There's a problem of adversarial attack right now.
An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
They can do that by flooding the public square of free opinions (the internet), with disinformation, fake data, lies of omissions, lack of contextualization, attacking all others personally, ridiculing them, etc.
All they have to do is put doubt in people's mind, keep the focus on others, and appeal to emotions of more and more people slowly.
They can do that because they are free to do it.
Then they can gain the political power from it, and slowly replace institutional power with loyalists working for them.
Once they've managed to get enough loyalist in place through this method, they can remove the right to free speech and take over as a fascist or dictator, or other more authoritarian measures.
Then they can continue the same speech they've always been pushing as propaganda, even denying the removal, bans, jailing, and all that of their opposition, and voila.
This is a pretty straightforward playbook. It's played out many times before.
You can call it a soft-coup:
> populists who seek the centralization of power but do so under the pretense of improving democracy
At least to me, it's very obvious our system is susceptible to this kind of adversarial attack. I don't know the solution, you don't want to prevent this attack but enable another one in doing so, but it's a huge threat vector and I'd hope we recognize it and do something to mitigate it.
>There's a problem of adversarial attack right now.
>An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
Appealing to emotions and attempting to label your opponents as corrupt and soft on crime is as old as politics itself. Convincing people to vote for you is not a soft-coup.
The platforms should be the ones who should decide how their algorithms promote information and shouldn't be pressured or controlled by whoever the current party is in power at that moment. The benchmark should be - would you want a Trump DHS with the power to change their censorship policies however they liked?
If online speech should be regulated by the government, pass legislation, don't backdoor it in a risky and unilateral manner through law enforcement.
> attempting to label your opponents as corrupt and soft on crime is as old as politics itself. Convincing people to vote for you is not a soft-coup.
From my understanding of political history, it used to be more common to talk about your policies and what you plan to do to win votes, and something related to Newt Gingrich started a new trend of being more on the attack/discrediting towards others, and it escalated from there.
But the important part isn't that piece, but what followed in what I said, it's the second stratagem to put loyalists in place that is the key to performing a soft-coup. Something you cannot do when moderates abound, it requires focusing on strong cult-like minority, that are really loyal, and slowly replacing key government roles with people you pick for their loyalty to you and not their qualifications.
It's that second part that's all the difference here.
> If online speech should be regulated by the government, pass legislation, don't backdoor it in a risky and unilateral manner through law enforcement.
I don't disagree, to be clear, I'm not saying this in favor of the DHS program, I don't know what the right defensive measures against this would be, that also wouldn't cause other bigger risks, but I think it's a vector for attack we currently are vulnerable too and I'd like to see it delt with.
Your understanding of political history is very limited and simply wrong. Look deeper at the history of 19th century campaigns. There was plenty of attacking and discrediting going on, often using language that would shock modern readers.
Thanks, I went and read about it, it's interesting. It is unclear how it stopped exactly and why it changed, apart from making ballot booths, but it does seem to be making a comeback.
Still, in any case, just to be extra clear, this isn't the issue I'm calling out, the adversarial attack is in-combination with the setting up of loyalists and the overthrow.
That a campaign can be won by crude measures of appeal to emotions and discrediting of your opponents is a bit sad, but it isn't as much a problem if it is just a method for election.
The problem I see is afterwards, are the checks in place to make sure that you cannot instate loyalists, and change the rules themselves to entrench yourself. It's this second part that is the soft-coup.
I think it’s effective because the message is simple and scaled in coordinated fashion. To effectively answer to such an attack you need to massively distribute among the users refutals to every part of the attack message, with reputable sources and it needs to be brief enough so people don’t lose interest halfway. It could take a form of browser extension or a separate site with a dialogue tree of sorts where one participant is propaganda bot and the other the site user. Then users need to publicly post these (i guess you can ask fellas for help?).
> An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
> They can do that by flooding the public square of free opinions (the internet), with disinformation, fake data, lies of omissions, lack of contextualization, attacking all others personally, ridiculing them, etc.
> They can do that because they are free to do it.
> Then they can gain the political power from it, and slowly replace institutional power with loyalists working for them.
> Once they've managed to get enough loyalist in place through this method, they can remove the right to free speech and take over as a fascist or dictator, or other more authoritarian measures.
This is more or less what the woke left has done to a lot of cultural institutions, with universities requiring political loyalty oaths. They just don't rely on a strongman to enforce their will the way populist movements do since wokeness is a distinctly professional-managerical class movement. But they've systematically taken control of most places of cultural power in the US.
An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
They can do that by flooding the public square of free opinions (the internet), with disinformation, fake data, lies of omissions, lack of contextualization, attacking all others personally, ridiculing them, etc.
All they have to do is put doubt in people's mind, keep the focus on others, and appeal to emotions of more and more people slowly.
They can do that because they are free to do it.
Then they can gain the political power from it, and slowly replace institutional power with loyalists working for them.
Once they've managed to get enough loyalist in place through this method, they can remove the right to free speech and take over as a fascist or dictator, or other more authoritarian measures.
Then they can continue the same speech they've always been pushing as propaganda, even denying the removal, bans, jailing, and all that of their opposition, and voila.
This is a pretty straightforward playbook. It's played out many times before.
You can call it a soft-coup:
> populists who seek the centralization of power but do so under the pretense of improving democracy
At least to me, it's very obvious our system is susceptible to this kind of adversarial attack. I don't know the solution, you don't want to prevent this attack but enable another one in doing so, but it's a huge threat vector and I'd hope we recognize it and do something to mitigate it.