t agree that Republicans have gotten massively worse over the last few years somehow, if you somehow view even Trump and Romney as the same, then your view is so skewed that it becomes functionally useless.
Yeah, the reaction to the student protests about Gaza definitely disturbs me. There are few things at play here, first off, it’s easy for unscrupulous Israel supporters to dupe people into believing that criticism of the Israeli government is inherently antisemitic. Add in some right wing provocateurs exploiting the situation by attacking the heads of these universities, and you get what’s happened so far. Also, Israel itself has a weird amount of influence throughout the government to the point where it’s actually illegal for U.S. companies to boycott them(I work in the logistics industry, and we have to do training every year to recognize signs of a boycott of Israel. If we find some, we literally cannot legally do business with them.) Israel is actually particularly difficult to protest against. I don’t think that leftist organizing will face quite that amount of pushback. Even if it does, repression under Biden is going to be much easier to deal with than repression under Trump(the man sent goons in unmarked vans to harass, detain, and intimidate BLM protesters in Portland. He’ll do much worse next time, when the guardrails have been removed).
This is basically what I’ve been trying to argue to you(though the propaganda source in your case would be different).
What a lousy, bad faith argument. I don’t pretend that things are going well, but for you to suggest that trans people are in danger from Harris is insane. I have replied to you not out of any conviction that I’ll change your mind, but to convince everyone else that you aren’t particularly worth listening to. You have proved that point. Like I said, the fact that you can’t discern the painfully obvious difference between the mediocre status quo Harris and the absolutely fascist Donald Trump means that we’re in an impasse here.
Then provide your definition of the term “fascist” because it clearly differs from the dictionary definition.
Many of the things that we see are not “stymied progress” or “roll back everything”. The modern US government today is in many ways very different than it was even 20 years ago. Republicans and Democrats have been building and modifying how the US government operates and they are making changes that directly change the form and function of government. The supreme Court and presidency did not have as much power as they do now. If you read the “Project 2025 agenda” it is not rolling things back, it is a plan for building a new thing.
If that is your argument then why don’t the Democrats simply roll back many of the extensions that have been made? If it’s easier to tear down, then the citizen’s united case should be easy to destroy? We could revert to 1960s federal tax rates? Repeal the homeland security act? That argument requires an extremely ahistorical understanding, but one you seem to share with the “make America great again” crowd.
If only we could’ve elected a democratic president in between Trump’s first and second term…
You have a good grasp on how the de jure government works, but seem to be rather ignorant (seemingly intentionally) of how the de facto government works. That ignorance is what I’m trying to highlight and why you keep ending up in disagreements. You can keep repeating what you read in your AP US history book but you should really be paying more attention to when it doesn’t match the present material conditions.
Funny, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Your idealism surrounding what the Democratic party is, and it’s purpose, has you actively working and arguing against your beliefs.
I don’t care what they say, I care what they do and they will both do the same thing.
They are not, but the messaging surrounding them at the time was. Similiarly going from the first black president to Jim Crow Joe is quite the difference on the Democratic side as well.
Then you live under a rock.
Using presidential powers created under Bush and expanded under Obama. It was a more brazen use of those powers than usual, but not too out of the ordinary if you’ve paid attention to events in Ferguson, standing rock, etc.
The “mediocre status quo” is absolutely fascist.
yeah, I’m done here. Zero effort is being put in to justify most of your positions, which makes sense because you can’t. There’s some hilariously bad faith arguments here that’s I’m not even going to address because honestly, this post has been superseded by others and we’re only ones reading it at this point.
please stop wasting people’s time with obviously false arguments like “trump and harris are the same”. not only is it wrong, it’s painfully simplistic and reductive. no nuance, just black and white thinking so that you never have to think critically. like, you just drop that nonsense so that you don’t have to do the hard work of arguing why we should risk a trump presidency.
I know that I haven’t been very charitable to you, but you led off this discussion by basically calling me “privileged” and saying I’m pretty much a trumper, and then you drop dumb argument after dumb argument(and I have noticed that you threw my “parroting” and “idealism” criticisms back at me… you’re not very original, which tracks for someone who isn’t thinking for themselves). It’s pretty telling that your most effective arguments are those nitpicking something I’ve said.
your position is dangerous. that is why i have indulged you this long. trump CANNOT be allowed in, and we must do whatever we must to prevent that. trump will send my trans ass to a camp. harris WILL NOT. this is life and death and i need you to stop making stupid arguments that you obviously haven’t thought through
Same, you have a said a lot of words while mostly refusing to seriously engage with anything I’ve said. If I may though; some parting thoughts:
They are not the same, they are 2 sides to the same coin. I fail to see how that heads/tails isn’t the “black and white, no nuance” mindset.
Yeah, because I was hoping it would be a moment for you to stop and do some self-reflection because I actually listened to what you had to say warts and all.
No he will send our asses to a prison the same ones black, Hispanic, indigenous, poor, marganalized etc. people are currently in. The same ones Harris is repeatedly saying she wants to expand and build more of, the same ones Biden has been building out for the last 4 years.