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.

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.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

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(2022)