Remember when the iPhone came out and BlackBerry smugly advertised that their products were “tools not toys”?
I remember saying to someone at the time that I was pretty sure iPhone was going to get secure corporate email and device management faster than BlackBerry was going to get an approachable UI, decent camera, or app ecosystem.
Until the AI can master the art of creating "footage of someone's phone if they were in the crowd of the speech in this other video", then we can't even trust that.
What officials actually say doesn't make a difference anymore. People do not get bamboozled because of lack of facts. People who get bamboozled are past facts.
Off topic from the video AI thread, but to elaborate on your point: people believe what they want, based on what they have been primed to believe from mass media. This is mainly the normal TV and paper news, filtered through institutions like government proclamations, schools, and now supercharged by social media. This is why the "narrative" exists, and news media does the consensus messaging of what you should believe (and why they hate X and other freer media sources).
By the time the politician says it, you've been soaking in it for weeks or months, if not longer. That just confirms the bias that has been implanted in you.
If anything I'd say the opposite. Look at the last US elections, a lot of the criticisms against the side that lost were things people "thought" and "felt" they were for/against, without them actually coming out and saying anything of the like. It was people criticising them for stuff that wasn't actually real on X, traditional TV, and the like that made voters "feel" like that stuff is real.
And X is really egregious, where the owner shitposts frequently and often things of dubious factuality.
You say offtopic, but I think AI video generation is the most on-topic place to bring up the subject of falsified politically charged statements. Companies showcasing these things aren't exactly lining up to include "moral" as one of the bullet point adjectives in a limitations section.
It's not impossible, but of course they're not homegrown.
Putin's apologists always demand he be given the benefit of the doubt. That's akin to convicting a spy beyond a reasonable doubt. That standard is meant to favor false negatives over false positives when incarcerating people. Better to let a thousand criminals go free than to imprison an innocent person.
If we used that for spies, we'd have 1000 of them running around for each convicted one. Not to mention that they have a million ways to avoid detection. They rely on their training, on the resources of the state, and on infiltrators who sabotage detection efforts. The actual ratio would be much higher.
In the case of opinion manipulation, the balance is even more pernicious. That's because the West decided a couple decades ago to use the "it's just a flesh wound" approach to foreign interference.
The problem is that we're not just protecting gullible voters. We're also defending the reputation of democracy. Either democracy works, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we're philosophically no better than Russia and China.
But if it was possible to control the outcome of elections by online manipulation alone, that would imply that democracy doesn't really work. Therefore online manipulation "can't work." Officially, it might sway opinion by a few points, but a majority of voters must definitionally be right. If manipulation makes little difference, then there's not much reason to fight it (or too openly anyways.)
Paradoxically, when it comes to detecting Russian voter manipulation, the West and Putin are strange bedfellows. Nothing to see here, move along.
My sense is that the "hivemind" is, in a symbiotic way, both homegrown and significantly foreign-influnced.
More specifically: the core sentiment of the hivemind (basically: anti-war/anti-interventionist mixed with a broader distrust of anything the perceived "establishment" supports) is certainly indigenous -- and it is very important to not overlook this fact.
But many of its memes, and its various nuggets of disinformation do seem to be foreign imports. This isn't just an insinuation; sometimes the lineage can actually be traced word-for-word with statements originating from foreign sources (for example, "8 years of shelling the Donbas").
The memes don't create the sentiment. But they do seem to reinforce it, and provide it with a certain muscle and kick. While all the while maintaining the impression that it's all entirely homegrown.
And the farther one goes down the "multipolar" rabbit hole, the more often one encounters not just topical memes, but signature phrases lifted directly from known statements by Putin and Lavrov themselves. E.g. that Ukraine urgently needs to "denazify". The more hardcore types even have no qualms about using that precious phrase "Special Military Operation", with a touch of pride in their voice.
It's really genuinely weird, what's happening. What people don't realize is that none of this is happening by accident. It's a very specific craft that the Russian security services (in particular) have nurtured and developed, literally across generations, to create language that pushes people's buttons in this way.
The Western agencies and institutions have their own way of propaganda of course, but usually it's far more bland and boring (e.g. as to how NATO "supports fosters broader European integration" and all that).
Would we have the same kind of hivemind without Putin? There's always some kind of a hivemind -- but as applies to Eastern Europe, it does seem that the general climate of discourse was quite different before his ascendancy. And that it certainly took a very sharp, weird bend in the road after the start of Special Military Operation.
What are you talking about? News media LOVE twitter/X, it is where they get all their stories from and journalists are notoriously addicted to it, to their detriment.
