Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation (2022)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01914537221108467

by xyzal • 4 months ago

87 54 4 months ago

journals.sagepub.com

dluan• 4 months ago

We have a massive poisoning of the commons catastrophe coming, driven by further authoritarian government overreach and control. I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. I don't just mean half solutions like tor or social protocols that let you in and out of walled gardens.

There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me feels like that window is already slammed shut.

mmooss• 4 months ago

There were many disinformation research organizations in the US, including at major institutions such as Harvard and Stanford, that were forced to close by conservatives through lawfare or apparently through donor pressure.

(It's interesting that conservatives saw it as a partisan cause.)

Mistletoe• 4 months ago

To quote The Cable Guy, there’s only one answer, someone has to kill the babysitter (tv, social media, Big Tech). It’s hard to kill the babysitter when everyone in Congress is invested balls deep in the babysitter. Eisenhower warned of the coming overreaching powers of the Military Industrial Complex, but no one is attacking the Government Stock Market Tech Complex (GSMTC).

mannanj4• 4 months ago

It’s beyond that. It’s the CIA deeply embedded in all the scary uncomfortable ways you would have hoped never possible. Presidents win and turn their stance and run around in the other direction, they don’t what to be another assassinated Kennedy (and imo today they would have other fears worse than dying). Congressmen and women are definitely also aware of the deep presence and power of that agency and its perversion into American life and politics. They don’t want to be the ones to be the sacrificial pawn sparking an outright violent American revolution and tear down of the agency.

I was surveilled, experimented on and followed by them for being American-Pakistani and speaking out against them from 2022-2023. It was a scary time and I wish I were making this up. I wonder sometimes if they really are the good guys, and I just got things backwards. I also heard when you are kidnapped and in hostile territories for long enough, you fall in love with the kidnappers.

Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious.

kubb3• 4 months ago

It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread.

It's hard to distinguish who's a bot, who's a narrative pusher and who's an enthusiast. Which is exactly what you'd want from an astroturfing campaign. There's a clear benefit: people in the industry are reading this, and in doing so they're granting mindshare.

There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support campaigns - personal key signature. But judging by how afraid people, especially in the US, need to be of their government surveilling them, this isn't going to catch on.

coffeefirst• 4 months ago

Yes. I’ve also been asking every engineer I know what they’re doing with AI and there’s a lot of people doing a lot of different things, but it’s a deep mismatch with the online rhetoric.

This phenomenon appears to be incrementally coming for every single topic and public platform.

mannanj4• 4 months ago

I hate to sound like I’m turfing for cryptocurrencies, isn’t there like an identity solution there that the crypto nerds solved for to keep identity verification anonymous and surveillance proof?

Need to double check what is available, though I feel like that angle could work.

I’ve been wondering also if a simple lie & deception detection type system could be a useful angles. It’s complicated in practice; though the human intuition would say it’s figured this out millennia ago- I can’t tell you how many times my body has figured out someone’s toxic negative vibe by feeling. And I think we probably understand this better than we think and can represent it in the computer space with analysis of signals and some follow on questions. Hope I’m not too naive here.

arikrahman• 4 months ago

It feels the same way on GitHub trending. I used to check it frequently to see what the hottest newest tech was and stay up to date. Now it's oversaturated by whatever the newest AI bubble is. It also doesn't help that MCP enabled products like OpenClaw star their own repo and artificially inflate their perceived value.

gruez2• 4 months ago

It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread.

Isn't this what exactly you'd expect in a connected world? The best arguments from both sides proliferate, thereby causing "The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread".

jacquesm5• 4 months ago

What's interesting about that is that indeed, there are a lot of people pushing the 'autonomous coding agents are great' narrative but there is one crucial bit missing: they absolutely never show their code.

iamnothere• 4 months ago

There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support campaigns - personal key signature.

You would be surprised at how cheaply opinions can be purchased, especially globally.

RobRivera• 4 months ago

Its already here.

calibas2• 4 months ago

I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem.

It's against the HN guidelines to insinuate that astroturfing happens on HN.

cwillu2• 4 months ago

Discussion of astroturfing on a post that is specifically about astroturfing is such an obvious exception that I'm having a hard time taking your reply in good faith, but this is me trying to do so anyway instead of just downvoting and flagging like the guidelines suggest I do in such cases.

mhitza2• 4 months ago

If you can point me at someone that would fund such projects (not VCs), would be happy to apply. Projects like NLNet aren't keen on funding larger scope projects. At least if you do not have the thought leader influencer clout.

slopinthebag• 4 months ago

What are your ideas for this?

alwa2• 4 months ago

I agree that it feels like the tiny window of opportunity hasn't quite shut yet, and it's a problem space I know I should take more interest in. What do you see as the viable technical directions? Something along the lines of what Altman was trying to do with his Orb? Something along the lines of the C2PA's Content Credentials?

[0] e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanit... and the feature piece at https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/

[1] https://contentcredentials.org and https://c2pa.org

whatshisface2• 4 months ago

Instead of collecting biometric info from humans and IDing all of their online movements, you could mandate that LLM output be watermarked (using a technology that Scott Arronson was hired by OpenAI to help develop, after which the project was shut down under Altman right after proving that it could work) so that their online movement would be IDed. The implication in this story that it was shut down to keep the Orb around in principle (telling humans they had to be tagged to distinguish them from machines that could more easily be tagged) is very easy to pick up.

ajkjk• 4 months ago

strong agree, I feel like it poisons the fabric of society somehow when everything you interact with is fake or even just has a good chance of being fake, regardless of the also-shitty fact that it is also often trying to influence you.

apsurd• 4 months ago

Also how the being fake doesn't even have to be malicious. now every tom, dick, and harry wants to create content. All the world's a stage, follower count go up.

pessimizer2• 4 months ago

I held a hope that it would create an evolutionary pressure that would weed out people who fall for foolish arguments i.e. arguments without any sort of structure that should be capable of convincing anyone of anything. But that's just wishful thinking. People fall for anything as long as it's flattering and it allows them to do what they want to do when they want to do it.

Every propagandistic argument is going to be like that for 80% of people, and 40% of people are going to be within that 80% about 99% of the time. They think the biggest issue of our time is how much people complain.

walterbell• 4 months ago

My browser highlights a few hundred accounts. For HN and other comment-oriented sites, local userscripts are supported by browser plugins, including mobile Safari. These can highlight known usernames and implement blocklists. Most LLMs can generate a userscript on demand for non-obfuscated sites, including userid list for manual edit.

Bridged7756• 4 months ago

This is notorious in platforms like reddit, with people jumping in to suggest no name products in response to questions. It doesn't help that reddit allows private profiles, thus allowing astroturfers to get away with it. Also, another case is LLM astroturfing, we're bombarded with doomerism and obituaries about programming, some of said opinions are subtler, short comments, the most dangerous ones, because little by little they jab you, though the most conspicuous ones are easy to identify. And then there's the political astroturfing. In my country smokescreens are the defacto tool, but it is suspicious of the amount of high quality edits and memes that came out about the Epstein files, essentially cementing him as a "meme" and not a monster that abused minors.

plun9• 4 months ago

Here is an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/dty9nd/com... Here, PM_ME_UR_LIDAR uses the pronoun "their" referring to Ouster, the lidar company. But PM_ME_UR_LIDAR was working at Ouster, Inc. at the time the comment was written.

AlexeyBelov2• 4 months ago

Recently I've been seeing this every day (yes, every).

See for example: https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_s...

User plugs "PracHub" constantly, but their profile page doesn't show those comments. Sometimes they post lazily, just pasting a link. Other times though they post as if they've stumbled upon this service by accident.

cwillu2• 4 months ago

(2022)

dang• 4 months ago

It's there now. Thanks!

bpavuk4• 4 months ago

related: https://doublespeed.ai/ - basically astroturfing as a service.

their landing page stops short of saying that Doublespeed would be "a good fit for your political campaign." I'd prefer fighting an AI-powered drone over becoming a victim of "Dead Internet-aaS" startup. at least, flying lawnmowers are honest

droidjj• 4 months ago

Wow… that’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve seen in a while.

bpavuk4• 4 months ago

right???? especially that "never pay a human again" at the end... Palantir is a sweetheart on Doublespeed backdrop

jacquesm5• 4 months ago

I have one of those 'flying lawnmowers' here and I'm not sure you would like to get up close and personal with them. They are super dangerous even when they are nominally under your control. But I agree with you that on the larger canvas the astroturfing will in spite of being more bloodless will do far more damage.

People are just not ready for being skeptical against this, they've barely gotten used to phone scams and now they have astroturfing and deepfakes to contend with.

bpavuk4• 4 months ago

well, I had one fly above my head in 2025, too. I know what compare against

SilverElfin• 4 months ago

Recent events in the world have highlighted just how influential social media can be, both in a national context and internationally. To list a few examples: platforms like Twitter and Facebook played a prominent role in the events surrounding the recent US presidential elections; social media and messaging platforms made possible the many decentralized mass protests that have popped up around the globe, from the pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, Thailand and Belarus to the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States; and of course, the whole of the internet, for better or worse, played a role in shaping how the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic. But with great power comes the great potential for manipulation and misuse.

I think everyone would agree with this but is there any formal evidence of how Twitter and TikTok affect elections or legislation?

Lerc• 4 months ago

I recently did some looking into how public perception campaigns work.

I found it amazing that I could not find any organisation that tracks these campaigns. These are often very well funded and those funds go to people.

Part of the problem is a successful public opinion campaign results in something that most people believe, we probably only get to see the failures. Challenging something that is widely held is not well received, whether or not you are right or wrong.

Some things I did find out. Fake news stories don't change people's opinions very much. They enable media to shape narratives because people will reject genuine stories outside the narrative because they know that fake news stories exist. Fake news exists to be seen as fake to establish that the things you disagree with could also be fake.

There are companies that specialise in this.

Reputation management companies might tell you who their clients are or what they do, but never at the same time. I suspect the best ones do neither.

rrhjm53270• 4 months ago

As an individual, this paper suggests that I must move beyond "Is this news true?" to "Why does it look like everyone agrees with this?"

jacquesm5• 4 months ago

It is much worse than that: it is: is anybody I interact with real?

Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation (2022)

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