U.S. presidential election: How foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence your views

How foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence your views

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.

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39 comments

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!)
Yet, with a simple majority, we saw Republicans pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and Obama and Biden both had a simple majority in the Senate and controlled Congress. We've also seen presidents unilaterally keep Congress in session, as the Constitution allows them to do, in order to help pass important legislation. The thing is, the loss of Roe, the rollback of voting rights, the minimum wage, none of it seems to matter enough for Democrats to actually wield power when they have it. Republicans still get what they want. When I mention this in any online forum, the excuses roll out like Halloween candy, but if you're someone working for a living in the US, you're well aware that it doesn't matter who we elect. Your life only gets harder.
I'm also aware that there's really no way to change it, outside of being a billionaire or being willing to commit a terrorist act, both of which don't apply to the vast majority of people. The only way for an average person to benefit from our system of government is just to make sure you're putting every dollar you can in the stock market, because both parties agree 100% that the stock market should never drop, and they'll make trillions appear out of thin air overnight to achieve that.
- Republicans still get what they want.
  respectfully, if you have any political knowledge at all, how are you surprised that the Bad Things Party can do bad things within the confines of a constitution literally written to facilitate the permanent existence of bad things? what Republicans want--a system where they can arbitrarily and undemocratically carve out the haves and have-nots--is completely in line with (and facilitated by) the existing undemocratic, federalist constitutional order. no shit they're able to get what they want while Democrats don't when this is the case; it's like a 100 meter race where only one person actually has to run 100 meters, and everyone else in the race has to run 200.
  it's why complaining about the Democrats is dumb--you are incorrectly assigning blame and misdirecting people from the correct source of their ire. that doesn't mean you have to be uncritical of the Democrats, but the problem is you're not merely uncritical. you are an active impediment to the correct analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it (and sometimes you're just wrong, like below). no amount of railing on the Democrats will fix the system, because the Democrats aren't the system that needs fixing. they can't fix it with their current political power, and meanwhile if everyone took your advice (even though it is being posted on a small and irrelevant-to-the-national-conversation website like ours) it would from first principles undermine their ability to win the needed political power to change anything.
  The thing is, the loss of Roe, the rollback of voting rights, the minimum wage, none of it seems to matter enough for Democrats to actually wield power when they have it.
  this is incorrect and people in this thread have disproven it. continuing to repeat it indicates you are either genuinely very ignorant or actively malicious in the positions you hold. i don't know or care to disambiguate which--and in outcome it doesn't matter. it's not acceptable, and it undermines the value of having discussions in the first place. continuing this behavior of repeating falsehoods and ignoring other people when they correct you will have you removed from this section until after the election at minimum.
  
  So the only ones who have the power to fix the system are Republicans? If that's the case why isn't the strategy then to vote Republican and change their hearts and minds instead?
  Or if you legitimately believe the only way to accrue enough political power is to become indistinguishable from that which you're trying to replace, does it matter if it gets replaced at all?
  (Mostly rhetorical questions, I just strongly believe that you have an incorrect analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it and am hoping to provide other perspectives because you are not getting it...)
  
  (Mostly rhetorical questions, I just strongly believe that you have an incorrect analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it and am hoping to provide other perspectives because you are not getting it…)
  your analysis of the situation is "kamala harris is promising a fascist dictatorship as well [...] She is also promising to purge us." which is, respectfully, a Charlie Brown had hoes level statement. it can be dismissed with prejudice because it's so obviously false.
  
  You are engaging with a different comment thread, if you would like to engage with that thread and not be dismissive and condescending then go over there. (Lol, seriously why did you feel it necessary to post a screenshot of the og 'Charlie Brown had hoes' tweet?! 🤣)
  Would you like to take a pass at answering the above rhetorical questions?
  
  No, the Republicans also don't have the power to fix the system. That's not their goal. Both parties have the power to completely gum up the works of the government, which is antithetical to fixing the system, but is perfectly acceptable if your goal is to weaken protections to allow a privileged few to gain more power through extragovernmental levers. If we entered a mirror world where the Democratic party were gunning to be a fascist dictatorship and the Republicans were gunning to stop them, but all voters retained their current alliances, not much would change long-term because there are enough people in both parties to obstruct and roadblock, unless the now-pro-civil-rights supreme court kept being radical but in a positive direction
  
  Then who has the power to fix anything?

39 comments