Election hacking

crimson5pheonix

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No. This is misreading the study.

The study found that a specific instance of a bot farm campaign was likely ineffective at changing views within the relatively narrow field of what the researchers examined:

"Importantly, the scope of our research is limited to the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter. We also restrict our analysis to social media posts and thus cannot examine relationships from any potential sharing of other media content (e.g., images and videos) more generally. This research thus does not speak to the impact of similar campaigns on other social media platforms, nor to the possibility of foreign election interference via other channels, such as hacking or phishing schemes that were allegedly designed to surface information unfavorable to political opponents at opportune moments."

Whilst I accept that the study offers hope that bot farms may be less worrying than we fear, it absolutely should not be taken as a comprehensive assessment of bot farm capabilities generally. A lot more research is necessary to establish that.
Namely what it doesn't examine is... unrelated to bot farm nature. Which I already said hacking and media outreach are potentially more interesting. The bots themselves though were demonstrated to be nearly useless. Again, it's easy to see why. In the modern internet landscape, they'll never show up and have impact anywhere except where they're speaking to the like-minded crowd. If they show up where actual undecided voters are, they'll be ignored or banned immediately.

If you have a scandal (fake, staged, or real) you want to spread, the best way to spread it is to take it to a midrange media outlet or journalistic personality. Like the Biden laptop story.
 
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immortalfrieza

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Plus, of course, the fact that as soon as you have a demonstrable, definite case of an election being swung (as near-impossible as that would be to establish), then it's too late to prevent that damage.

Regulation is not about waiting for shit to be broken and then setting up some cameras. Regulation is about recognising what shit people are trying to break, and then setting up structures to stop it happening.

Look at the electronically-controlled pneumatic brake thing. Before the first massive toxic derailment, would it have been the appropriate response to say "eh we've got an N of zero, lots of trains haven't derailed, that's enough evidence that this ain't a problem"? Fuck no. And in this case we know we have wealthy, secretive assholes actively trying to derail the train.

Regulation is caution. And you can't complain after a disaster that regulations weren't in place, if you also preach complacency when you're shown warning signs.
Since when? Regulation almost always happens after something bad has already happened rather than before. Even if people are trying to regulate something it never gets any traction until something bad happens because whatever it wasn't being regulated. For example, despite how painfully obvious it was that it was only a matter of time before something like it happened rather than put it in regulations before it happened gun control laws, school safety measures, etc. got a LOT tighter only once the Columbine shooting happened.

That's just something more specific. How many people had to be maimed or die in horrible working conditions before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was even a thing? Nobody gave a damn despite knowing the danger existed until enough people suffered due to the lack of regulation.
 

Ag3ma

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Namely what it doesn't examine is... unrelated to bot farm nature.
So, take a neurone. These fire action potentials, which are powerful electrical signals that travel along the length of the neurone to make important stuff happen. A neurone fires an action potential because it reaches a threshold of stimulation. The stimulation to reach threshold is much smaller than the action potential. However, if the stimulation does not occur, neither does the actional potential.

Therefore, a study that says "we observed a stimulation and it wasn't very big" without also considering any subsequent effects of that stimulation is missing a very important part of picture, and thus what may be a very important result of the stimulation.
 

crimson5pheonix

It took 6 months to read my title.
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So, take a neurone. These fire action potentials, which are powerful electrical signals that travel along the length of the neurone to make important stuff happen. A neurone fires an action potential because it reaches a threshold of stimulation. The stimulation to reach threshold is much smaller than the action potential. However, if the stimulation does not occur, neither does the actional potential.

Therefore, a study that says "we observed a stimulation and it wasn't very big" without also considering any subsequent effects of that stimulation is missing a very important part of picture, and thus what may be a very important result of the stimulation.
This abstraction implies there would be no fake news without bots to push it and we both know that's absolutely false. Bot farms are there to carry misinformation to people who would be susceptible to it, but all indications are they fail at their job. And it's not like there aren't effective alternatives that would let misinformation reach crowds, in fact bot farms are the alternative to paying primadonna media personalities. Unfortunately bot farms just don't compete, and not even in a "they're just less efficient" manner; they're a placebo. This is more like a COVID mutation that now only attaches to proteins found in coyotes. It's still COVID and still viral, but it's not attaching to people anymore.
 

Silvanus

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Since when? Regulation almost always happens after something bad has already happened rather than before.
No: high-profile regulation happens after something goes wrong.

You have any idea how much precautionary regulation is on the books in any given wealthy country? Not as much as there should be, but still a hell of a lot.

That's just something more specific. How many people had to be maimed or die in horrible working conditions before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was even a thing? Nobody gave a damn despite knowing the danger existed until enough people suffered due to the lack of regulation.
High profile, transformational steps such as the establishment of an administration are not comparable with the introduction of a regulation like the brakes thing in the current day. The latter happens pretty often, usually with little to no fanfare, and (if the government is halfway functional and focused) before things get catastrophically broken.
 

Eacaraxe

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Namely what it doesn't examine is... unrelated to bot farm nature. Which I already said hacking and media outreach are potentially more interesting. The bots themselves though were demonstrated to be nearly useless. Again, it's easy to see why. In the modern internet landscape, they'll never show up and have impact anywhere except where they're speaking to the like-minded crowd.
It's just the next evolution of astroturfing; the only difference is in scale and the amount of political hay to be made over it.

If they show up where actual undecided voters are, they'll be ignored or banned immediately.
The problem is, "undecideds" are a demographic that don't really exist any more. Nearly every US election in the past thirty years has been down to one of two factors: the percentage of partisan-affiliated voters in a jurisdiction, and who turns out in greater numbers. Elections aren't about convincing undecided voters to vote for you any more; it's about mobilizing those already affiliated with your party. Which is precisely why echo chamber politics like that we've seen since 2008 have been dominant.

But, that's a bigger problem than simple astroturfing.

(if the government is halfway functional and focused)
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