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.
Chiming in because you seem to be glossing over the fact that kamala harris is promising a fascist dictatorship as well. Did you listen to her acceptance speech? She is also promising to purge us. What do you think that "most lethal military" is for?
The truly insane thing is that donald trump functions as a good enough boogeyman that it has normally reasonable, intelligent people like you on the verge of chanting "build that wall!" because you'd rather your genociders be polite and civil while they send you to your internment camps.
It takes an extremely privileged position to demand others "vote blue no matter who" when 'the blues' are engaged in actively purging them right now. You can be as much of an apologist as you want but if you insist on voting as a mechanism for change, the only change that can come from that is at least voting third party.
You can't just fire off a wild assertion like that without some sources to back it up. And, no, I am not searching through her acceptance speech to try to figure out what you're talking about, the burden of proof is on you.
Of course, I don't expect much out of you based on your comment history. You throw around the term fascism like candy. The U.S. is a shitty, corporatist empire that that doesn't give a shit about it's own citizens, but a fascist dictatorship it is not. "Fascist" is not a synonym for "conservative and imperialist that only really cares about preserving the status quo". That could definitely be part of it, but we're not under a dictatorship. Words have meanings, and with every misuse of the word it diminishes its impact. Honestly, it makes it hard for me to take you seriously when you do that in a serious conversation.
Now, why am I harping so much on the fascist thing? Because you calling the Biden administration fascist really does make it seem like you see zero effective distinction between Harris and Trump, which is outright crazy to me. Like, Donald Trump is not just "Kamala Harris but ruder". He's gunning for actual fascism, and then there's people like you who hem and haw, parroting things like "electoralism doesn't matter" without thinking critically about the situation. I actually do agree somewhat with that statement when it's a situation like Obama vs. Romney, where there was not much real difference between the candidates. Obviously we need to do more than just vote to get out of this situation. But to not even bother casting a strategic vote against Trump? You shouldn't be lecturing people on politics if you aren't willing to swallow your pride and do that. This will have knock on effects through the world, because you know that Trump's going to be pushing fascism once's he's fully taken over. No democracy on Earth will be safe from the tide of fascism.
I know, casting a vote for "status quo" absolutely fucking sucks. I get that. And it is "status quo" and not whatever thing you had cooked up in your mind from Kamala's speech. But we can't just snap our fingers and have a socialist utopia. Things don't work like that. You know as well as I do that we're not going to have a revolution here. Not in a country where just saying word "socialist" is met by revulsion by a voting populace that, quite frankly, does not understand what it actually is. We're fighting against a century of antisocialist propaganda, and that's going to take a long time to undo, if we ever actually do. Face it, we need to buy time. We'll still be able to organize under Harris, and that won't be the case with a Trump regime.
I do, however, feel that I wasted my time replying to you when you advocate voting third party in a system that actively discourages and punishes it. It shows a complete lack of understanding of our political system. And yet you call me the privileged one for doing the calculus and making the pragmatic choice? I don't have a choice. Not in THIS ELECTION. If you're incapable of discerning the difference between Trump and Harris, if you think that voting third party accomplishes anything at all, if you actually think Harris will purge trans people, then we aren't really operating with the same understanding of reality and can't have much of a discussion.
To be clear your dividing line between "fascism" and not is "dictatorship"? You have no problem calling the USSR and PRC dictatorships (assuming due to the functionally 1 party systems).
A 2 party system where one gets to dictate what the other can/cannot do is a dictatorship is it not? Or else what do you mean by the Democrats can't do anything because the "system is kinda rigged against them"? My argument is actually that "corporatism" is the 1 party dictatorship in the US which I believe is a stronger argument but also requires a deeper dive...
The word choice of "fascist" is deliberate so that you take the current state of things seriously because your belief that others disagree with you because they 'just don't understand how government works' is a very unserious one.
I would be curious to know what the "effective difference" between, historically, Trump and Biden is because the functional difference has been negligible. I'm also old enough to recall the Obama vs Romney and old enough to recall they were also marketed as polar opposites. The only major difference between then and now is the faces and increased normalization.
Have you not been paying attention to the attempts at organizing under the current Biden administration?
As well as nationalistic propaganda which I am desperately trying to help you see past. The actual workings of the us government are significantly different than what was taught in your AP high school history class and I need you to have more intellectual curiosity and less parroting.
Yes, the only difference is that Trump will actively encourage vigilantism while being largely ineffective whereas Harris will do the 'I promise we are doing everything in our power to prevent these gross mischarges of justice!!! But we need to build more prisons in order to effectively combat attacks against our democracy.' song and dance. See the "kids in cages", Roe v Wade, war on the homeless, Iran escalation etc. comparing Trump Vs. Biden.
It's at least not a vote for dictatorship. I agree it's functionally useless but I'm hoping to help you understand how it's not any less useless than a vote for Harris. My goal isn't to convince you to vote third party, my goal is to help you understand other viewpoints instead of actively belittling those with different perspectives.
No. It was a shortcut I took to shortcircuit your argument that Biden is fascist. Not all dictators are fascists, but all fascists are dictators.
The U.S. government is set up in a way that makes it extremely resistant to change, both good and bad. This means that the Democrats, who at least make a token effort towards progress, face an uphill battle. Republicans, on the other hand, just want to stymie progress and roll back everything they can, and it's always a lot easier to tear things down than build things up. Couple this with compromises made in the 1700s for small states and the electoral college, which hasn't been abolished despite it making absolutely zero sense in this modern age, and yeah, of course it's hard for Democrats to do much. With how polarized things have gotten over the past few decades, the ancient Constitution that we have that we've basically ducttaped over a few times is unable to cope. Our system is inherently dysfunctional, with many of the advances in progress that we've made lately have been due to Supreme Court decisions, and, well, the Republicans seized control of it and are now using it to roll back those advances. In fact, now that they're obviously in the bag for Trump, they're making nonsensical and unconstitutional decisions that will hand Trump a lot of power that will make things a lot worse for all of us.
If Trump gets in, it's game over. What little power we do have will be gone. If we can deny Trump the Presidency, there are some things we can do. The Republican Party has become fully reactionary, which means they'll be fighting the system to make changes for the worse. We can then use the system against them by electing enough Democrats to play defense against their horrifying Project 2025 agenda. When you're operating in a system that makes it so hard to change, the absolute last thing you should do is let things get worse, because that just makes our predicament even more dire. Now, the Supreme Court is a massive problem, and they absolutely are going to make the country worse because they're on the bench for life, and there's no realistic way to remove any of them, because the Republicans will protect their own no matter how criminal and corrupt they are. But the answer is not to let the Republicans back in power, and give the older Republican justices an excuse to retire so that they're replaced by younger judges that damns us into having a reactionary court for generations. I know that "keeping Republicans from nominating more Supreme Court justices until a couple of the conservative justices pass away" is not exactly an inspiring strategy. There are deep systemic problems involved here that will require us to stay disciplined and vote strategically to deny the reactionaries as much regression as possible. But that requires actually holding your nose and voting Democrat. We are fundamentally not in a position where we can be picky.
The corporatism problem is the U.S. is, admittedly, a much harder nut to crack. The biggest issue is, of course, the voting populace is vehemently pro-capitalist, and things will not fundamentally change until this changes. Corporatist politicians get voted into office because that's what people will actually vote for. The Citizens United decision by the right-wing Supreme Court basically lets billionaires bribe politicians even more brazenly than before. Again, there really isn't much we can do here until it gets struck down. If we can get a movement going to deny politicians that accept corporate donations votes in the primaries, maybe we can start to make some inroads.
Okay, first off, you're completely failing in your endeavor. This only makes you look hyperbolic when you call Biden a fascist, and it makes people disregard your point. There are so, so, so many ways you can criticize and condemn the government from a leftist perspective. The hyperbole is completely unnecessary, and it makes people more likely to write you off as a kook. If you're actually trying to change someone's mind, you need to do so in a way that doesn't make people simply dismiss you.
It is not "very unserious" to point out that your lack of understanding undermines virtually all of your arguments. You advocate for a massive tactical blunder because you simply do not get it. It sounds like you have read up on leftist theory(which is great! everybody should!), but your weak grasp on how the American government works means that you aren't able to propose realistic and practical strategies to actually achieve your goals. I'm not under the delusion that I have everything all figured out, but I do know that we need to do something actionable, and not throw our hands up and go "we've tried everything and we're all out of ideas". Your idealism clouds your mind to the point where you're actively working against what you're professing to believe, by offering useless strategies like "don't vote" and "vote third party". For a left-leaning person, voting this way only stands to benefit the reactionaries. Just because we don't have much power doesn't mean we have no power, and we're in deep enough shit that if we're not doing everything we can to at least slow and thwart the reactionaries, we don't have a chance of building a better world.
continued from the last comment
This is such a ridiculously bad argument that I'm absolutely stunned that someone would actually think this would work. You're wrong on this, full stop. I am begging you to step out of your bubble and compare and contrast Harris's proposed policy agenda and Trump's Agenda 47/Project 2025 and tell me that they're the same. Like, this take is so atrociously foolish that it must have been formed by uncritically parroting the Russian propaganda promoting apathy and despair that is infesting leftist corners of the internet. Like, if you can't agree that Republicans have gotten massively worse over the last few years somehow, if you somehow view even Trump and Romney as the same, then your view is so skewed that it becomes functionally useless.
Yeah, the reaction to the student protests about Gaza definitely disturbs me. There are few things at play here, first off, it's easy for unscrupulous Israel supporters to dupe people into believing that criticism of the Israeli government is inherently antisemitic. Add in some right wing provocateurs exploiting the situation by attacking the heads of these universities, and you get what's happened so far. Also, Israel itself has a weird amount of influence throughout the government to the point where it's actually illegal for U.S. companies to boycott them(I work in the logistics industry, and we have to do training every year to recognize signs of a boycott of Israel. If we find some, we literally cannot legally do business with them.) Israel is actually particularly difficult to protest against. I don't think that leftist organizing will face quite that amount of pushback. Even if it does, repression under Biden is going to be much easier to deal with than repression under Trump(the man sent goons in unmarked vans to harass, detain, and intimidate BLM protesters in Portland. He'll do much worse next time, when the guardrails have been removed).
This is basically what I've been trying to argue to you(though the propaganda source in your case would be different).
What a lousy, bad faith argument. I don't pretend that things are going well, but for you to suggest that trans people are in danger from Harris is insane. I have replied to you not out of any conviction that I'll change your mind, but to convince everyone else that you aren't particularly worth listening to. You have proved that point. Like I said, the fact that you can't discern the painfully obvious difference between the mediocre status quo Harris and the absolutely fascist Donald Trump means that we're in an impasse here.
Then provide your definition of the term "fascist" because it clearly differs from the dictionary definition.
Many of the things that we see are not "stymied progress" or "roll back everything". The modern US government today is in many ways very different than it was even 20 years ago. Republicans and Democrats have been building and modifying how the US government operates and they are making changes that directly change the form and function of government. The supreme Court and presidency did not have as much power as they do now. If you read the "Project 2025 agenda" it is not rolling things back, it is a plan for building a new thing.
If that is your argument then why don't the Democrats simply roll back many of the extensions that have been made? If it's easier to tear down, then the citizen's united case should be easy to destroy? We could revert to 1960s federal tax rates? Repeal the homeland security act? That argument requires an extremely ahistorical understanding, but one you seem to share with the "make America great again" crowd.
If only we could've elected a democratic president in between Trump's first and second term...
You have a good grasp on how the de jure government works, but seem to be rather ignorant (seemingly intentionally) of how the de facto government works. That ignorance is what I'm trying to highlight and why you keep ending up in disagreements. You can keep repeating what you read in your AP US history book but you should really be paying more attention to when it doesn't match the present material conditions.
Funny, that's exactly what I'm saying. Your idealism surrounding what the Democratic party is, and it's purpose, has you actively working and arguing against your beliefs.
I don't care what they say, I care what they do and they will both do the same thing.
They are not, but the messaging surrounding them at the time was. Similiarly going from the first black president to Jim Crow Joe is quite the difference on the Democratic side as well.
Then you live under a rock.
Using presidential powers created under Bush and expanded under Obama. It was a more brazen use of those powers than usual, but not too out of the ordinary if you've paid attention to events in Ferguson, standing rock, etc.
The "mediocre status quo" is absolutely fascist.
yeah, I'm done here. Zero effort is being put in to justify most of your positions, which makes sense because you can't. There's some hilariously bad faith arguments here that's I'm not even going to address because honestly, this post has been superseded by others and we're only ones reading it at this point.
please stop wasting people's time with obviously false arguments like "trump and harris are the same". not only is it wrong, it's painfully simplistic and reductive. no nuance, just black and white thinking so that you never have to think critically. like, you just drop that nonsense so that you don't have to do the hard work of arguing why we should risk a trump presidency.
I know that I haven't been very charitable to you, but you led off this discussion by basically calling me "privileged" and saying I'm pretty much a trumper, and then you drop dumb argument after dumb argument(and I have noticed that you threw my "parroting" and "idealism" criticisms back at me... you're not very original, which tracks for someone who isn't thinking for themselves). It's pretty telling that your most effective arguments are those nitpicking something I've said.
your position is dangerous. that is why i have indulged you this long. trump CANNOT be allowed in, and we must do whatever we must to prevent that. trump will send my trans ass to a camp. harris WILL NOT. this is life and death and i need you to stop making stupid arguments that you obviously haven't thought through
Same, you have a said a lot of words while mostly refusing to seriously engage with anything I've said. If I may though; some parting thoughts:
They are not the same, they are 2 sides to the same coin. I fail to see how that heads/tails isn't the "black and white, no nuance" mindset.
Yeah, because I was hoping it would be a moment for you to stop and do some self-reflection because I actually listened to what you had to say warts and all.
No he will send our asses to a prison the same ones black, Hispanic, indigenous, poor, marganalized etc. people are currently in. The same ones Harris is repeatedly saying she wants to expand and build more of, the same ones Biden has been building out for the last 4 years.