I’ve been hearing about the dangers of influence campaigns like Russian bot farms, deep fakes, and LLMs for the last ten years now. While these sorts of papers go out of their way to use the word “democratic,” it always seems to be motivated by a (not-very-compelling) idea that right wing populism is an essentially artificial creation rather than an organic backlash to the excesses of the Obama era. The scale of these influence campaigns may have increased in the last five years, but the (common, in these circles) idea that Russia stole the election with a few million posts on Twitter is silly and itself begins to look like an attempt to implement anti-democratic measures that would allow established authorities to pull the ladder up behind them.
The authors of this paper have at acknowledged that there are (practical, more so than moral) limitations to strict identification systems (“Please insert your social security number to submit this post”) and cite a few (non-US) examples of instances where these kinds of influence campaigns have ostensibly occurred. The countermeasures similarly appear to be reasonable, being focused on providing trust scores and counter-narratives. What they are describing, though, might end up looking a lot like a Reddit-style social credit system which has the impact of shutting out dissenting opinions. One of my favorite things about Hacker News over Reddit is that I can view and vouch for posts that have been flagged dead by other users. 95% of the time the flags were warranted (low-effort comments, vulgarity, or spam), but every once in a while I come across an intriguing comment that others preferred to be censored.
These disinformation tactics via bots are used to vocalize BOTH the fringe left ("kill the rich") and the fringe right ("great replacement").
Most organizations and teams who have been investigating automated disinfo at scale have highlighted how fringes on both sides of the spectrum are being manipulated via automated engagement - often with state backing.
Power and Politics is completely orthogonal to ideology.
Polarization seems more like an organic reaction to post-nationalism. There is no pre-political identity in any of these countries anymore, so the idea that you could be satisfied with dissatisfaction in exchange for being a member of a general public united in some kind of underlying belief system is nonsensical now.
Thank you, I needed a laugh today. I mean you're not wrong that it started with Obama but like come on-- I lived through that era, you probably did too. It was a visceral emotional response to the most powerful man on earth being a black man. That spawned The Tea Party and birther movement the Venn Diagram of which was a circle. The Republican party noticeably changed to a tone of burn it all down while Obama was in office. Being one of the most outspoken birthers what was put Donald Trump into the public sphere as a political figure. This is where the MAGA wing of the Republican party traces its origins.
> It was a visceral emotional response to the most powerful man on earth being a black man.
This is exactly the sort of mentality that led to Democrats thinking Hillary Clinton was a viable candidate.
Leftists all over the world spent the 2010s creating a coalition of the fringes, for whatever reason assuming that young majorities would not take notice. This was a very uncomfortable time to be a young man, even after Trump was elected. Young guys these days don’t have any expectation of being allowed to sit at the table, which is why they are so open about wanting to burn it all down now; a lot of them felt this way when Obama was president, too, but the risk of getting cancelled on Twitter still seemed like a serious threat back then.
Look, we can talk about how the political views of Democrats and Republicans shook out over the last 15 years but trying to dispute that the Tea Party was founded and fueled by an intense racism laser focused on Barack & Michelle Obama is like trying to argue the Civil War wasn't over slavery. This wasn't some liberal media spin, this was straight out of the mouths of prominent conservatives posting on their own websites and ranting on their own talk shows.
I was fascinated by these people in the '08-'12 era. I watched so much Fox News, listended to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, and kept up with Breitbart and The Drudge Report. I got so many free civics papers from my weird obsession. They were racist as hell. I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears. And it's not like it was just talking heads, conservative online spaces were worse.
> but trying to dispute that the Tea Party was founded and fueled by an intense racism laser focused on Barack & Michelle Obama
The statement I replied to was:
> It was a visceral emotional response to the most powerful man on earth being a black man.
This isn’t true. The racists you’re describing were (literally) dying out by the time Obama was elected. The resurgence of white identity politics in America was a reaction to a series of riots (e.g. Ferguson, Baltimore, Kenosha, Seattle, Minneapolis), affirmative action policies in higher education as well as in the public and private sectors, and renewed activity in the grievance industry (e.g. Anita Sarkeesian, Ibram Kendi, etc.).
> The racists you’re describing were (literally) dying out by the time Obama was elected. The resurgence of white identity politics in America was a reaction to a series of riots
This is both inaccurately describing the protests and also way off on timing – for example, Ferguson was 2014 but the white identity politics was on display before the first time he was elected.
> but the white identity politics was on display before the first time he was elected.
Among klansmen. These are the people I alluded to who were dying out. Young people and the general public at large didn’t take interest in these movements until the summer of 2015, and even then it was just a thing for the terminally-online until the latter half of Biden’s presidency.
There were plenty of off ramps throughout this whole period, leftists opted not to take them because they were operating under the assumption that they would be in control forever.
Yes, and had been since 2009. I’m still not sure how you expect the racist backlash starting in 2008 to have been triggered by time travelers from 2014. People were threatening to lynch him before he was sworn in and the mainstream Republican Party leaders weren’t willing to give those people the treatment David Duke got in the 90s - McConnell tried to spin all of that “one term president” talk as solely about policy but all of the context made it quite clear that they wouldn’t have been so motivated for, say, Kerry.
I’m denying that this was a significant force in American politics until the latter half of Obama’s presidency. These people existed; they were not influential.
> McConnell tried to spin all of that “one term president” talk as solely about policy but all of the context made it quite clear that they wouldn’t have been so motivated for, say, Kerry.
What context are you referring to? Would you attribute black Republicans like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell to political tokenism intended to appeal to black voters? I know that the prevailing sentiment (among the media I consumed back then, anyways) was that George Bush was a racist who hated black and brown people, but looking back, I just don’t see it. That element of American society doesn’t look influential until the late 2010s and early 2020s when Thiel started buying his way in, and by that point it’s an entirely different cohort.
I'm not, that's just where it started. The movement has grown massively since it's humble beginnings during the Barack HUSSEIN Obama era. They started hating Obama before he took office, to say it's a response to what he did during his presidency doesn't track.
> I’ve been hearing about the dangers of influence campaigns like Russian bot farms, deep fakes, and LLMs for the last ten years now. While these sorts of papers go out of their way to use the word “democratic,” it always seems to be motivated by a (not-very-compelling) idea that right wing populism is an essentially artificial creation rather than an organic backlash to the excesses of the Obama era.
I think it can be both. There's part of me that has become, maybe sort of Bernie Sanders MAGA over the past couple of years. Like I certainly identify with the people who want their lives to be better, and America to be simplified, and I don't think that underlying this is an idea that without Russian influence, we would all be Democrats. But to me the problem with Russian bot farms and other influence campaigns to me isn't the direction of the beliefs, it's the degree, and by the way, this is on both sides.
Right, classically, there's the study that says gun violence is down, but portrayal of gun deaths in the media is up, and I think social media has taken this idea into overdrive. So like, instead of thinking we're one nation with people who disagree, now we're two political parties, and if we don't eliminate the other evil political party, it's the end of America.
Maybe something from the other side I've been trying to figure out:
To a matter of degree, again not binary, to what extent was the woke movement organic, vs constructed re: social media algorithms and capitalism. I'm not saying that nobody organically cares about social justice and etc. But to what extent were certain practices - announcing pronouns at the beginning of meetings - bottom up from activists or the people who cared, or top down via diversity consultants? To what extent did BLM or MeToo grow organically, vs being promoted by social media algorithms?
If there's this big complaint that progressive change was happening too fast, was it really progressive activists driving the change? Or other institutions and influence campaigns.
The authors of this paper have at acknowledged that there are (practical, more so than moral) limitations to strict identification systems (“Please insert your social security number to submit this post”) and cite a few (non-US) examples of instances where these kinds of influence campaigns have ostensibly occurred. The countermeasures similarly appear to be reasonable, being focused on providing trust scores and counter-narratives. What they are describing, though, might end up looking a lot like a Reddit-style social credit system which has the impact of shutting out dissenting opinions. One of my favorite things about Hacker News over Reddit is that I can view and vouch for posts that have been flagged dead by other users. 95% of the time the flags were warranted (low-effort comments, vulgarity, or spam), but every once in a while I come across an intriguing comment that others preferred to be censored.