[epistasis]

(We're not supposed to talk about downvotes, but boy have I seen my comments fluctuate up and down at the top, which is highly unusual. In most web open forums I take part in, anything connected to this brings in lots of "new" users, some or many of which end up being bots. I upvoted you, for the record.)

[RajT88]

Talking about social media strangeness.

I've noticed on Facebook that when you make a comment on a political article, you will sometimes - within a minute or two - start getting failed login attempts or password reset attempts on your account.

Given that your email address and phone are not visible unless you explicitly share them (and I use a pseudonym on FB), the implications are frankly chilling.

[epistasis]

Could be coincidence, could be a data leak from Meta that wasn't reported, could be outside groups using LLMs to match profiles of text to external sources that do have your name...

It's a wild world out there in political technology, and I probably can't even guess what's going on with half of it.

Way back in the early 2010s I went to a data science meetup, way before facial recognition and face processing was easy, and found out that Facebook was tracking the faces in every photo, building databases of locations, times, and people out of it all, even for people without accounts, etc. And that was just a side project! 15 years ago!

For motivated groups operating without the usual bounds of being part of the US government, the sky is the limit in what they can do. Buying data from Thompson Reuters is really mild compared to what I'm sure is going on inside of PACs within the US. When you add in the state groups operating outside the US on US social networks with the goal of spreading distrust and disunity, I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.

[RajT88]

> I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.

I can't prove it, but it sure looks like this is what's going on with some of the accounts which are posting anti-datacenter content on FB. Old ladies inactive for years who all of a sudden become super activists.

A wild world indeed, and frustratingly one that Meta doesn't seem bothered by. Presumably because it drives engagement.

[epistasis]

In addition to the immediate gains of engagement, the ability to manipulate public opinion through campaigns like this are pretty explicitly the goal of some Silicon Valley oligarchs, especially the PayPal Mafia. They believe that they can control the monster that they have created in their own favor. Time will tell!