You don't have to look far to know this hypothesis won't stand up to any scrutiny. Not only are TikTok users typically in the age range less likely to vote, but everyone is susceptible to propaganda and lies. There is a lot of US produced propaganda out there aimed at the older generations which is being lapped up by a public thirsty for negative partisanship and divisive rhetoric.
If the Tiktok generation has been undermined, then it's by the older generations who benefited from more favorable situations, grabbed the wealth and power for themselves, pulled the ladder up and now refuse to see how any of this is an issue and will fight to maintain an unequal situation as long as it favors them.
But that’s less my point, it’s more about the methods and attack vectors being an increased surface area now than ever before.
See here on why more so with TikTok generation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24614815
Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_management
“Chinese military scholars argue that their nation has a long history of conducting "psychological operations", a phrase that connotes important aspects of strategic deception and, to a certain degree, what the US Department of Defense portrays as perception management. For example, several articles published by the PLA's Academy of Military Science (AMS) journal Zhongguo Junshi Kexue, examine psychological warfare and psychological operations mainly as a deception-oriented function of military strategy.”
China are extremely skilled at psyops.
Citation needed. Come on.
My pessimistic side says they probably are, and maybe they even did.
https://www.thinkbox.tv/research/thinkbox-research/a-matter-...
[1] CIA didn't exist before 1947, so it would have to have been a different they for late 1920s, or even a different medium for "Remember the Maine!"
Bonus blog: https://joshuaspodek.com/north-korean-propaganda-our-adverti...
Would that influence anybody?
Also 60 seconds of video is a ton of information. And it’s not just one video at a time. The total session aggregated per user per active user is way higher than that. These are behaviors where users use the app all day. Their entire worldview is based on the content within the social network experience.
seek variety of manipulated information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24600424
systematically analyse received information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897577
analyse especially source levels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24459177
compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403135 and remember we may have evolved big energy-guzzling brains in order to see through primate politics.
The Arthashastra recommends never acting on intelligence which hasn't been confirmed through at least three independent channels. Russian, swiss, and US secondary sources agree on the the underlying events of that scenario. I guess if the soviets really had had a highly-placed mole like Stierlitz, they could have done more, perhaps have been subtly encouraging top nazis first to prioritise ideology over pragmatism and then to get into speed, into the occult, and into the bunker.
However, I think a simpler explanation for the later events of 1945 would be: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401308
====
Nighttime, 1944 Berlin: A ushanka-wearing man with skis and a parachute creeps silently along the hallway of an apartment building. He raps quickly on one of the doors.
A dishelved german in nightcap and house shoes opens after a few minutes.
"The eagles fly over the campfire. Repeat: the eagles fly over the campfire!" whispers the man in the hallway.
"Sorry," says the german, "I'm Otto Stierlitz the plumber, born 1904. You want Otto von Stierlitz the spy, born 1899. He lives up on the third floor."
A single 60 second video is not materially useful. But steady repetitive exposure to the same or similar messaging videos, is the foundation of TV advertising. There is likely some useful weaponization in there somewhere when the videos can be made without the assistance of a Madison Avenue crew and contract, and the consumers are pecking at the screen for more videos for long stretches of time like a pigeon in a psychology experiment.
Someone is going to try something to achieve controlled/directed opinion shaping with that kind of mass population behavior in a relatively regulation-free context compared to conventional centralized media. It has to be too tempting a centralized target to leave alone. Opinion shaping in these channels already is being attempted commercially. I'd like to hear from domain experts whether the metrics bear out such efforts actually work in the commercial sector, and if other domain experts in politics and defense think such experience warrants those sectors dabbling in making their own attempts.
Follow the trail of information. Look into what’s going in across the stack hardware to software to networks. There’s a massive shift the past couple years.
At which point you’re being disingenuous.
The zoomers are entirely on internet platforms which has a higher degree of manipulation. Every single person is mined against. Every single person gets optimized against. There’s more room for coercion based on the algorithmic use targeting demographics, and with the capability of individual optimization with machine learning tech.
If the typical “hacker” can launch a botnet with GPT2 and automate conversation and thread demographics based on interactions putting a “group” into a human in loop pattern with a goal ... imagine what state actors are doing.
It scares me everytime I think about it how little $$ you need in order to reach e.g Reddit's front page.
It’s incredibly alarming what one can do with very little resources.
It’s downright horrifying or exciting when realizing what one can do with more than average resources.
In a way, that’s why I think the battleground is more “weird” than ever. It’s not just state actors, it’s factions of organized and convergent groups using memetic warfare. Some groups naturally converge towards each other. Take the anon’s, and various sects then overlay it with state actor and your smaller groups. Weird nameless stuff of massive influence and self organization.
That is more than enough boomers being algorithmically swayed to alter an election. As has been shown (Cambridge Analytica, etc...) Facebook's segmentation arguably offers more power to target it's user than Tiktok does.
Heck, people made this argument for the printing press.
Yes, ads have always been this. But no, it’s never been like this.
All that data on the internet is being used to train algorithms to sway global sentiment. This emerges as bots, ads, interactions, content. It’s mind blowing.
Unlike the Boomers, who most definitely haven't been brainwashed by right-wing propaganda on Facebook and Fox News?
You’re absolutely correct that brainwashing happens on those mediums. It’s entirely interesting on one hand and entirely alarming on another. At this rate I’m not sure what the world at large can do given the technology out there to manipulate the populace. It leads to some very critical questions on how to exist.
Look into what is mined. Look into how algorithms get optimized to influence behavior. See a recent paper on this with using social media to shut down a power plant. Memetic warfare is real and it’s been going on in cyberspace for a while now. Every single bit of information is manipulation.
Every social network is a memetic warfare piece and TikTok is a primary target.
Lol at the downvoting. Bunch of brainwashed people here already.