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.
Rampant inflation for food, housing, and utilities with no end in sight
We’re almost back to historical norms for inflation.
Cops are still killing at will, and cop cities are becoming a thing
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.
your rights still depend largely on your zip code.
i mean: this sort of devolution is how all federal systems work, and especially the one established by the Constitution. your issue is very literally with the system here.
accordingly: implying that the problem is the Democrats for not unilaterally overturning the entire constitutional order when they don’t have the votes to do that (or anything, for that matter!) is nonsensical. it’s not a materialist way of looking at the world. there are obvious constraints that prevent them from doing this. if you want to productively change things, the goal should be to give them (or another faction i suppose, although i have no idea what faction this would be outside of democratic socialism) the political power needed to begin changing the constitutional order. i don’t know what other strategy you adhere to which is capable of changing this at scale.
accordingly: implying that the problem is the Democrats for not unilaterally overturning the entire constitutional order when they don’t have the votes to do that (or anything, for that matter!)
Yet, with a simple majority, we saw Republicans pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and Obama and Biden both had a simple majority in the Senate and controlled Congress. We’ve also seen presidents unilaterally keep Congress in session, as the Constitution allows them to do, in order to help pass important legislation. The thing is, the loss of Roe, the rollback of voting rights, the minimum wage, none of it seems to matter enough for Democrats to actually wield power when they have it. Republicans still get what they want. When I mention this in any online forum, the excuses roll out like Halloween candy, but if you’re someone working for a living in the US, you’re well aware that it doesn’t matter who we elect. Your life only gets harder.
I’m also aware that there’s really no way to change it, outside of being a billionaire or being willing to commit a terrorist act, both of which don’t apply to the vast majority of people. The only way for an average person to benefit from our system of government is just to make sure you’re putting every dollar you can in the stock market, because both parties agree 100% that the stock market should never drop, and they’ll make trillions appear out of thin air overnight to achieve that.
Republicans still get what they want.
respectfully, if you have any political knowledge at all, how are you surprised that the Bad Things Party can do bad things within the confines of a constitution literally written to facilitate the permanent existence of bad things? what Republicans want–a system where they can arbitrarily and undemocratically carve out the haves and have-nots–is completely in line with (and facilitated by) the existing undemocratic, federalist constitutional order. no shit they’re able to get what they want while Democrats don’t when this is the case; it’s like a 100 meter race where only one person actually has to run 100 meters, and everyone else in the race has to run 200.
it’s why complaining about the Democrats is dumb–you are incorrectly assigning blame and misdirecting people from the correct source of their ire. that doesn’t mean you have to be uncritical of the Democrats, but the problem is you’re not merely uncritical. you are an active impediment to the correct analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it (and sometimes you’re just wrong, like below). no amount of railing on the Democrats will fix the system, because the Democrats aren’t the system that needs fixing. they can’t fix it with their current political power, and meanwhile if everyone took your advice (even though it is being posted on a small and irrelevant-to-the-national-conversation website like ours) it would from first principles undermine their ability to win the needed political power to change anything.
The thing is, the loss of Roe, the rollback of voting rights, the minimum wage, none of it seems to matter enough for Democrats to actually wield power when they have it.
this is incorrect and people in this thread have disproven it. continuing to repeat it indicates you are either genuinely very ignorant or actively malicious in the positions you hold. i don’t know or care to disambiguate which–and in outcome it doesn’t matter. it’s not acceptable, and it undermines the value of having discussions in the first place. continuing this behavior of repeating falsehoods and ignoring other people when they correct you will have you removed from this section until after the election at minimum.
So the only ones who have the power to fix the system are Republicans? If that’s the case why isn’t the strategy then to vote Republican and change their hearts and minds instead?
Or if you legitimately believe the only way to accrue enough political power is to become indistinguishable from that which you’re trying to replace, does it matter if it gets replaced at all?
(Mostly rhetorical questions, I just strongly believe that you have an incorrect analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it and am hoping to provide other perspectives because you are not getting it…)
(Mostly rhetorical questions, I just strongly believe that you have an incorrect analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it and am hoping to provide other perspectives because you are not getting it…)
your analysis of the situation is “kamala harris is promising a fascist dictatorship as well […] She is also promising to purge us.” which is, respectfully, a Charlie Brown had hoes level statement. it can be dismissed with prejudice because it’s so obviously false.
Do the Democrats have unilateral control at the federal level? Seems far from that to me.
Also worth pointing out that it’s not third party candidates or Republicans passing these state policies. It’s democrats.
I can’t understand why someone would just roll over and give up when one candidate is promising a fascist dictatorship
Weird. A bug in the app switched up my replies.
What I intended to say was:
I can understand. If you’re a wage earner in this country, your life does not change in any significant way based on who we elect, so why skip a badly needed day’s pay to vote? There’s just no point.
And when you point this out to other people, all you get in response are excuses.
That’s a strange line of reasoning to discourage voting. I just got my mail in ballot, I’ll probably be dropping it off the next time I have a day off.
We’ve discussed it elsewhere in this thread, but it’s really not.
Your right to vote, absentee or otherwise, is largely based on your zip code. Democrats haven’t shown any interest in bringing back the Voting Rights Act.
no, they are trying to reinstate it. Its easy to find this information.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/22/kamala-harris-voting-rights-legislation-senate/
Also why blame the democrats for “not bringing back” things the GOP have taken away. Why not criticize Trump or discourage voting for the GOP who are explicitly been responsible for these things if you care so much?
That’s a lot of selective interpreting right there, lol.
I don’t have the time or want to unravel everything - I’m only sharing evidence that good things are happening amidst all the doom and gloom, and they’re typically lead by Democrats.
Sorry, I don’t quite understand your point. Can you clarify?
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.
Honest suggestion: take a civics class to brush up on stuff like this. Theory is great but if you don’t understand the system of government under which you live, you have no hope of changing it.
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.
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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.
We’ll still be able to organize under Harris, and that won’t be the case with a Trump regime.
Have you not been paying attention to the attempts at organizing under the current Biden administration?
We’re fighting against a century of antisocialist propaganda, and that’s going to take a long time to undo
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.
if you actually think Harris will purge trans people
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.
if you think that voting third party accomplishes anything at all
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The article is literally about you.
