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Freedom Fox's avatar

This is an interesting article from AI & Society published

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-021-01306-w

Speaks of "reframing truth" consensus truth. The author's truth shared with others of her ideological bent. I find great insights reading researched pieces like this of those who I disagree with that informs me of how they think, how they weaponize information against those they disagree with. You must know your enemy to defeat them. Many personnel in this administration and in positions of power within the government have come in from Big Tech/Big Media and share the beliefs and values this writer shares.

They honestly believe this. And have taken license to do what she suggests, empowered, emboldened, envirtued by a calling to perform "a greater good," ends justifying the means, using their positions inside government to do this. Which is where they break the law. They break our Constitution. They've done it. The only question is will our courts allow our Constitution to be broken?

"But the difference is not only that end-users themselves influence ideas or drive trends: it is also that their existence as a reified imaginary creates new stakes in controlling the perception of trends. This is why bots and trolls—interveners in trends—are receiving such significant investment from national governments and professional influencers."

"The extraordinary rise of state-promoted bots and trolls (Jankowicz 2020 ["Moaning Myrtle Disinformation Minister Wannabe]) not only stands as proof that power lies in manipulating the iteration of content via ‘computational propaganda’ but marks this power as a fundamental affordance of the digital public environment. Manipulating apparent consensus allows a minor or evanescent intervention in terms of cost and scale to be instrumentalised to disproportionately significant political result."

"Focussing on the effects of digital technologies in isolation can miss the core problem, which is the new potentials offered by the symbiotic relationship between mainstream media and social media. A newspaper, today, is less its print content or its subscriber base than its ability to reciprocally influence and be influenced by vast like-minded networks of digital communities, in processes that are both deliberate and not, and whose effects are typically invisible to their persuasive targets and deracinated from their progenitors. A public shift of attention onto how information is repeated must include information of all kinds, across all media, revealing a complex information environment in which centuries-old methods of influence, protest and opinion-manipulation combine with unprecedented potentials of disproportionate and rapid amplification."

"In Facebook’s own research on ‘fake news’ in April 2017, three out of four of the kinds of fake news it distinguishes are to do not with content, but with how content is shared. It acknowledges the creation of individual falsehoods, or ‘false news’ (i.e. articles intentionally misstating facts to arouse emotion); but then goes on to stress the importance of ‘influence operations’ (deliberate dissemination by governments or other organisations with intent to distort political sentiment); ‘false amplifiers’ (coordinated activity by inauthentic accounts i.e. bots and trolls with the intent of manipulating political discussion); and ‘disinformation’ the intentional spreading of manipulated information."

"In Danah Boyd’s opening keynote speech at the Republica conference in Berlin in 2018, ‘How an Algorithmic World Can Be Undermined’, she said it was crucial that journalists, as 'first stage amplifiers', and social media users, as ‘second stage amplifiers’ (a casual like, share, post or retweet) become aware of the importance of 'strategic silence'. It was essential, she said, that the ‘reporting ecosystem’ stop unthinkingly reporting things simply because they have been reported by others. Eric Boehlert’s blogsite ‘Press Run’, founded in February 2020, seeks to educate news producers and news amplifiers about ‘feedback loops’, seed stories, ‘both sides’ journalism, and clickbait."

"The disruption that results from the production of doubt thus not only serves the interests of tobacco, fossil fuels and other industries eager to delay regulation: in a global digital world it clears the playing field for transnational financial interests who would like to avoid or control the irksome regulation, taxation and oversight of nation state legislatures. Electoral democracy as a political process is less, therefore, at risk of gradual degradation than an unprecedented opportunity offered by digitally mediated cultures to transnational strategic influencers, especially in two-party first-past-the-post systems like the US and the UK, where marginal election results, easily gamable by cynical or external forces, can have disproportionate impacts. Regulation and anti-trust legislation against the monopoly tech platforms, even changes to their business model, will not necessarily change this fundamental conflict of interest between transnational financial stakes and their potential regulation by national governments; nor the underlying problem, which is that many well-funded networked international interests stand to benefit from intranational societal chaos, division, and doubt about matters of fact. By definition, no billionaire can have a relationship to only one nation."

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Guttermouth's avatar

We're worse than "subjects," we're suspects.

The federal government now exists solely to defend itself against the public, which it now views as a latent criminal threat in the absence of anything but unquestioning obedience.

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