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 âlikeâ and âunlikeâ 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 platformâs 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 â not less â content moderation to identify and hinder manipulation campaigns and thereby increase their usersâ 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 peopleâs attention is limited, influence operations can be, in effect, a form of censorship by making authentic voices and opinions less visible.
continued from the last comment
I would be curious to know what the âeffective differenceâ between, historically, Trump and Biden is because the functional difference has been negligible. Iâm also old enough to recall the Obama vs Romney and old enough to recall they were also marketed as polar opposites. The only major difference between then and now is the faces and increased normalization.
This is such a ridiculously bad argument that Iâm absolutely stunned that someone would actually think this would work. Youâre wrong on this, full stop. I am begging you to step out of your bubble and compare and contrast Harrisâs proposed policy agenda and Trumpâs Agenda 47/Project 2025 and tell me that theyâre 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 canât 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.
Have you not been paying attention to the attempts at organizing under the current Biden administration?
Yeah, the reaction to the student protests about Gaza definitely disturbs me. There are few things at play here, first off, itâs 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 whatâs happened so far. Also, Israel itself has a weird amount of influence throughout the government to the point where itâs 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 donât 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. Heâll do much worse next time, when the guardrails have been removed).
As well as nationalistic propaganda which I am desperately trying to help you see past. The actual workings of the us government are significantly different than what was taught in your AP high school history class and I need you to have more intellectual curiosity and less parroting.
This is basically what Iâve been trying to argue to you(though the propaganda source in your case would be different).
Yes, the only difference is that Trump will actively encourage vigilantism while being largely ineffective whereas Harris will do the âI promise we are doing everything in our power to prevent these gross mischarges of justice!!! But we need to build more prisons in order to effectively combat attacks against our democracy.â song and dance. See the âkids in cagesâ, Roe v Wade, war on the homeless, Iran escalation etc. comparing Trump Vs. Biden.
What a lousy, bad faith argument. I donât 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 Iâll change your mind, but to convince everyone else that you arenât particularly worth listening to. You have proved that point. Like I said, the fact that you canât discern the painfully obvious difference between the mediocre status quo Harris and the absolutely fascist Donald Trump means that weâre in an impasse here.
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.
Then provide your definition of the term âfascistâ because it clearly differs from the dictionary definition.
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 itâs always a lot easier to tear things down than build things up.
Many of the things that we see are not âstymied progressâ or âroll back everythingâ. 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 âProject 2025 agendaâ it is not rolling things back, it is a plan for building a new thing.
If that is your argument then why donât the Democrats simply roll back many of the extensions that have been made? If itâs easier to tear down, then the citizenâs 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 âmake America great againâ crowd.
Our system is inherently dysfunctional, with many of the advances in progress that weâve 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 theyâre obviously in the bag for Trump, theyâre 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 only we couldâve elected a democratic president in between Trumpâs first and second termâŚ
your weak grasp on how the American government works
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 Iâm 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 doesnât match the present material conditions.
I do know that we need to do something actionable, and not throw our hands up and go âweâve tried everything and weâre all out of ideasâ. Your idealism clouds your mind to the point where youâre actively working against what youâre professing to believe
Funny, thatâs exactly what Iâm saying. Your idealism surrounding what the Democratic party is, and itâs purpose, has you actively working and arguing against your beliefs.
compare and contrast Harrisâs proposed policy agenda and Trumpâs Agenda 47/Project 2025 and tell me that theyâre the same.
I donât care what they say, I care what they do and they will both do the same thing.
if you somehow view even Trump and Romney as the same
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.
I donât think that leftist organizing will face quite that amount of pushback.
Then you live under a rock.
the man sent goons in unmarked vans to harass, detain, and intimidate BLM protesters in Portland.
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 youâve paid attention to events in Ferguson, standing rock, etc.
you canât discern the painfully obvious difference between the mediocre status quo Harris and the absolutely fascist Donald Trump
The âmediocre status quoâ is absolutely fascist.
yeah, Iâm done here. Zero effort is being put in to justify most of your positions, which makes sense because you canât. Thereâs some hilariously bad faith arguments here thatâs Iâm not even going to address because honestly, this post has been superseded by others and weâre only ones reading it at this point.
please stop wasting peopleâs time with obviously false arguments like âtrump and harris are the sameâ. not only is it wrong, itâs 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 donât have to do the hard work of arguing why we should risk a trump presidency.
I know that I havenât been very charitable to you, but you led off this discussion by basically calling me âprivilegedâ and saying Iâm pretty much a trumper, and then you drop dumb argument after dumb argument(and I have noticed that you threw my âparrotingâ and âidealismâ criticisms back at me⌠youâre not very original, which tracks for someone who isnât thinking for themselves). Itâs pretty telling that your most effective arguments are those nitpicking something Iâve 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 havenât thought through
Same, you have a said a lot of words while mostly refusing to seriously engage with anything Iâve said. If I may though; some parting thoughts:
please stop wasting peopleâs time with obviously false arguments like âtrump and harris are the sameâ. not only is it wrong, itâs painfully simplistic and reductive. no nuance, just black and white thinking so that you never have to think critically.
They are not the same, they are 2 sides to the same coin. I fail to see how that heads/tails isnât the âblack and white, no nuanceâ mindset.
I have noticed that you threw my âparrotingâ and âidealismâ criticisms back at me
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.
trump will send my trans ass to a camp
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.
