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.
So I know it's nice to doompost, but there certainly are good things to look for.
Some states are working towards making education more available. New Mexico has free tuition, period.
We're almost back to historical norms for inflation.
Some states have removed qualified immunity for cops.
Yeah, but to me, it seems a tad backward to have Democratic leadership at the federal level, and yet, your rights still depend largely on your zip code.
In addition to what alyaza said, the Democrats don't even hold the House of Representatives right now, and the judicial branch is fully under the control of the Republicans. So, no, they have partial leadership on the federal level. Biden is not a king, he can't will this stuff into existence.