> Someone (Russia)

One of the videos uses the non-existent word prawilny, which is Russian (правильный). The Polish equivalent would be prawidłowy or właściwy.

How is this different from hiring actors to do guerilla marketing, or hiring influencers to pretend to like something, both of which happen constantly?

Something can be simultaneously "dope" and also very obviously extremely destructive to society if one looks past the tip of their nose. Let's try not to get too excited by those things.

Not exactly the same, but I've seen some studies where people are shown things, art, music, people, cars, etc and asked to rate them.

Its very easy to influence their rating by showing them fake ratings from other people.

Additionally they can show who rated it a certain way and influence the test subjects ratings even more.

It is scientifically proven that people don’t change channels on TV if the ad has a dog in it. I don’t see why this can’t apply to people on screen as well.

I doubt Brexit would've been much different. The constituency nature of UK general elections means that a substantial majority of MPs knew they had to support it even though it was only a 48-52 split in a supposedly advisory referendum.

But to the extent that it might have been different, the many incompatible visions for it that gridlocked UK politics might have coalesced into a single vision, and while that would still have been worse than not having done Brexit as all, it might have been less bad than five mutually incompatible visions that got brushed under the carpet long enough to make it happen only by Boris Johnson promising all things to all people.

OTOH, things can be much much worse than Brexit. Musk's tweets about civil war in the UK, his willingness to support people too far right to even be in the most far-right of the top 8 polling parties, what Grok calls itself…

On that kind of theme, there's a psych study, Robbers Cave, worth reading about. Also note some summaries fail to mention that both groups resented being manipulated by the researchers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb...

I mean... They still voted to leave and we didn't have the technology... so... can't have been worse, hah!

> Propaganda? Sure, but no one is being defrauded.

The problem with your position is that if a government, say Poland's, created a structure tasked with producing AI videos defending EU membership, or some other initiative beneficial to the people, the media would scream bloody murder by way of vicious government propaganda.

And then people like you are nowhere to be found to speak up in defense of the government.

I'm not saying that any government propaganda is good, but in cases like this, laying down like a beaten dog is worse. In other words, a solution is necessary and the government should be the initiator and a part of it.

Media-government relations are an unsolved problem which, unfortunately, doesn't depend only on the two of them... but I'm getting into the can of worms I promised not to open this year.

There is a difference between hiding your identity for the purpose of privacy and for the purpose of deception.

There’s a difference between writing anonymously and assuming a false identity.

Because it takes power to do massive AI influence operations.

It's not enabling speaking truth to power. It's letting the already powerful dictate the perception of truth.

I’m more interested in how you’d restrict speech, in a way that isn’t ineffective or corrupted.

Right now I think that free speech, like decentralization, should exist as a safety net. So most people use centralized platforms where bad content (e.g. this) is censored, but the open internet still exists, if only to keep the centralized platforms in line by providing alternatives if they degrade (e.g. if government propaganda gets so bad that it clearly and significantly contradicts people’s beliefs and real-life experiences).

Indeed. This was not such an issue when everybody had their own website or blog or whatever, and you had to seek out content intentionally... It's the active intervention of an algorithmic megaphone that is causing the damage. To me this is when it stops being free speech and starts being corporate policy that needs to be regulated.

But without free speech you run the risk of not being able to speak out against this exact type of activity.

Imo this isn't a free speech issue, it's fraud, you can criminalize this type of manipulative false testimony without encroaching on freedom of speech.

Yes. It's propaganda, not speech. Also the algorithms favor this sh*t. Also this massive generation of content floods the zone[1]. There is nothing "freedom of choice" about it if it resurfaces all the time. Upvotes/Views count disproportionally in most social media against downvotes/"not interested" (tiktok is better but even there you can't downvote enough AI-videos for them to not resurface. Probably because the algorithm isn't good enough to understand what is AI and what not, so these downvotes often don't count against AI).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

Or bots.

The biggest, loudest, most powerful proponents of free speech don't actually believe in it. Musk bans and fires anyone who disagrees with him. Donald Trump rails against news articles and media companies who publish information he personally doesn't like, all while both of them blame the EU for violating a supposed free speech standard that they themselves hate, and also one the EU never really adhered to.

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