I have been disturbed by the flippant HN response to these findings (especially in a related thread yesterday). I listened to a radio program this week (KPFA or KQED can't remember) with one of the researchers whose findings were in the Senate report.<p>I was blown away by the magnitude and the tactics used, starting years before the elections laying groundwork.<p>The researcher did not pull punches, calling it straight up espionage. Unwitting Americans were personally contacted by the IRA, an agency whose funding is closely tied to Russian intelligence and whose members have been indicted by the Special Counsel. Groups on both sides were bolstered with IRA funding, organizing, propaganda, and social media support. Once a movement or fb page or protest gained enough momentum, the IRA then sabotaged the movement by reframing them as violent, stupid, liberal, racist, or whatever buzzword they co-opted for effect. They would also frame the protest as artificial, fake, funded by outsiders, etc - anything to poison the well or co-opt an originally well meaning or organic group.<p>One end goal was to disillusion support for protests in general. The severity, indsidiousness, and sophistication cannot be overstated. The fact that people still claim it had no effect is a PRODUCT of their efforts.
There's consistently a lot of shock and outrage about foreign interference in American elections, however there seems to be no feasible solutions to the problem. If, as people seem to be doing, "election interference" doesn't mean hacked voting machines but 'hacked voters' (exposure to subversive foreign propaganda), then there is no defense against it without going to what we would consider a repressive state. Low-cost social-media memes, groups, and bot-comments are a super-weapon that can be deployed against any government that purports to be 'democratic' in its methods.<p>At a <i>minimum</i>, to actually combat 'foreign interference in elections,' the US would need to:
- rigorously require anyone paying for political ads on social media to be US citizens,
- require anyone posting comments on US-visible political social media topics to also be US citizens,
- limit the exposure of US citizens to foreign media, both state-sponsored and 'private'
- place additional surveillance or suspicion on first/second-generation immigrants who may be spreading latent ideological memes from foreign governments<p>In short, a China model rather than a traditionally Western model. In a globalized society with such free flow of information, is it even possible to have a national democracy that doesn't implicitly give the rest of a world voting access through rival-state mechanisms?
These statistics about the dataset are interesting:<p>~10.4 million tweets (of which ~6 million were original) across 3841 twitter accounts<p>~1100 YouTube videos across 17 account channels<p>~116,000 Instagram posts across 133 accounts<p>~61,500 unique Facebook posts across 81 Pages<p>There were ~77 million engagements on Facebook, ~187 million engagements on Instagram, and ~73 million engagements on original content on Twitter.
One interesting tidbit in the report is the claim that the platforms intentionally scrubbed potentially useful metadata from the data they provided the Senate.
This kind of org seems cheap enough to setup.<p>So I am just wondering why can't the same model be used (secretly or openly) to hack minds to do good? What would it take?<p>It feels like Bill Gates web presence is a fledgling example of it. There was this Cass Sunstein/Obama admin "nudge" attempt which probably was a little too ahead of its time(?).<p>What would such an org look like in 10 years and what would you like to see them achieve in terms of hacking society (positively)?
<i>reaching 126 million people on Facebook</i><p>So, that's like a 500 dollar budget? Somewhere in that range?<p><i>Partisan content was presented to targeted groups
in on-brand ways, such as a meme featuring Jesus in a Trump campaign hat on an account that targeted Christians</i><p>It's an unbelievably tacky picture of Jesus wearing a red MAGA hat. Yeah, that's why people voted for him. I mean, yeah. The multi-million dollar ad campaigns from Clinton had nothing on crap sourced from 4chan.<p>If you watch the election coverage from 2016, they were going on about Russia minutes after Trump clinched it. Minutes. All together. And this shit is still going on. I was trapped in Atlanta airport shortly after the election and CNN had 4 hours of shameless Russia Russia Russia propaganda. And they're still at it. Joe McCarthy would have died of shame before carrying on like this.<p>Anyone interested in how propaganda really works needs to consider the top down, nationwide, nonstop campaign to destroy the president. Even if you hate the guy, consider just how much power is being exerted to negate an election. It's interesting if you look at this--because it's actual power, unlike silly two-bit posts on Facebook.<p>That same power could plausibly be turned in the opposite direction, and the left will be utterly staggered, like fish out of water.
The ranking history for this post is weird (<a href="http://hnrankings.info/18710482/" rel="nofollow">http://hnrankings.info/18710482/</a>):<p>21:10 - 7<p>21:15 - 4<p>21:20 - 2<p>21:25 - 1<p>21:30 - 1<p>21:35 - 26<p>21:40 - 27
The scale was massive, yet no one noticed this astroturfing campaign until the election... and this astroturfing campaign dwarfed all other competing astroturfing campaigns by other states/NGO factions?<p>All this talk of Russia astroturfing without any additional context, as if they're the only party astroturfing (Democrat-affiliated ShareBlue, for example, was kicked out of a large subreddit due to astroturfing)...