It's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth.
To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends.
Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the only criterion is whether they can survive against other memes. Grounding in reality is an idea's death sentence, because of the bullshit asymmetry principle.
And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
I shudder to think what this means for elections. At least I appreciate that the article attaches some numbers to it.
For me, what really drove home how bad it is is that I know otherwise normal people in real life who think that many Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets. To even find that plausible there was a lot of racist misinformation they needed to have already internalized to the point that "don't live in the same reality" seems very accurate.
Though one bit of hope is that for me politics has never been that much different. My first foray into real political discussion was people in high school trying to convince me global warming wasn't real or that allowing gay marriage was a slippery slope to bestiality. Even back in 2008, before social media was what it is today, there was still tons of misinformation.
There were times and places in history where truth was valued, respected, and rewarded.
You could not employ N writers even if you had the money, because there were not enough good writers. And they needed to care about remaining adjacent to reality, or their reputation would (rightfully) be ruined as a fraud. Things were slow enough that the average person could see that they were being bullshat. These were the golden ages of human progress.
> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
Democratizing propaganda. Not sure the previous state of affairs where propaganda was accessible to the ruling class and their media corporations was better, it might have just seemed that way because there appeared to be less conflict when it came to them telling you what was in "your own best interest".
I do have to say though, I certainly am enjoying watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the prior monopoly holders on propaganda though, lashing out desperately in the face of their waning influence. They want so desperately to censor the commoners (for our own good, naturally).
>Russian-linked Doppelganger operations have systematically cloned major media infrastructure (Reuters, The Washington Post, Fox News) using lookalike domains that replicate visual design and URL structure closely enough to pass casual inspection. This purpose-built impersonation infrastructure is supported by fake personas, AI-assisted content, and paid amplification across mainstream social platforms.
Are there any live examples out there? Similar to how I like to look at scam/phishing emails to see how they work, I'm interested in seeing how sophisticated these are/are not.
MAGAts have memory holed it but Hillary Clinton originally started using "Fake News" in the 2016 presidential election to describe websites[0] that were entirely fake, made to mimic a real news site spreading Russian disinformation.
I did do some searching and any link I found was already dead (hence me asking here!), so it's not really helpful to say "there should be plenty of links".
Disinformation moved from page rank to the "feed" in 2018 when Douyin bought (read: acquired copyright they originally stole) Musically and rebranded to TikTok. Why does no one remember any of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_websites_in_the_Unit...
I feel like this may be made worse by the rise in paywalls from media companies. I understand times are difficult and they need to make money, but it’s harder to counter disinformation if only those with money can see it. Disinformation will always be free to view.
Even when journalism was free, no one read anything. Paywalls didn't make people less lazy to read articles. People are totally content mindlessly thumbing infinite scrolling apps.
If you want to fix the average Americans low information media digest we need to start by banning the "algorithm".
The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will.
To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions.
Just to make myself clear, when I say politicians I mean someone who tries to bring politican change, not someone who works in the government making decisions.
Democracy sounds nice, but it assumes people want to participate in it: actively validate facts, find truthful information not just vote whoever promises more of what you like.
Of course on the other hand you have the european federation: they are able to make unpopular choices, but at a steep cost which ends up hurting the member states and making the general population pretty hateful of the european central government.
Governments are too big to change, but what we have doesn't work and we're probably going to be in a world of hurt as the american type democracy(japan, australia, etc) is being manipulated from all sides, federations are uncompetitive and dictatorships becoming the strongest government there is being able to accelerate faster than anyone else and becoming the defacto world power.
Thank you for putting the reason at the top to disregard the rest of your post-hoc justification. Your prescriptions literally don't matter because you will never engage with the political system.
Everyone pushes voting and sure, you should vote if you're able, but the other half of the puzzle is you need to have good options to vote for.
Politicians are relatively low paid for the expertise we want and so many of the folks running are people looking to supplement their income with influence peddling and grift.
It's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth.
To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends.
Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the only criterion is whether they can survive against other memes. Grounding in reality is an idea's death sentence, because of the bullshit asymmetry principle.
And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
I shudder to think what this means for elections. At least I appreciate that the article attaches some numbers to it.
These sorts of things did happen before the internet though. Think of the Cultural Revolution in China started by revolutionary university students.
Mass printed pamphlets was the original meme. The more things change the more they stay the same.
This is why any totalitarian regime bans printed pamphlets.
Uh yea you used to need a license to run a printing press, there’s quite a few that were operated in secret
For me, what really drove home how bad it is is that I know otherwise normal people in real life who think that many Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets. To even find that plausible there was a lot of racist misinformation they needed to have already internalized to the point that "don't live in the same reality" seems very accurate.
Though one bit of hope is that for me politics has never been that much different. My first foray into real political discussion was people in high school trying to convince me global warming wasn't real or that allowing gay marriage was a slippery slope to bestiality. Even back in 2008, before social media was what it is today, there was still tons of misinformation.
> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
This was always true, right? With enough $, you can employ N writers. But the constant factor is smaller than it once was.
Only for relatively low values of N. It’s really difficult to scale organizations up and down for election cycles.
Historically you’d quickly reach a point where each additional writer was more expensive than the last.
There were times and places in history where truth was valued, respected, and rewarded.
You could not employ N writers even if you had the money, because there were not enough good writers. And they needed to care about remaining adjacent to reality, or their reputation would (rightfully) be ruined as a fraud. Things were slow enough that the average person could see that they were being bullshat. These were the golden ages of human progress.
It's not the world we live in today.
The writers didn't need to be "good" for this kind of work.
> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
Democratizing propaganda. Not sure the previous state of affairs where propaganda was accessible to the ruling class and their media corporations was better, it might have just seemed that way because there appeared to be less conflict when it came to them telling you what was in "your own best interest".
I do have to say though, I certainly am enjoying watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the prior monopoly holders on propaganda though, lashing out desperately in the face of their waning influence. They want so desperately to censor the commoners (for our own good, naturally).
>Russian-linked Doppelganger operations have systematically cloned major media infrastructure (Reuters, The Washington Post, Fox News) using lookalike domains that replicate visual design and URL structure closely enough to pass casual inspection. This purpose-built impersonation infrastructure is supported by fake personas, AI-assisted content, and paid amplification across mainstream social platforms.
Are there any live examples out there? Similar to how I like to look at scam/phishing emails to see how they work, I'm interested in seeing how sophisticated these are/are not.
Took me a bit of digging but I found this screenshot of fox-news.in: https://urlscan.io/result/50f1da5b-5b1f-417c-91b8-8690638a6e...
That URL is linked from https://assets.recordedfuture.com/insikt-report-pdfs/2023/ta...
Which is linked from https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/russian-influence-ne...
MAGAts have memory holed it but Hillary Clinton originally started using "Fake News" in the 2016 presidential election to describe websites[0] that were entirely fake, made to mimic a real news site spreading Russian disinformation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_websites_in_the_Unit...
> Similar to how I like to look at scam/phishing emails to see how they work, I'm interested in seeing how sophisticated these are/are not.
https://edmo.eu/publications/ai-political-influencers-the-ne...
Are there any links to any of these Russian doppelganger propaganda sites? That seemed to just be a story about "influencers" and their AI slop.
It is the world wide web so yes there should be plenty of links to those, but I do not have them.
I did do some searching and any link I found was already dead (hence me asking here!), so it's not really helpful to say "there should be plenty of links".
Disinformation moved from page rank to the "feed" in 2018 when Douyin bought (read: acquired copyright they originally stole) Musically and rebranded to TikTok. Why does no one remember any of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_websites_in_the_Unit...
They set up new ones, don't worry. And the propaganda is largely on brain rotting social media like tiktok and twitterx.
They were largely taken down after Biden-admin actions in 2024 -- a contemporaneous story about some:
https://dfrlab.org/2024/09/18/doppelganger-us-election/
I strongly recommend anyone interested to do a quick search of the leadership of checkpoint.com and if they have ties to any foreign intelligence.
I swore this comment got flagged and deleted.
Anyways, Jimbo here wants you to know that there are Jews at Checkpoint.
Fun to see anti-semitism in the comments.
I feel like this may be made worse by the rise in paywalls from media companies. I understand times are difficult and they need to make money, but it’s harder to counter disinformation if only those with money can see it. Disinformation will always be free to view.
The open question of how journalists get paid is key to democracy, and still open.
Many countries have free news services though. Can read BBC and so on
Even when journalism was free, no one read anything. Paywalls didn't make people less lazy to read articles. People are totally content mindlessly thumbing infinite scrolling apps.
If you want to fix the average Americans low information media digest we need to start by banning the "algorithm".
The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will.
To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions.
Just to make myself clear, when I say politicians I mean someone who tries to bring politican change, not someone who works in the government making decisions.
Democracy sounds nice, but it assumes people want to participate in it: actively validate facts, find truthful information not just vote whoever promises more of what you like.
Of course on the other hand you have the european federation: they are able to make unpopular choices, but at a steep cost which ends up hurting the member states and making the general population pretty hateful of the european central government.
Governments are too big to change, but what we have doesn't work and we're probably going to be in a world of hurt as the american type democracy(japan, australia, etc) is being manipulated from all sides, federations are uncompetitive and dictatorships becoming the strongest government there is being able to accelerate faster than anyone else and becoming the defacto world power.
> I have never voted and never will.
Thank you for putting the reason at the top to disregard the rest of your post-hoc justification. Your prescriptions literally don't matter because you will never engage with the political system.
Everyone pushes voting and sure, you should vote if you're able, but the other half of the puzzle is you need to have good options to vote for.
Politicians are relatively low paid for the expertise we want and so many of the folks running are people looking to supplement their income with influence peddling and grift.
Agreed, someone should do something to fix the problem that you discussed so eloquently.