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.
What fascinates me every time this topic comes up is that, for tens of millions of Americans, social media isn’t required because they’re living the utterly shitty effects of our current regime’s rule.
Can’t afford health care or education, could find themselves homeless and bankrupt with one bad injury or illness
Working 60-80 hours a week, and that’s just to cover basics
Rampant inflation for food, housing, and utilities with no end in sight
As always, a blank check for war, even if we’re not actually fighting it, also a blank check for genocide against children
Cops are still killing at will, and cop cities are becoming a thing
School shootings happening almost every day
You lost the right to abortion and Dems response was to use it for fundraising
Who needs enemies with friends like these Democrats? How is it possible that there were almost no meaningful primaries after all this AND the presidential candidate was a man in obvious cognitive decline? (Granted, that’s also true of Trump, but Trump isn’t the one at the helm right now.) Objectively, you don’t have to lie to voters when they don’t care what you do in the first place.
There are two main reasons why the Democrats fail to do much to materially improve the quality of out lives.
First off, the system is kinda rigged against them. The Senate is a prime example of this. There are more red states than blue states, and as such, it’s hell trying to get a majority in that chamber to get judges in and the like. So people like Manchin, who hail from ruby red states and are the absolute best you can get out of them, hold the party hostage. The House really needs to be uncapped as well. When land has more representation than people, you’re going to have a bad time. The Democrats have won nearly every popular election in the past 30 years, and yet due to our stupid electoral college system, the Reps got Bush and Trump in. Then they managed to nominate five Supreme Court justices between them, and as we’re seeing right now, they’re now trying to bring the country back to the 1800s. Furthermore, Republicans chose to start fighting dirty(by effectively handing a disputed election to Bush, and McConnell screwing Obama out of a Supreme Court pick by saying it’s too close to the election, then ramming through Trump’s pick even closer to the next election). Democrats still stuck to the ideal of decorum for far too long and it’s really bit them in the ass.
The second reason is that voters in the U.S. tend to vote against their best interest due to propaganda and poor civics education. It cannot be understated just how much damage the Cold War did to this country. The authoritarian and totalitarian nature of the USSR and PRC made it easy to demonize them, and by conflating communism and socialism with these dictatorships, it poisoned the chalice for left wing politics. Given that the U.S. was the one main participant in WWII to not be terribly affected about it, it allowed the country to become an economic superpower. People were doing pretty well(if they were white men, anyway), and so they really started to embrace capitalism. A nasty recession in the 1970s led to Carter’s ouster in favor of Reagan, and Reagan completely dismantled the New Deal, which is the primary cause of our problems now. Of course, voters didn’t realize that their way of life was being gutted, they saw the stock market exploding, and so comparatively left wing Democrats like Mondale and Dukakis absolutely got their clock cleaned. The Democrats had to move to the “center” with Clinton. There was no choice; the voters had turned way to the right and the collapse of the USSR wasn’t helping. Clinton did win, however, this is the point where the Republicans started going for the throat. Rush Limbaugh was screeching poison on the AM airwaves, Fox News launched with the singular goal of being a propaganda channel for the right, and Newt Gingrich kicked off this era of Republican politicians going for victory at all costs. So, basically, while Democrats are more popular than Republicans in general, that doesn’t mean progressive politics are popular. Even among Democratic voters, more people would support Biden than Bernie. It pains me to say that, but it’s true.
So, basically, the way this country is set up, Republicans have more power than they otherwise should, given their lack of popularity. This allows them to stonewall progress(and even roll it back, as the SCOTUS has done). People genuinely think here that liberalism is a left wing ideology, so a milquetoast conservative Democrat like Biden is the furthest left many here will vote for. Actual leftism here is dead. Add in Citizens United and all the misinformation from Russia and China trying to get a Trump victory, and now we’re in a position where Harris might lose to Donald Fucking Trump. It’s a fucking outrage, to be honest. The absolute last fucking thing we need is for the Republicans to take power again. The country has been primed for fascism, and the Republicans have been putting the pieces in place for permanent minority rule. They must be stopped, even if that means voting for a party that doesn’t inspire much confidence.
This makes me think about that quote about insanity.
We’ve seen 40 years of Republicans getting their way no matter who we elect, so it’s exceedingly difficult for me (and I imagine most people working for a wage) to understand why it even matters.
We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, I get that. But that’s absolute loser talk. I can’t understand why someone would just roll over and give up when one candidate is promising a fascist dictatorship. Kamala Harris is a lousy candidate. Kamala Harris will not solve all our problems. But to reject a disappointing candidate and let an evil monster like Donald Trump run roughshod over all of us? It’s insane. That’s completely insane. It’s such an unjustifiable position that it’s mindboggling. Seriously, what is wrong with you? Then, to go around bleating about how we should vote third party or not vote. If you’re truly the leftist you’re purporting to be, then you’re hurting more than you’re helping. We’ll never get anywhere under a Republican dictatorship. The status quo sucks, but we can still change hearts and minds. Trump will just purge us.
Because Republicans are literal Nazis who would, if given the chance, wipe out every person of color, queer person, leftist, and immigrant and put women under direct government control. That’s literally what Project 2025 is.
The only resistance they have to prevent them from doing this is the Democratic party. If we stop giving them resistance, they will turn this country into a fascist hellhole that threatens every person you love.
The Democratic party sucks. I hate them with every inch of my being. But the US is not a democracy, and it’s the only party that poses any real resistance to Republicans. The only way to have a chance at progress is to bandaid the bleeding wound.
So I know it’s nice to doompost, but there certainly are good things to look for.
Some states are working towards making education more available. New Mexico has free tuition, period.
Rampant inflation for food, housing, and utilities with no end in sight
We’re almost back to historical norms for inflation.
Cops are still killing at will, and cop cities are becoming a thing
Yeah, but to me, it seems a tad backward to have Democratic leadership at the federal level, and yet, your rights still depend largely on your zip code.
Do the Democrats have unilateral control at the federal level? Seems far from that to me.
Also worth pointing out that it’s not third party candidates or Republicans passing these state policies. It’s democrats.
your rights still depend largely on your zip code.
i mean: this sort of devolution is how all federal systems work, and especially the one established by the Constitution. your issue is very literally with the system here.
accordingly: implying that the problem is the Democrats for not unilaterally overturning the entire constitutional order when they don’t have the votes to do that (or anything, for that matter!) is nonsensical. it’s not a materialist way of looking at the world. there are obvious constraints that prevent them from doing this. if you want to productively change things, the goal should be to give them (or another faction i suppose, although i have no idea what faction this would be outside of democratic socialism) the political power needed to begin changing the constitutional order. i don’t know what other strategy you adhere to which is capable of changing this at scale.
In addition to what alyaza said, the Democrats don’t even hold the House of Representatives right now, and the judicial branch is fully under the control of the Republicans. So, no, they have partial leadership on the federal level. Biden is not a king, he can’t will this stuff into existence.
I wish it gave a breakdown of which agendas or candidates the foreign entities are trying to push.
