At least to me, living in Europe, the writing on the wall is that anonymous social media - or more likely internet as a whole - is going to end over here.
I figure this is why some platforms, like X, are trying so hard to leverage their political power. They know that some verification / KYC measures are coming, and that they'll get fined or blocked if they can't follow those regulations.
One of the videos uses the non-existent word prawilny, which is Russian (правильный). The Polish equivalent would be prawidłowy or właściwy.
It might not be taking people's money, but it's taking away access to truth through automated deception, which might even be worse.
Back when it took a madman to pollute discourse the public square, maybe you could have called it their right free speech, but this is not that. This is just computer assisted fraud, and exactly the kind of thing that computer hacking laws should be for.
But not all contexts. People are allowed to lie: e.g., I can tell my friend that a bag of Lay's chips has 0 calories and 100g protein, or (relevant here) that I'm Dua Lipa. People specifically aren't allowed to lie "officially": e.g., I can't sell Lay's chips with inaccurate nutrition facts, or present a fake ID that says I'm Dua Lipa to board a flight.
I think online should work roughly similarly. On the open web, using an AI-generated persona is like lying about your A/S/L, which is like other forms of lying: immoral, but not illegal. However, there should be "authentic" sites, where posting "inauthentic" content gets you banned by the site and maybe (if you're subverting bans) fined.
In fact, this is what we have today: sites have "terms of service", and although breaking them usually only gets you banned, I believe in most places you can technically be sued. The problem here is that popular social media sites don't enforce authenticity, and whoever's making these videos (if they're subverting bans) isn't getting fined.
I wish there were public studies like, 'We ran an experiment where young, attractive women wearing Polish clothing caused people who would naturally express these ideologies to stop scrolling more often than young, attractive women not wearing Polish clothing, for x demographic"
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.
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...
There was a vote. The public made their decision. Having carried out the vote it would have been political suicide to have ignored the result.
I think the result was wrong, and I think there should have been a defined threshold of 60% or similar, but those things aside the results were always going to be followed and honoured so long as the 50% threshold was exceeded.
The only way that the result could have been ignored would have been if the reply had been "we'll spend five years coming up with a plan, and let you vote on that" then hoping people forgot.
The whole vote was pointless, the possibilities of leaving so large and a single binary question captured none of the available options. Then the Tories locked in the most brutal exit they could and we were screwed.
But "advisory" was not even the top 50 things in the list of everything that went wrong.
I want future generations to have the power of anonymity, that some use that anonmyity for something I disagree with is precisely why I think it might be worth preserving.
There’s a difference between writing anonymously and assuming a false identity.
Whose identity is being faked?
I always grew up with the assumption that everything on the internet is most likely fake.
That girl you're talking to? Probably a dude. The Nigerian prince asking for money. Probably a scammer.
Unless it's a government website with secure ID login, every account you see online is probably fake.
It's not enabling speaking truth to power. It's letting the already powerful dictate the perception of truth.
Tbh the details don't really matter, what matters is that we ban this propaganda before it destroys us.
A lot of "speech" online isn't real humans voicing their opinions and having civilized discourse.
It's nation states and moneyed interests weaponizing our naïveté, using what are meant to be public squares as means of disseminating propaganda and dividing our societies.
People arguing for unrestricted free speech online are either complicit (e.g. Musk) or naive and being taken advantage of.
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).
free speech over the mail, phone, in writing, in books, in newspapers, in radio, in television, in shouting on the street
but not on the internet.
it's just irresponsible to allow someone to both reach millions of individuals, and be anonymous. either one, or the other.
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.
I think this is exactly the crux of the free speech issue - should manipulative false testimony be allowed? I'd say no, but others disagree.
What would these corrupt thieves do without their useful idiots?
But on the other hand, I do think someone type of content shouldn't be allowed... And it gives me a bit of cognitive dissonance. Take this polish AI crap for example: I think people should be able to freely speak about these issues, and I'm not opposed to them reaching for anonymity even through AI. But on the other hand, we also don't know if this is a foreign misinformation campaign or just a politically disgruntled Pole. I'm okay with the disgruntled Pole voicing their opinion, but I'm not okay with foreign actors manipulating people's opinions.
The videos contain at least one mistake that indicates that they were written by a native speaker of Russian (the use of the word prawilny, which is a Russian word (правильный) and doesn't exist in Polish).
It's circumstantial evidence, granted, but enough to point at a Russian origin, at least in the absence of further information.
"Gee whiz, I never thought about it that way before now, but that 15 second clip of an AI-generated woman regurgitating platitudes really changed my mind. It was so profound that I sat in stupor and thought to myself, 'Who is this woman?' I clicked on her profile and saw that her name is Anna. Thanks, Anna."
This all goes away with education. Anna doesn't harass you, you must look for Anna.