
Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate - jseliger
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/01/authoritarians-distract-rather-debate.html
======
importantbrian
This reminds me of the storyline from Newsroom where Neal tries to infiltrate
the troll underground. The scary thing is how effective this kind of
manipulation can be. I often check the comments on HN before reading the
article to see if it's going to be worth my time. With sports or controversial
news articles I love to jump to the comments to see what the debate is. I like
to think of myself as a critical thinker, but I often find myself getting
swept up in my own confirmation bias. Upvoting the comments I agree with and
downvoting those I don't, almost mindlessly without really evaluating the
arguments. It's the more modern version of the cable news network shows where
they put a Republican on one side and a Democrat on the other and let them
yell their talking points at each other while the host interjects every so
often to stir the pot. I hate that it appeals to me, but something about my
base nature is attracted to it like a moth to a flame.

~~~
fedups
As you note, this level of self-awareness may not be sufficient, but is
probably at least necessary for information sources to provide the kind of
value we expect from them.

It's still encouraging to see, though.

------
clairity
i'd say our political machine in the US has done a great job for the last 35
years at distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth
disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who
uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance.

if recent political movements (tea party, the 99%) and national elections have
taught us anything, it's that this is increasingly on the minds of americans
(and seemingly others, but i won't speak for them), yet politicians seem to
want to talk about anything but that, lest they lose the financial backing of
the economic elite.

at its core, this is about fairness, which is one of those fundamental
psychological forces we can't and shouldn't ignore. game theory studies show
time and again that we are willing to play into lose-lose situations if it
means maintaining a semblance of fairness among participants. the trump
election seems to be an example of that. the arab spring uprisings seem to be
larger, more international examples.

we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of
wealth disparity every single time they try to distract us with something else
(particularly terrorism, which has killed far fewer people in the last 15
years than a single year of car accidents has, yet we have sacrificed so much
monetarily and psychologically trying to battle that phantom).

~~~
alasdair_
>biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity

Serious question, not trolling: why does wealth disparity matter?

Let's say you start the year barely having enough to eat and are living in a
cardboard box and you end the year with plenty of food and a small house, why
would it matter if your neighbor gets to eat steak once a week and has a
slightly nicer house? Surely the absolute fact that your are better off than
you were previously is more important than the relative distribution of goods?

A quick way to reduce wealth disparity is to burn down every home that costs
more than the median house price. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.

So why is relative wealth more important than absolute wealth again?

~~~
dguest
Maybe a slightly bigger house is tolerable, but if my neighbor is making 10
times more than me and is able to buy his way out of legal trouble while I
have to abide by the rule of law, I'm one of three things: lazy, inferior, or
getting screwed. To maintain my faith in capitalist democracy in the face of
large wealth inequality you have to convince me that one of these three
options is acceptable.

Most poor people I know wouldn't consider themselves lazy, so that one is out.
With some serious social engineering and propaganda you may be able to
convince the poor that they are inherently inferior, but the trend in most of
the world seems to be against this sticking. So in most cases wealth disparity
means that the poor people feel like they are getting screwed, i.e. they feel
entitled to a better life, and they feel that their institutions have failed
them.

Look at any country with a high Gini Coefficient and you can see what this
leads to. The rich end up corralled into compounds surrounded by razor wire
and electric fences, kidnapping runs rampant, political corruption is the
rule. With no reason to believe that the government is working for the
underclass, you can't really expect the underclass to abide by the
government's laws.

------
analyst74
This is really scary, because I do read comments critically, and have seen
those sections being flooded with nonsense, or convincing arguments being
pushed without evidence. Heck, this even happens on HackerNews, which users
are thoughtful hackers and which are secretly trying to push an agenda? Or is
there even a line between those?

Now some food for thought, does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful
more than the general public?

~~~
AngrySkillzz
Pushing an agenda is one thing if the person is doing it in good faith, even
if I think their ideas are bad or not supported by evidence. In all likelihood
there are large scale information operations going on with world powers trying
to subvert each other's populations.

The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full
time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is
just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have
the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it this weekend and it sounds bleak. Not
only do they spread misinformation, the presence of bad faith actors in social
spaces causes a breakdown in trust between all participants, leading to less
dialogue and more polarization. Why bother debating me if I might be a paid
agent from Belarus? Why bother investigating claims from the other side of an
issue if there's a good chance it is paid propaganda? Meanwhile leaving
yourself vulnerable to propaganda on your own side that increases group
identity and groupthink.

Even worse, bad actors can start trends or spread falsehoods that end up
motivating and encouraging good faith actors. There are plenty of people who
have been caught up in an information operation, unwittingly propagating and
defending someone else's manufactured data. That's scary.

Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public
opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do
anything. Manipulating the public in democracies will lead to poor decisions
and bad governance, giving authoritarian countries ample opportunities to
seize more power on the world stage. We can't even fight back effectively.

~~~
MaysonL
_The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full
time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is
just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have
the resources to combat armies of paid trolls._

What's the difference between this and a lot of PR?

~~~
MagnumOpus
Secrecy and deception. Advertising and corporate PR are open about their
interests, purveyors of payola and positive-reviews-for-freebies are usually
recognisable and the people involved often admit it.

Outright fabrication of big lies by paid PR/psyops operatives who pretend to
be "one of us" is a different kettle of fish, and if it is repeated
thousandfold, even people who are normally skeptic might at least perceive it
as a plausible mainstream view.

------
monocle
In China the government hires people to sway public opinion. In the US,
special interests and those with money do it. Is it worse that the Chinese
government does it to "keep the peace", while those in the US do it to get
your money? Super PACs, political activists, pharmaceutical companies, Reddit
power users, brigades and pay-for-votes services... not sure if there's any
real difference.

~~~
Chickenality
One major difference is how concentrated the special interests are. In the
case of the Chinese government, public opinion is being swayed by a single
entity. In the US, a large number of interest groups are all competing to try
to sway public opinion. In the latter case, I think it's harder (at least in
principle) for any one group to have a large effect on its own.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Except, centralization of wealth means that the opinions of a relatively few
people control the seeming surface diversity of "influencers" in the USA by
holding the purse strings (when the proles resort to crowd funding they can
break out of this to an extent, Bernie being an example).

~~~
stcredzero
The elites rig the elections and the public sphere, while the proles use the
one election where they can still sway the vote to vote for dangerous
populists as a protest.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw)

Old republican values are relegated to the dustbin, and a civilization becomes
a shadow of its former self. This has happened before, and will happen again.

------
tristanj
I'm not sure what's especially revealing about this story. A lot of the
content we already knew, except now there's more evidence of it. The
marginalrevolution author wrongly suggests that "it has long been assumed that
propaganda posts would support the government with praise or criticize critics
of the government" and says it's surprising this paper found it wasn't. This
is no surprise, others have concluded this before this has been known probably
a decade.

Kudos for the authors to write this paper though, it takes courage to do this.

For most people skimming the comment section, this interview here with a paid
Chinese "online commentator" is far more revealing than submitted article is:

[http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/10/china%...](http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/10/china%E2%80%99s-paid-
trolls-meet-50-cent-party)

The commentator estimates 10-20% of posts on Chinese media are by "online
commentators" like him, and he also talks about the methods he uses to guide
and manipulate the discussion.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Gary King is a pretty prominent political scientist. It's unlikely that this
is unoriginal work. Yes, that's an appeal to authority, but I think the
methods used are what's novel. And don't discount just having some evidence!

Here's the article:

[http://gking.harvard.edu/50c](http://gking.harvard.edu/50c)

edit: it's also in the apsr, which is one of _the_ poli sci journals.

There are a lot less people doing this kind of analysis in an academic setting
than one might expect.

------
cryoshon
Yep. This is real in the US, too:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JTRIG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JTRIG) &
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Counterte...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Counterterrorism_Communications)
&
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice).
Sure, these are officially targeted at enemies of the state, outside the US.

But we have proof that they lie about these things preventatively as well as
reactively.

I imagine that in China as well as here, their shills are skilled at
disruption and redirection.

------
bbctol
Title might want to be altered: this is a description of a specific research
paper analyzing Chinese online propaganda campaigns, not as general an
analysis as the title indicates. Interesting stuff!

~~~
nabla9
RAND has study says the same about Russia.

The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model Why It Might Work and
Options to Counter It
[http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html](http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html)

~~~
cryoshon
Thanks for the excellent link, I've been looking for a documentary on Putin's
propaganda regime that I saw a few years ago, but this paper is a much deeper
look which will serve the same purpose.

~~~
alphonsegaston
If you want more context on Putin's regime, check out, "Nothing is True and
Everything is Possible" by Peter Pomerantsev. It's an inside view of Russian
life/propaganda from someone who worked as a TV producer for a Russian
network:

[https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-
Surr...](https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-
Surreal/dp/1610396006)

------
aaron-lebo
Pretty fascinating stuff.

I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is, but Correct the
Record was a very real thing, despite the bogeyman descriptions of it in some
online communities.

[https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997](https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record)

Interestingly, the original website is now gone, but it used to say
essentially that it advocated for Clinton across Reddit, Facebook, Twitter,
and other forms of social media.

[http://www.correctrecord.org/](http://www.correctrecord.org/)

The scary thing is just how cheap it would be to pay people to sit in online
communities and drive attention to and away from whatever you wanted. Even
more interesting is in 10 years it'll be like it never existed. Spread some
propaganda, pack up, and go home.

~~~
LyndsySimon
> I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is

In all seriousness - it's /pol/. See also /r/The_Donald, gab.ai, and a handful
of niche forums.

As an aside, I'm sad that gab.ai hasn't seen adoption outside that political
group. It's really got a lot of potential as a platform.

~~~
MichaelGG
Do you have any links about paid propaganda on /pol/?

~~~
LyndsySimon
I've not seen any allegations of that.

I'm not saying it's paid, I'm saying it's his propaganda arm. They serve the
function, officially or not.

------
devoply
> …find a massive government effort, where every year the 50c party writes
> approximately 448 million social media posts nationwide. About 52.7% of
> these posts appear on government sites. The remaining 212 million posts are
> inserted into the stream of approximately 80 billion total posts on
> commercial social media sites, all in real time. If these estimates are
> correct, a large proportion of government web site comments, and about one
> of every 178 social media posts on commercial sites, are fabricated by the
> government. The posts are not randomly distributed but, as we show in Figure
> 2, are highly focused and directed, all with specific intent and content.

This is massive. But I am sure Western governments are paying attention as to
how to combat online opinion using similar tactics. But I doubt they can match
that sort of scale with their economies. Indian freelancers aren't really
going to be that convincing to the American public.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
>But I doubt they can match that sort of scale with their economies.

Chatbots scale much easier than manual astroturfing.

------
lacampbell
This makes me wonder more at the pro-Chinese position of a lot of western
media, particularly the New York Times. Its fairly telling that Taiwan is most
often described as a "renegade province" as opposed to a "peaceful high-income
democracy", for example.

Having talked to a lot of English speaking, wealthy, educated, overseas
Chinese people I am always disturbed at how many of them take communist party
positions, despite being able to google "Tiananmen Square". More disturbing
when they weren't even born in China.

~~~
mturmon
Googling:

    
    
      [site:nytimes.com] [renegade] [province]
    

turns up only things like:

    
    
      "Beijing has maintained that Taiwan is a renegade province..."
    

which is perfectly factual.

I do agree with your larger point that a lot of stories in Western media are
uncritical of the shortcomings and risks of the Chinese political system.

~~~
paradite
That's interesting. Can you recommend me some pro-China Western media? I am
having trouble finding one.

~~~
mturmon
I should be more precise. I'm trying to say that much Western writing is not
critical of the decisions the Chinese political system has made about how
society is organized there, despite its costs for the country. (E.g., the fast
building of roads, trains, and infrastructure; the responsiveness of its
electronics industry -- these things have costs for the people of China, but
their benefits are very unequally distributed.)

I didn't mean to suggest that there is widespread Western cheerleading for
China's political system, especially recently as Xi Jinpeng has consolidated
power. What I was trying to capture is Western willingness to overlook the
costs.

~~~
paradite
On the contrary, I keep getting the sort of news that you are missing, on my
daily dose of social media. Just yesterday, I got this:

[http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-
lot-...](http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-more-
come-it-waste-money-china-has-built-worlds-largest)

And plenty more critical of govt decisions (ghost city, pollution, food
safety) from this particular Facebook page which is quite popular for news in
China:

[https://www.facebook.com/shanghaiist/](https://www.facebook.com/shanghaiist/)

------
grabcocque
Thank god media doesn't try to distract us with trivial minutiae in the West,
eh?

------
ghempton
In the actual paper
([http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf](http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf)),
the authors say they asked hundreds of Weibo (a chinese social media site)
posters the following question:

> "I saw your comment, it’s really inspiring, I want to ask, do you have any
> public opinion guidance management, or online commenting experience?"

After tallying up, 19% of the people who post online answered yes.

------
DenisM
There is something new going on in the social network realm that can undermine
trolling efforts as they exist today.

Social networks started appearing when tech adoption was relatively scarce.
They predate the smartphone revolution. As such they had to bend out of shape
to produce as much public or semi-public content in order to attract and
engage enough users to sustain the network effects. The direct side effect of
this approach is transparency of the discussion. People who disagree would
butt heads because the feel the need to defend "their side" in "public". A
manipulation agent can assess the current state of discussion as well as the
immediate outcome of his actions, so that he can fine-tune his campaigns.

Now that the smartphone adoption is basically 100%, it becomes possible to
build private social networks without making everything public or semi-public.
The ones where content is only posted/shared in a close group and is not
observable by trolls. No shares, no reposts, no likes, no "people are
talking". Nothing. How would you use Snapchat to assess and manipulate the
public opinion? The best you can do is check the hits on your web site. What
if you lost even that to some sort of caching? Now you're flying completely
blind.

Pretty much every popular messenger app has the potential to mutate into an
opaque social network. Perhaps many already did.

~~~
buzzybee
It correlates with my theory of Endless September someday having an end. The
problem of Endless September was growth - too much growth, too quickly. When
that stops, and unless we experience an AI personhood event, it has to,
because we only have so many people on the planet and so much data they can
transmit - the network settles into a place where it can focus on quality
instead of sheer scale. In the developed world we are likely already entering
this phase, with online access surpassing 80%, and the rest of the world is
not that far behind.

So then what happens? The business model changes. Social network technologies
will re-commoditize and the value will return to communities. Privacy takes a
bigger role, as you note. And the world, for better or worse(but probably
better), becomes even weirder and harder to assess or manipulate top-down.

------
chillingeffect
There is no doubt that memes and social media have been militarized for
propaganda use. This presentation from a consulting agency to many U.S. TLAs
and defense contractors outlines the strategies and contains numerous
references to DoD work in the area. It gives models, tells what metrics to
use, identifies roles, etc.

[http://robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/military-
memetics](http://robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/military-memetics)

Either find the PDF halfway down, or just go here:
[http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Presentat...](http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Presentation%20Military%20Memetics%20Tutorial%20Conference%2013%20Dec%2011.pdf)

And here is their 1,680 page compendium of ~100 papers on the subject which
they used as references:
[http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Memetics%...](http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Memetics%20Compendium%205%20February%2009.pdf)

Distraction is a tactic, but it's only a single tool in the strategy. It's
also relevant _when_ to distract, when to counter, when to ignore, etc.

------
tunesmith
It's a cultural problem. There's always been these two styles of communication
- one where you communicate to honestly express your views, and another where
you communicate to put across an impression that is useful for your agenda.
We're in an age now where the second style is making a huge comeback, from
state-sponsored propaganda to social media trolling.

------
VLM
Its interesting to compare the behavior observations in the article to the
concept of "concern trolling" which is almost the same.

------
xapata
bread and circus

We've known this for a few millenia.

------
general_ai
What is this political drivel doing on HN?

