From the desk of Ryan Kopf
CEO of AnimeCon.org
Hey fellow nerds! If you're anything like me, I bet you spend a lot of time on the internet. Some of it may be productive - computer programming lessons, welding lessons, Japanese language practice, videos of cool hydroponics. Some of it is just wasting time, for leisure, which is fine too.
But I've started to notice something. I hope you have too. More and more of this leisure scrolling has become... crap.
I wrote recently about the fact that your political opinions and believes are being targetted by powerful bot farms and fake accounts. But there's so much more going on than just that.
Corporations lie to us regularly.
Here's a video of all the big companies that supposedly left Russia as a result of the Ukrainian war. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/z5qBbvJHOg
Of course, the local owners could have just decided to switch up the names and sell off existing inventory - but how have they been getting new inventory for the past several years, without direct support from the companies?
Exxon Mobile, the gas and oil company, knew that climate change was real in 1977, and repeatedly funded lobbyists and public relations campaigns to deny it and to divert blame.
Facebook and Reddit are receiving millions of dollars aggressively advertising Temu - a shitty site like Wish.com that sells items I consider to be junk and promotes it as top quality, Amazon-equivalent products - and promoting articles like this one in the picture, which only references other articles but provides no facts or statistics:
Temu, using the same model as TikTok, is spending BILLIONS on advertising to try to take up market share for a company owned in China. A company where, if you have a class-action lawsuit or issue with them, you have no recourse whatsoever.
Not only are corporations spamming us, lying to us, and directing us to garbage products and services, but the bot and troll farms are bigger and stronger than ever. Look at this OBVIOUSLY ai image that 63,000 people have liked. Of course, the first 5,000 likes were probably bots, and then the algorithm takes over from there!
And our political opinions are still being deeply warped by bot farms and troll.
Another Reddit user has recently pointed out that the Russian propaganda machine holds a major role in the pro-Palestinian movement. There was recently a UN vote on a ceasefire, for starters, and the only opposing votes were from Russia and China.
In the U.S., a big segment of left-leaning voters, who are generally supportive of Biden, have expressed concerns over his administration's military cooperation with Israel, labeling it complicit in alleged offenses against Palestinians. This sentiment overlooks the significant financial aid the Biden Administration and European nations provide to Palestinian territories, a fact seldom covered by mainstream or independent media. This narrative erosion potentially affects Biden's credibility among his supporters, amidst a backdrop where his rival, Trump, promotes a peace-oriented persona, coupled with NATO-skeptic views beneficial to Russian interests.
KGB defectors who described a key role played by the USSR and allied propagandists in developing the Palestinian propaganda in the first place.
Abbas and other Palestinians were straight up KGB agents.
Basically all the most common talking points come straight from the KGB, and have been recycled since.
For instance, prior to the involvement of the KGB, the issue was very much framed as "Arabs vs Israel", and the focus was on "removing the Jews from Palestine".
The KGB suggested reframing as an "indigenous rights" issue, as well as "genocide", "settler colonialism" and most of the other common accusations. They rightly felt that this line of attack would have far more salience with the Western left, and would allow it to be flipped on it's head, from a story of a huge coalition of Arabs ganging up on Israel, to a powerful "European colonizer" attacking a weaker neighbor.
Listen, I can not be here every day reading every article and every crazy story on the internet.
God knows I have seen enough WILD, malicious, untrue, dangerous, and crazy things on the internet. I've seen so many artificially intelligence created pictures, so many wild state-actor-backed conspiracy theories, and so much of this affect real people in the real world.
Stop believing things you see on the internet. For your health, for your sanity, and for your own safety. It's getting wild out there. As AI gets better, its only going to get worse.