The Internet Boogeyman from Russia and China is a fairy tale to scare kids you know. Wildly exaggerated threat.
Bot farms is an ads problem.
The feed algorithm that maximize for 'engagement', in the same sense a traffic jam does, is the main culprit. Using Facebook, Instagram now gives you no power over what you see, just faint wishes that Zuckerberg somewhat fulfills every 4th post.
You're wrong. I've checked out many facebook propaganda sources and they are all laughingly obvious that they are state actors OR US internal sources that Facebook could quickly remove with minimal fuss. Yes the English was terrible and the propaganda horribly obvious (yet dumbasses on FB still buy into it or feed the troll). Anyway, FB doesn't want to remove them unless they pop up in mainstream media, otherwise they are very safe because they drive up viewership and commenting and the Zuck loves that.
Sure, I don't mean it doesn't exist, but that it is just not that impactfull compared to domestic lunatics. I agree FB is very bad at removing syntetic 'content farm' content.
Which, while stupid, didn't have the effect of blowing up the government or infecting other people. Ask any newspaper of the era what their most popular section is and you'll find the same thing. "Horoscopes"
There was plenty of that nonsense back in the day, too. And plenty of novice users who just cared about owning the "libs", or making fun of Bush. We were just a lot better about putting this stuff in the right perspective.
It resulted in the Web suddenly becoming open, and full of ill-informed opinions, and populated by large crowds of ignorant, obnoxious, know-nothing users, wearing cargo shorts, Hawai'ian shirts, and socks and sandals, wandering around, pawing all the exhibits.
The September That Never Ended was Good.
That's when the real money started to hit the Internet.
All those Teslas that average-level programmers are driving around, these days, are because of all those "tourists," and their loud shirts.
No, it always had tons of ill-informed opinions and obnoxious users. The difference is that people were able to put it in perspective.
It was just the "exotic" opinion of some anonymous user on the internet you will very likely never meet in real life. Crazy and colorful opinions made a lot of places interesting in the first place, meeting people completely different from yourself or similar to you in ways you could't or didn't want to share with close friends.
The demand that everything wrong should be purged from the internet is fairly recent. Today users demand conformity like they demand it from their TV and newspaper.
Same (not SV, average programmer), but I am paid well enough now. But it took 15-20 years to catch up to my SV friends. And only because I now work for a SV HQ'd company.
Yes but Disneyland has refined its crowd control and experience to fine point. You don't see the chaos and mess because Disney spends a lot of money (and has lots of people working the parks) to contain and direct it. Even something as simple and common as a guest getting sick on a ride, Disney has a response team to handle it and keep the "Happiest Place on Earth" image alive.
Try that kind of curation and moderation in an online forum for people that size and within a week you'd have the right wing yelling about "cancel culture" and GOP senators calling hearings on Big Tech censors.
Every platform nowadays suffers from this. Reddit's admins recently posted saying they intended to continue allowing anti-vaxx content. To quote the admins themselves [1]: "we believe it is best to enable communities to engage in debate and dissent." YouTube is the other cornerstone of the anti-vaxx movement, hosting and (quite sinisterly) automatically recommending countless videos on the topic (see Plandemic).
Well, yes. That's because it drives engagement, sells ads, and makes money. As long as they social media companies can keep the "both sides" field open they can occupy that space for profit as long as they want, without regard to morality or ethics.
The censorship didn't get going anywhere for the most part until about 2016. Before that, the internet was not considered a serious enough information channel compared to mainstream media to impose much censorship on. After the Trump election, the mainstream woke up, freaked out, and the screws got tightened everywhere.
The theory is that Dugin's strategies (outlined in "Foundations of Geopolitics") were widely implemented in the US in 2015-2016 in an attempt to destabilize the west.
Wikipedia:
> The book emphasizes that Russia must spread anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S...Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms became publishing platforms for active measures (propaganda and disinformation) campaigns to promote Russian-style authoritarianism and diminish the influence of western democracy.
Once these platforms were given this evidence (widely published and released online by the platforms themselves), they took some steps to stop it.
Notable examples include populist movements such as the Trump campaign, state secession movements, white separatist movements, and more recently anti-vax movements. There are many more.
Facebook in particular has failed to stop the spread, and the site is widely considered by most outside experts as "captured" by foreign assets. This is especially true when it comes to QAnon and anti-vax content, which appears to be promulgated to harm western institutions.
It's insane that there are still people that think our own countrymen aren't crazy enough to do this to themselves and blame a foreign power (that conveniently is an official enemy).
The implicit strategy of such active measures (according to the sources), is to take advantage of homegrown, nativist movements and co-opt them from the inside. In other words, it's best if one's own countrymen, as you put it, start and maintain the movement. At some point, the foreign power either influences it from the sidelines or outright funds and takes over the group.
In the case of at least one state separatist movement (and at least one white power movement, IIRC), both were revealed to have leaders who traveled back and forth to Russia and/or received funding.
I would also invite you to go back to the origins of the Trump campaign, and see how it evolved. It originally began as an active measure, with the Trump campaign hiring paid actors to promote his campaign announcement. There's a paper trail behind this, and several of his former staffers have come forward recently and admitted it.
> The implicit strategy of such active measures (according to the sources), is to take advantage of homegrown, nativist movements and co-opt them from the inside.
You just described US foreign policy in South America and SE Asia.
Somehow people think the United States is too big or too exceptional to be the target of agitprop.
It's also the case, that the best historical, academic sources consistently point out that Russian disinformation and propaganda is some of the best in the world. From what I understand, based on what I've read, the US has actually learned from them. I think part of this has to do with their two decade head start over the US in political warfare. In other words, Russia has more experience doing this kind of thing over time.
You really think Russian agitprop is the best in the world? The US has conducted so many regime change operations I can't even count them, and they mostly start with propaganda aired from outside the country, funding from CIA front groups, and eventually the funding of death squads or invasions. Russia has taken Crimea, a piece of Ukraine that secures its access to a seaport, but nothing that compares to anything the US has done in recent memory (illegal invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, supporting coups in Boliva, etc) or currently (encouraging separatist movements in China).
This theory is like a mirror image of what the empire is doing to the world.
Further, the successful use of cyberwarfare by Russia, is considered the leading example of its kind.
And I haven't even mentioned Brexit, or hundreds of other campaigns to weaken western democracies.
It's pretty clear that Russia leads in this regard.
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were worthless failures, and resulted in the loss of trillions of US dollars that could have gone to building American infrastructure, funding universal healthcare and education, and improving the lives of average citizens.
These invasions fundamentally weakened the US at home and abroad. They did not serve the interests of "empire" at all.
Well if you take that kind of stuff seriously, you really should watch the Yuri Bezmenov interviews. Yuri was a KGB defector in the 80s who was working in India and decided to defect after he fell in love with the culture of India and became disillusioned. He worked in ideological subversion of nations through propaganda: https://youtu.be/yErKTVdETpw
Yeah, back shortly after Trump's election Google had a staff meeting. The content of it was something like we weren't successful this time, but we'll win next time. OK I found it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE
As much as I despise FB, the Pages, and Groups, are great.
I do think Nextdoor will give FB competition though. If they don't buy it up?
(I despise Nextdoor. To me it's just people complaining about their neighborhood. Will never understand the guy who sits home, and complains about the car parked on the street, or who's dog deficated on their lawn. That said, I hear strangers taking about the site, and asking for invites. It's privately owned now, but will make a few people billionaires soon.)
I would love to read into the psychology of these people. You know, the busybody, snitchy neighbour type. The type that scrutinizes a neighbours home improvements for the most trivial of infractions (we don't allow this colour of flower in this HOA!), or who threatens to report people for banal things that aren't even illegal (gasp... someone legally parked on the publicly owned street).
There's something called other-directed perfectionism that could be at work. Someone who can't stand to see imperfections around them or tolerate the fact the humans are just imperfect.
