Attempts to manipulate public perception are usually launched as campaigns with lots of content pushing the same message, often in different ways. In the case of mass media, for example, you could detect manipulation efforts by finding commonalities across multiple articles from one media outlet or by finding commonalities across multiple media outlets. It's possible you could distill this down to something like "From October 14 through October 23, content from media outlets X, Y, and Z seem to be correlated and are pushing the same message, and that message is ---".
Having that knowledge would be extremely powerful, effectively neutering manipulation efforts by identifying them as such. A person is far less susceptible to manipulation if they are aware of the belief that the manipulator is attempting to instill in their mind.
In reality you can't, but most people seem to think you can. It can be enraging trying to debate things even on HN because people often ignore the actual content of what you're saying and try to figure out what you secretly think or meant. My guess is the way people "accomplish" this with AI is by training it to make major assumptions based on other things. It will have an abysmal error rate (just like it does now) but the vast majority of people won't ever notice, and the person speaking will never even know they were censored, let alone have a chance at clarification or God forbid, explaining the nuance.
You should be able to build a profile of a person based on adtech, credit score, and social credit score/surveillance. With enough data on everyone we could easily determine intent with AI.
Though for some reason minorities always have questionable intentions, but whatever, it’s basically a utopia already.
Having that knowledge would be extremely powerful, effectively neutering manipulation efforts by identifying them as such. A person is far less susceptible to manipulation if they are aware of the belief that the manipulator is attempting to instill in their mind.