Re:Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online convers...
by sitkack on Saturday December 13, 2014 @06:10PM
(#8746832)
It is the same problem as credit card fraud detection on an ecommerce site. Naive stuff is easy, as the fraud gets more sophisticated it is indistinguishable from human traffic. It isn't just that bots will post stories, but the bots are controlled by persona-amplification software, so a single person could control 100+ bots, tweaking and modifying their behavior while keeping a 2k view of the conversation.
Look at some of the other comments on this very thread. Not the top vote-getters, but the ones that must have gotten two or three upvotes apiece. Several of those could easily have been generated by an AI designed to rephrase an already-popular view, perhaps with a pop culture reference or two thrown in to make it seem more authentic. Voila, instant karma, which can then be used in the ways the original presentation suggested to influence who reads what.
It only seems easy until you spend five minutes thinking about it.