I've met Hungarian people in the Netherlands and they're doing everything they can to become Dutch. One Hungarian even speaks fluent with no accent, and that is quite a feat.
I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.
Hungarian population have been declining for decades [1]. Hungary has already lost 5% of their population since 2010. For comparison their neighbour the Czech Republic has been growing [2].
Man. I logged in to Twitter the other day and itâs now 100% unfiltered racist fear mongering and nazi propaganda. Truly frightening. And I canât believe people still consider it a useful platform.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this, but it's the same thing for me. The For You tab is a cesspool, but if you stick to the Following tab and unfollow anybody who says pretty much anything political, it's actually a pretty nice platform.
I feel like it's more "if you don't sprint through the middle of the freeway and instead cross at the crosswalk, you're safe from cars". Also, there's not some genie sprinkling fairy dust on all of the political posts that's making them go up to the top, it's because that's what most people interact the most with. If you have atypical tastes (as most people on this website do), then you shouldn't be surprised when content tailored for typical tastes do not fit your tastes. After enough time on Twitter, even the For You becomes a bit better, with only occasional political posts.
I signed up for a new account a month ago for a specific purpose, and the default timeline was full of literal Nazi crap, like dumb 1488 references, and blaming weather on Jews, and other bullshit like that. I did absolutely nothing to get that. I signed up and thatâs what it showed me until I went on a spree of blocking stuff.
I agree with your comment about the "for you" tab. It is really the death of Twitter. Like Faecebook and YouTube, much of their suggested content is suss.
Western-backed leaders are democratic, progressive etc.
Others are backdoors.
China is tricky because they make our iPhones. For now
----
Meanwhile, there's almost nothing on the news or social spaces about how indigenous populations are still fighting for independence from Western colonizers, such as New Caledonia, an amazing place that I was planning to visit:
Equating the west, to Russia is such an unserious opinion.
The west has it's problems, don't get me wrong, but generally we have liberal democracies, which are more free, successful, better on human rights, and have the capability to improve the world(as it has).
Russia is an interesting case as it has a president for life (China has gone this way too) and if your billions aren't available to said president you fall out a windows. The US is diving towards an oligarchy but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.
We live in an era where the wealthiest are made by devaluing fiat and moving the purchase power from average citizens to the richest ones. Creating value, if people are still doing that, is mere a byproduct now.
> but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.
This doesn't happen overnight. You need to thoroughly corrupt the judiciary (which has not yet been accomplished, even if SCOTUS and a number of lower court appointments and many of the federal prosecutors have been) first. [1]
Or, alternatively, just go full fucking might-makes-right police state, for which ICE's blatant disregard for the law and your rights is a trial run.
If the country is ever retaken from this, the guilty will have to be punished. Deprivation of rights under color of law is, incidentally, a capital crime.
---
[1] The end-game for this sort of thing is 'Punch a nazi -> Go to a camp'. 'Nazi punches you -> Pardon and a pat on the back'. Rule of law is anathema to these people, which is why they put so much effort into corrupting it.
It is in the EU's interests to get on with Russia, and the Russians haven't crossed any important lines that the US hasn't crossed in recent history. The EU would probably benefit from having more Russian involvement in their policy making, they could do a much better job of promoting peace in Europe if they spent more time communicating with major powers in Europe.
Taking that as a given, the EU doesn't have to be a neighbour of Russia. If they have problems with Russia as a neighbour then they shouldn't be trying to expand the EU into a country that not only neighbours Russia but is currently at war with them. Russia is one of the few powers who's borders have retreated in my lifetime. It is impressive how quickly the EU expanded to but up against them again.
Taking it as not a given, Hungary seems to think that negotiation is possible.
EU has been a neighbour of Russia since a very long time as Finland joined EU in 1995. Not being a neighbour hasnât been an option in a very long time as there are now several countries bordering it. Beside EU is not a military alliance so why should it matter?
Russia has only ever expanded, but since you seem to be wrong just about everything no surprise there.
Doubt it. Appeasing hasn't worked. I don't know what would, but polishing Putin's shoes doesn't help. As for the US, least they have the chance to oust their emperor in three years.
Countries understood in the age of TV/newspapers that control of the media was a sovereignty issue. Any nation that wishes to remain truly sovereign, particularly in the English-speaking world is going to have to grasp the nettle and block or force divesture of Meta & the other US social media giants.
Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.
There's zero overlap between banning social media for kids and banning news from Rupert.
P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.
Just the price of the account doesn't mean much alone. The other important factor is how easily the account can get (shadow)banned from the region you are trying to influence. And for the price given we just know it's account. We don't know how sketchy it appears to the provider.
Not all accounts are created equal. For example a verified US account will be cheaper than a verified Japan account because Japan has stricter regulations around phone numbers. And then if you don't have a Japan account you might not be able to reach a potential Japanese audience due to not only antitrust of the platform, but also features that use geolocation for relevance.
Take a look at the YouTube algorithm. If those other accounts aren't in the same cohorts as your target audience you aren't going to accomplish much. The idea that accounts are fungible like they were 2 decades ago isn't true.
The people most susceptible to consensus mirage are, by the very nature of the beast, the ones least aware of it happening to themselves. Any opinion that you find yourself praised for by any of the groups in your social circle is infinitely suspect.
Of course they do. And yes there is proof for AI chatbots now, see the link in the other post, but in the last 10 years (since the Cambridge Analytica purchase by Bob Mercer) the usage was sock puppet networks and basic auto reply bots. However, they were microtargeted to individual psychology. So yes they work.
We now have multiple networks discovered in multiple countries, ie Analytica, Team Jorge in Israel, Internet Research Agency in Russia. And that's the ones we know about. Why would multiple countries double down on an idea that doesn't work?
Every right wing movement in Europe that had any contact with Bannon through his "The Movement" "data analytics" training program has all the outer appearances of running a large bot program, now using LLMs. In Portugal for the origins of the bot network they traced them in Angola. In Brasil the origin was Israel.
In the US, it's relatively inexpensive to buy up radio and TV stations and newspapers in low population states, then flood the zone with must-run pieces aimed at manufacturing consent for a particular worldview. That delivers a voting majority of a minimum of 1 representative and exactly 2 senate primed to favor a particular set of values and political objectives. Doesn't even require cheating by racial gerrymandering. (Political gerrymandering was legalized by SCOTUS in the 2019 Rucho case.)
I've had a thought in my mind recently. There's been a sudden push in Western countries towards "think-of-the-children" online age gating, and hence online verification tools, and any age verification tool that works can verify other things, like whether the user is a real person or not. The "that works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but we should assume that the politicians pushing for this at least believe it's possible.
Of course, any push for new legislation like this has many factions, and I'm sure there's a large faction who genuinely want better CSAM scanning tools, and another large faction who want to spy on and control what people can say online.
But those factions have always existed. Why is this push coming so strongly now in so many countries, and getting so much traction, when it previously failed?
Perhaps it's because politicians have recognized this existential threat. If they can't control what fake AI accounts say online to their real citizens, and the cost of running those fake accounts is trending down to the point where they'll vastly outnumber real people, then western civilization is lost. Democracy only works when there's a reasonable amount of signal in the noise. When it's basically all noise, and the noise is specifically created to destroy the system, the system is dead.
So perhaps there's another faction for whom this think-of-the-children stuff is a way to get verification normalized, and that's a way to get real humans verified online. This would not be accepted if it was done directly (or at least, politicians believe that people wouldn't accept it, and I tend to agree).
I personally react strongly again almost any kind of online control. But for the first time in my life, where we're no longer faced with troll centers that required real humans to work, but we're instead facing millions or billions of AI agents that are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from real humans, and are specifically designed to fight a hidden war against western civilization, I don't really see any other good option either.
Small forums with strong moderation like HN are great, but they don't scale. At best they'll be small enclaves of resistance, but most people will be using larger services that are overrun by fake accounts. And realistically, if we fast forward ten years where I can spin up a few thousand (or million) fake accounts for $1000, that are indistinguishable from real humans and tell them to target any small forum of my choice, I don't think any moderation team can survive that.
Itâs notable and interesting this research is coming out of University of Cambridge. Cambridge Analytica spun out of academia there too?
Question for folks here who may be familiar: it seems like thereâs a strong connection to research (and in the case of CA, commercial application of said research) around social media manipulation and propaganda in the digital age.
Is there any six-degrees type connection to the people doing this research and those involved with the roots of CA? Not as in the same bad actors (which, tbh yes, I consider CA to have been), but as in perhaps the same department and/or professors etc.
The _Science_ paper linked is paywalled, is anyone aware of a preprint?
I find it a bit curious that they've chosen to use SMS verifications as a proxy for the difficulty of creating an account, when there are similar marketplaces for selling the actual end product of bulk-created accounts. Was there some issue with that kind of data? SMS verification is just one part of the anti-bulk account puzzle, for both the attacker and defender.
You should delete the bonus content from this post too because you started with a good point that doesn't deserve to get deleted for irrelevant and confessed-intentional spam.
The conclusion that an account being cheap is the problem as a reason for regulation is a disturbingly wrong-headed on multiple levels. It essentially says. "If only superpowers can use it would be a-okay!". A monopoly on manipulation is a bad thing for the same reasons allowing only incumbents to run political ads would be.
running political ads is in and of itself value neutral, tools for manipulation aren't. Just having them in the hands of fewer people is a straight up win in the same way having bioweapons in the hand of fewer people is. "I wish everyone had Sarin gas to level the playing field" isn't really a great idea.
I think a minimum pricing on accounts, even if it's just a buck or two on most social media sites would do very little to hinder genuine participation but probably eliminate or render transparent most political manipulation.
Arguably the primary reason nobody does it is because it would reveal how fake their stats are and how little value there actually is in it
And yet a lot of services claim they are keeping the phone number as a requirement for registration to âprevent fraud and abuseâ, pro tip, it is not, the real reason is to link your real identity to your digital one, and even that number can be tracked with cellular towers. So never trust any service who sells itself for privacy and all and still requires a phone number, and that includes Signal.
Even if just 30% is crazy it seriously messes up elections, especially with low overall turnout.
Not sure if mandatory voting is the answer either.
The old way of âonly landownersâ voting is arguably highly unfair but might also have held a tiny grain of wisdom.
We donât allow just anyone to drive a car, practice medicine, or give legal advice. But canât imagine how a âvoting licenseâ could be implemented either.
When Citizens United was a big deal, I was torn over the premise of the concern for election integrity. Ideally, voters would make rational, informed decisions. They'd see ads, but know they all have an agenda, so they'd do their own research and come to a conclusion. Worrying about biased or inaccurate noise influencing elections means you think people can't be trusted to vote. Which might be true, and if it is, it's a bigger problem than corporate speech and fake accounts.
Other western democracies go further than the U.S. with campaign restrictions, including restrictions to campaign financing. One might say they protect the functioning of their democracies more with these additional restrictions, protecting voters.
And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.
I'll swing wildly in the other direction with campaign financing and point out Bloomberg's run for president. He outspent everybody and won American Samoa. He wasn't unqualified, either. He was mayor of NYC.
Money matters on an s curve. The bigger the election the more you tend to spend, but it reaches a saturation point. This said in the average election this saturation point is a lot of money.
Are you saying that one billionaire's loss in the primaries indicates money is not a problem in U.S. politics?
I was thinking of things like the 2015 study referenced in this article [0] that looked at 1,800 policy change polls over three decades indicating that elites got their way twice as often as the majority, and the majority never - not a single time - got something the elites didn't support.
In the other direction, the article gave examples of things the elites wanted that were passed into law, even thought he majority opposed. Like NAFTA, the Bush tax cuts, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking laws.
It appears that politicians pay more attention to voters with money.
btw, I agree with you that ideally voters are rational and informed. I guess that's a separate question than the influence of money.
Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.
It now appears that we took democracy, the open scientific process, and other basic tenants of our modern society for granted. But, it was a good run.
It's so crazy to me that people who built their fortunes on the foundations of the previous paragraph are now doing their best to destroy those foundations.
It was only recently that I realized that "may you live in interesting times" was a curse, and not a blessing.
I'm from the Netherlands. That is slightly relevant given that we have 20+ parties here, so I'm coming in with that mindset. I understand that Americans have a 2 party political system which makes things a lot more entrenched.
The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.
Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.
I simply want a sane democratic voting process.
And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.
From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.
I don't know man, I think people disappove of voting fraud and sockpuppeting rather unilaterally.
> forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
Digital government ID based mandatory auth, properly implemented or not (read: anon via zk vs. tracking), does not "properly remediate" [0] this issue. You'd limit identity forgery to those who administrate identities in the first place.
[0] if that is even possible, which I find questionable
Plenty of people were pointing out that voting machines had poor security for about two decades. Even before that, there was the mechanically disastrous Bush vs Gore Florida ballot.
America being what it is, with endless Voting Rights Act lawsuits required to keep the southern states running vaguely fair elections, it was impossible to get a bipartisan consensus that elections should actually be fair. And so the system deteriorates.
It was known to the Attic Greeks that democracy had a fatal bug: a system that entrusts ultimate authority to the masses will predictably privilege persuasion over knowledge, passion over judgment, and populism over excellence.
It just couldn't be exploited effectively until now. Thanks, Mark and Elon.
No, mass media had been around much longer than just a couple years.
But also, that bug is why our government was initially set up with the structure it was. And why you'll occasionally see complaints about parts of the structure being "undemocratic".
It was set up the way it was because the founders didn't trust voters. Voters don't always make optimal choices. Nobody said democracy was perfect. It's just a lot better than every other system we've ever tried. Benevolent dictatorship is good in theory, but quite rare in practice.
Politics isn't Newton's Third Law of Motion. Prior to Musk's takeover, there absolutely and unequivocally was no "equal but opposite" deliberately biased system in place like there is now.
This is a classic playbook in U.S. politics. Conservative media gins up a conspiracy theory (e.g., Hollywood is biased, universities are biased, mainstream media is biased, social media is biased, etc. etc.) and then they use these imaginary foes as justification for actual retribution. There was no purposeful and systematic bias at Twitter under Jack Dorsey (himself, a pretty conservative character, having backed Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr in the past election, both of whom both now work in the Trump administration).
Really? Are those the elections to which even TikTok admitted there was an organized meddling? [0]
> We proactively prevented more than 5.3 million fake likes and more than 2.6 million fake follow requests, and we blocked more than 116,000 spam accounts from being created in Romania. We also removed:59 accounts impersonating Romanian Government, Politician, or Political Party Accounts +59,000 fake accounts+1.5 million fake likes+1.3 million fake followers
Next one to look out for: 2026 Hungary. Fidesz is basically a russian backdoor in the EU and they will do everything to stay in power.
https://telex.hu/english/2025/12/11/most-hungarians-fear-rus...
They are also doing everything to bypass the no-political-ads-on-facebook ban https://telex.hu/english/2025/10/29/despite-the-ban-fidesz-c...
I've met Hungarian people in the Netherlands and they're doing everything they can to become Dutch. One Hungarian even speaks fluent with no accent, and that is quite a feat.
I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.
Hungarian population have been declining for decades [1]. Hungary has already lost 5% of their population since 2010. For comparison their neighbour the Czech Republic has been growing [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Czech_Repu...
Man. I logged in to Twitter the other day and itâs now 100% unfiltered racist fear mongering and nazi propaganda. Truly frightening. And I canât believe people still consider it a useful platform.
No, it's not 100% anything. The content you're looking at is what you see.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this, but it's the same thing for me. The For You tab is a cesspool, but if you stick to the Following tab and unfollow anybody who says pretty much anything political, it's actually a pretty nice platform.
Reads a bit like ânah if you ignore the main streets and just walk on the paths that you like youâre safe from crime in your neighbourhood.â
I find it crazy that we accept this madness on social media.
I feel like it's more "if you don't sprint through the middle of the freeway and instead cross at the crosswalk, you're safe from cars". Also, there's not some genie sprinkling fairy dust on all of the political posts that's making them go up to the top, it's because that's what most people interact the most with. If you have atypical tastes (as most people on this website do), then you shouldn't be surprised when content tailored for typical tastes do not fit your tastes. After enough time on Twitter, even the For You becomes a bit better, with only occasional political posts.
I signed up for a new account a month ago for a specific purpose, and the default timeline was full of literal Nazi crap, like dumb 1488 references, and blaming weather on Jews, and other bullshit like that. I did absolutely nothing to get that. I signed up and thatâs what it showed me until I went on a spree of blocking stuff.
I agree with your comment about the "for you" tab. It is really the death of Twitter. Like Faecebook and YouTube, much of their suggested content is suss.
I logged into X right now and saw zero racist fear mongering or Nazi propaganda. You're probably following the wrong type of accounts.
Network effects are powerful, itâs still the âtown squareâ of the world
Itâs more accurately the âtruck stop bathroom wallâ of the world under new management.
To be fair, the world is a truck stop bathroom, on average.
Town squares have an implied equal access to the floor. Twitter favors certain political and social ideologies.
Dubious claim now
> Fidesz is basically a russian backdoor
I love (hate) this:
Western rich people are billionaires.
Russian rich people are oligarchs.
Western-backed leaders are democratic, progressive etc.
Others are backdoors.
China is tricky because they make our iPhones. For now
----
Meanwhile, there's almost nothing on the news or social spaces about how indigenous populations are still fighting for independence from Western colonizers, such as New Caledonia, an amazing place that I was planning to visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6S1AFh88PE
(I don't know where else to mention this, this conversation seemed close enough to be relevant)
Equating the west, to Russia is such an unserious opinion. The west has it's problems, don't get me wrong, but generally we have liberal democracies, which are more free, successful, better on human rights, and have the capability to improve the world(as it has).
Russia is an interesting case as it has a president for life (China has gone this way too) and if your billions aren't available to said president you fall out a windows. The US is diving towards an oligarchy but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.
Yeah because in the US the billionaires actually run the country.
I wish that were true but it's not. If billionaires ran the country we wouldn't be starting trade wars and restricting immigration.
During trading war the US stock skyrocketed.
We live in an era where the wealthiest are made by devaluing fiat and moving the purchase power from average citizens to the richest ones. Creating value, if people are still doing that, is mere a byproduct now.
> The US is diving towards an oligarchy but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window
Probably because it -IS- an oligarchy? Why would they chuck themselves out of windows?
> but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.
This doesn't happen overnight. You need to thoroughly corrupt the judiciary (which has not yet been accomplished, even if SCOTUS and a number of lower court appointments and many of the federal prosecutors have been) first. [1]
Or, alternatively, just go full fucking might-makes-right police state, for which ICE's blatant disregard for the law and your rights is a trial run.
If the country is ever retaken from this, the guilty will have to be punished. Deprivation of rights under color of law is, incidentally, a capital crime.
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[1] The end-game for this sort of thing is 'Punch a nazi -> Go to a camp'. 'Nazi punches you -> Pardon and a pat on the back'. Rule of law is anathema to these people, which is why they put so much effort into corrupting it.
It is in the EU's interests to get on with Russia, and the Russians haven't crossed any important lines that the US hasn't crossed in recent history. The EU would probably benefit from having more Russian involvement in their policy making, they could do a much better job of promoting peace in Europe if they spent more time communicating with major powers in Europe.
Of course it is in their interest. The problem is that Russia only knows how to bully, oppress, or violently interfere with their neighbors.
You cannot get along with a tiger who only regards you as a meal.
Taking that as a given, the EU doesn't have to be a neighbour of Russia. If they have problems with Russia as a neighbour then they shouldn't be trying to expand the EU into a country that not only neighbours Russia but is currently at war with them. Russia is one of the few powers who's borders have retreated in my lifetime. It is impressive how quickly the EU expanded to but up against them again.
Taking it as not a given, Hungary seems to think that negotiation is possible.
EU has been a neighbour of Russia since a very long time as Finland joined EU in 1995. Not being a neighbour hasnât been an option in a very long time as there are now several countries bordering it. Beside EU is not a military alliance so why should it matter?
Russia has only ever expanded, but since you seem to be wrong just about everything no surprise there.
> Russia is one of the few powers who's borders have retreated in my lifetime
What part of russian border retreated in your lifetime?
Suppose they're conflating Soviet Union with Russia
Chechnya did briefly.
Also it's in the EU interest to sanction russia to the bankruptcy, wait for implosion and buy for pennies all available resources.
Doubt it. Appeasing hasn't worked. I don't know what would, but polishing Putin's shoes doesn't help. As for the US, least they have the chance to oust their emperor in three years.
No.
Countries understood in the age of TV/newspapers that control of the media was a sovereignty issue. Any nation that wishes to remain truly sovereign, particularly in the English-speaking world is going to have to grasp the nettle and block or force divesture of Meta & the other US social media giants.
Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.
There's zero overlap between banning social media for kids and banning news from Rupert.
P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.
If that is as easy as the comments suggest, EU should just pay couple euros to sway elections in Hungary, Russia, Belarus, etc.
Just the price of the account doesn't mean much alone. The other important factor is how easily the account can get (shadow)banned from the region you are trying to influence. And for the price given we just know it's account. We don't know how sketchy it appears to the provider.
Not all accounts are created equal. For example a verified US account will be cheaper than a verified Japan account because Japan has stricter regulations around phone numbers. And then if you don't have a Japan account you might not be able to reach a potential Japanese audience due to not only antitrust of the platform, but also features that use geolocation for relevance.
Cheap accounts from other regions are equally useful for mass upvoting preferred viewpoints.
Take a look at the YouTube algorithm. If those other accounts aren't in the same cohorts as your target audience you aren't going to accomplish much. The idea that accounts are fungible like they were 2 decades ago isn't true.
The people most susceptible to consensus mirage are, by the very nature of the beast, the ones least aware of it happening to themselves. Any opinion that you find yourself praised for by any of the groups in your social circle is infinitely suspect.
Do we have solid evidence that these accounts actually change votes?
Of course they do. And yes there is proof for AI chatbots now, see the link in the other post, but in the last 10 years (since the Cambridge Analytica purchase by Bob Mercer) the usage was sock puppet networks and basic auto reply bots. However, they were microtargeted to individual psychology. So yes they work.
We now have multiple networks discovered in multiple countries, ie Analytica, Team Jorge in Israel, Internet Research Agency in Russia. And that's the ones we know about. Why would multiple countries double down on an idea that doesn't work?
Every right wing movement in Europe that had any contact with Bannon through his "The Movement" "data analytics" training program has all the outer appearances of running a large bot program, now using LLMs. In Portugal for the origins of the bot network they traced them in Angola. In Brasil the origin was Israel.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223522
In the US, it's relatively inexpensive to buy up radio and TV stations and newspapers in low population states, then flood the zone with must-run pieces aimed at manufacturing consent for a particular worldview. That delivers a voting majority of a minimum of 1 representative and exactly 2 senate primed to favor a particular set of values and political objectives. Doesn't even require cheating by racial gerrymandering. (Political gerrymandering was legalized by SCOTUS in the 2019 Rucho case.)
I've had a thought in my mind recently. There's been a sudden push in Western countries towards "think-of-the-children" online age gating, and hence online verification tools, and any age verification tool that works can verify other things, like whether the user is a real person or not. The "that works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but we should assume that the politicians pushing for this at least believe it's possible.
Of course, any push for new legislation like this has many factions, and I'm sure there's a large faction who genuinely want better CSAM scanning tools, and another large faction who want to spy on and control what people can say online.
But those factions have always existed. Why is this push coming so strongly now in so many countries, and getting so much traction, when it previously failed?
Perhaps it's because politicians have recognized this existential threat. If they can't control what fake AI accounts say online to their real citizens, and the cost of running those fake accounts is trending down to the point where they'll vastly outnumber real people, then western civilization is lost. Democracy only works when there's a reasonable amount of signal in the noise. When it's basically all noise, and the noise is specifically created to destroy the system, the system is dead.
So perhaps there's another faction for whom this think-of-the-children stuff is a way to get verification normalized, and that's a way to get real humans verified online. This would not be accepted if it was done directly (or at least, politicians believe that people wouldn't accept it, and I tend to agree).
I personally react strongly again almost any kind of online control. But for the first time in my life, where we're no longer faced with troll centers that required real humans to work, but we're instead facing millions or billions of AI agents that are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from real humans, and are specifically designed to fight a hidden war against western civilization, I don't really see any other good option either.
Small forums with strong moderation like HN are great, but they don't scale. At best they'll be small enclaves of resistance, but most people will be using larger services that are overrun by fake accounts. And realistically, if we fast forward ten years where I can spin up a few thousand (or million) fake accounts for $1000, that are indistinguishable from real humans and tell them to target any small forum of my choice, I don't think any moderation team can survive that.
The future of the internet is a dark forest
Itâs notable and interesting this research is coming out of University of Cambridge. Cambridge Analytica spun out of academia there too? Question for folks here who may be familiar: it seems like thereâs a strong connection to research (and in the case of CA, commercial application of said research) around social media manipulation and propaganda in the digital age.
Is there any six-degrees type connection to the people doing this research and those involved with the roots of CA? Not as in the same bad actors (which, tbh yes, I consider CA to have been), but as in perhaps the same department and/or professors etc.
CA was not spun out of Cambridge University. There's even a statement from the university about this: https://www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/statement-from-the-univer...
> Cambridge Analytica has no connection or association with the University of Cambridge whatsoever.
The _Science_ paper linked is paywalled, is anyone aware of a preprint?
I find it a bit curious that they've chosen to use SMS verifications as a proxy for the difficulty of creating an account, when there are similar marketplaces for selling the actual end product of bulk-created accounts. Was there some issue with that kind of data? SMS verification is just one part of the anti-bulk account puzzle, for both the attacker and defender.
How were elections swayed before the internet?
How much do fake supporters, protestors etc cost? What can be done about them?
By establishing two party systems and normalising them.
I have witnessed obvious and systematic synthetic upvotes of HN posts. Over and over. I don't think the site has enough protections in place.
Maybe have YC invest in some startups combatting this using machine learning?
(Given the focus of HN it's typically some product being pushed, though. Not a politician.)
It is machine learning, not machine telepathy or machine precognition. Without causality you just automate superstition.
You are saying its not feasible to create an anti-spam filter using machine learning? I mean wtf. Is this a joke?
Edit: Bonus content:
Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon from today's Epstein release:
https://e3.365dm.com/25/12/2048x1152/skynews-noam-chomsky-st...
https://news.sky.com/story/whos-pictured-in-the-newly-releas...
(I tried posting it on its own five times but HN won't let me. It's unclear if it's because of the keywords or something else.)
You should delete the bonus content from this post too because you started with a good point that doesn't deserve to get deleted for irrelevant and confessed-intentional spam.
Insightful. Thank you.
Interesting. How to counteract these online imposters?
The conclusion that an account being cheap is the problem as a reason for regulation is a disturbingly wrong-headed on multiple levels. It essentially says. "If only superpowers can use it would be a-okay!". A monopoly on manipulation is a bad thing for the same reasons allowing only incumbents to run political ads would be.
running political ads is in and of itself value neutral, tools for manipulation aren't. Just having them in the hands of fewer people is a straight up win in the same way having bioweapons in the hand of fewer people is. "I wish everyone had Sarin gas to level the playing field" isn't really a great idea.
I think a minimum pricing on accounts, even if it's just a buck or two on most social media sites would do very little to hinder genuine participation but probably eliminate or render transparent most political manipulation.
Arguably the primary reason nobody does it is because it would reveal how fake their stats are and how little value there actually is in it
And yet a lot of services claim they are keeping the phone number as a requirement for registration to âprevent fraud and abuseâ, pro tip, it is not, the real reason is to link your real identity to your digital one, and even that number can be tracked with cellular towers. So never trust any service who sells itself for privacy and all and still requires a phone number, and that includes Signal.
And Anthropic, which is why I donât use Claude.
I am utterly terrified of elections finally. I didn't expect that to be in my timeline. The masses are really crazy.
Even if just 30% is crazy it seriously messes up elections, especially with low overall turnout.
Not sure if mandatory voting is the answer either.
The old way of âonly landownersâ voting is arguably highly unfair but might also have held a tiny grain of wisdom.
We donât allow just anyone to drive a car, practice medicine, or give legal advice. But canât imagine how a âvoting licenseâ could be implemented either.
The key is to keep turnout low.
When Citizens United was a big deal, I was torn over the premise of the concern for election integrity. Ideally, voters would make rational, informed decisions. They'd see ads, but know they all have an agenda, so they'd do their own research and come to a conclusion. Worrying about biased or inaccurate noise influencing elections means you think people can't be trusted to vote. Which might be true, and if it is, it's a bigger problem than corporate speech and fake accounts.
Other western democracies go further than the U.S. with campaign restrictions, including restrictions to campaign financing. One might say they protect the functioning of their democracies more with these additional restrictions, protecting voters.
And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.
I'll swing wildly in the other direction with campaign financing and point out Bloomberg's run for president. He outspent everybody and won American Samoa. He wasn't unqualified, either. He was mayor of NYC.
Money matters on an s curve. The bigger the election the more you tend to spend, but it reaches a saturation point. This said in the average election this saturation point is a lot of money.
Are you saying that one billionaire's loss in the primaries indicates money is not a problem in U.S. politics?
I was thinking of things like the 2015 study referenced in this article [0] that looked at 1,800 policy change polls over three decades indicating that elites got their way twice as often as the majority, and the majority never - not a single time - got something the elites didn't support.
In the other direction, the article gave examples of things the elites wanted that were passed into law, even thought he majority opposed. Like NAFTA, the Bush tax cuts, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking laws.
It appears that politicians pay more attention to voters with money.
btw, I agree with you that ideally voters are rational and informed. I guess that's a separate question than the influence of money.
[0] https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2015/05/disturbing-d...
This is âwhy are we going to space when we havenât cured cancerâ reasoning.
Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.
It now appears that we took democracy, the open scientific process, and other basic tenants of our modern society for granted. But, it was a good run.
It's so crazy to me that people who built their fortunes on the foundations of the previous paragraph are now doing their best to destroy those foundations.
It was only recently that I realized that "may you live in interesting times" was a curse, and not a blessing.
I'm from the Netherlands. That is slightly relevant given that we have 20+ parties here, so I'm coming in with that mindset. I understand that Americans have a 2 party political system which makes things a lot more entrenched.
The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.
Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.
I simply want a sane democratic voting process.
And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.
From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.
Yeah. It's complicated. See Veritasium's "Why Democracy is Mathematically Impossible" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
And also Idiocracy. This one is becoming more relevant. In all countries and all races.
I don't know man, I think people disappove of voting fraud and sockpuppeting rather unilaterally.
> forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
Digital government ID based mandatory auth, properly implemented or not (read: anon via zk vs. tracking), does not "properly remediate" [0] this issue. You'd limit identity forgery to those who administrate identities in the first place.
[0] if that is even possible, which I find questionable
>Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.
If they hack voting machines, they're not my guys, friend.
Plenty of people were pointing out that voting machines had poor security for about two decades. Even before that, there was the mechanically disastrous Bush vs Gore Florida ballot.
America being what it is, with endless Voting Rights Act lawsuits required to keep the southern states running vaguely fair elections, it was impossible to get a bipartisan consensus that elections should actually be fair. And so the system deteriorates.
Technofeudalism? In feudalism, the lords need the peasants. In an automated society they don't. Technocracy, yes, technofeudalism, no.
> What was it, 200 years?
Rant aside, I'm curious where you pin the start of this.
It was known to the Attic Greeks that democracy had a fatal bug: a system that entrusts ultimate authority to the masses will predictably privilege persuasion over knowledge, passion over judgment, and populism over excellence.
It just couldn't be exploited effectively until now. Thanks, Mark and Elon.
No, mass media had been around much longer than just a couple years.
But also, that bug is why our government was initially set up with the structure it was. And why you'll occasionally see complaints about parts of the structure being "undemocratic".
It was set up the way it was because the founders didn't trust voters. Voters don't always make optimal choices. Nobody said democracy was perfect. It's just a lot better than every other system we've ever tried. Benevolent dictatorship is good in theory, but quite rare in practice.
Mass media wasn't enough to wreck the whole concept of democracy.
It was almost enough, admittedly... but not quite. The coup de grace was administered by social media.
It wasn't? That's the reason why religion was and in many places still is the major part of the state.
> It just couldn't be exploited effectively until now.
Are you saying until Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there were no effective election interference problems?
Politics isn't Newton's Third Law of Motion. Prior to Musk's takeover, there absolutely and unequivocally was no "equal but opposite" deliberately biased system in place like there is now.
This is a classic playbook in U.S. politics. Conservative media gins up a conspiracy theory (e.g., Hollywood is biased, universities are biased, mainstream media is biased, social media is biased, etc. etc.) and then they use these imaginary foes as justification for actual retribution. There was no purposeful and systematic bias at Twitter under Jack Dorsey (himself, a pretty conservative character, having backed Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr in the past election, both of whom both now work in the Trump administration).
How is this little "both sides bad" rant related to the article at all?
Romania presidential election were cancelled because wrong guy (pro-Russian, anti-NATO) could win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C4%83lin_Georgescu
Really? Are those the elections to which even TikTok admitted there was an organized meddling? [0]
> We proactively prevented more than 5.3 million fake likes and more than 2.6 million fake follow requests, and we blocked more than 116,000 spam accounts from being created in Romania. We also removed:59 accounts impersonating Romanian Government, Politician, or Political Party Accounts +59,000 fake accounts+1.5 million fake likes+1.3 million fake followers
0 - https://newsroom.tiktok.com/continuing-to-protect-the-integr...