Comment by yorwba
3 days ago
> These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons
Do they work spectacularly well, though? E.g. the article you link shows that Twitter accounts holding anti-Ukrainian views received 49 reposts less on average during a 2-hour internet outage in Russia. Even granting that all those reposts were part of an organized campaign (its hardly surprising that people reposting anti-Ukrainian content are primarily to be found in Russia) and that 49 reposts massively boosted the visibility of this content, its effect is still upper bounded by the effect of propaganda exposure on people's opinions, which is generally low. https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-w...
Notice that the two reasons I mentioned don't hinge on changing anyones mind.
1 - They boost dopamine reward systems in people who get "social" validation of their opinions/persona as an influencer. This isn't something specific to propaganda...this is a well-observed phenomenon of social media behavior. This not only gives false validation to the person spreading the misinformation/opinions, but it influences other people who desire that sort of influence by giving them an example of something successful to replicate.
2 - In aggregate, it demoralizes those who disagree with the opinions by demonstrating a false popularity. Imagine, for example, going to the comments of an instagram post of something and you see a blatant neo-nazi holocaust denial comment with 50,000 upvotes. It hasn't changed your mind, but it absolutely will demoralize you from thinking you have any sort of democratic power to overcome it.
No opinions have changed, but more people are willing to do things that are destructive to social discourse, and fewer people are willing to exercise democratic methods to curb it.
Do you have any evidence that a substantial number of people will be influenced in the way you claim? Again, propaganda generally has no or almost no effect.
That is tricky. I think some propaganda has no effect while some propaganda is so impactful that it is the sole cause of some major, major things. I know you said "generally" but I think that doesn't present the full picture.
The Russian state's hack and leak of Podesta's emails caused Pizzagate and QAnon. Russian propagandists also fanned the flames of both. It's not quite clear if this was a propaganda victory (it could be that it was propaganda from other sources commenting on the hacked emails which bears almost all responsibility for Pizzagate and what followed) or simply an offensive cybercapabilities victory, but this is an example of the complex chains of actions which can affect societal opinions and attitudes.
I am skeptical random LLM nonsense from Russian farms is shifting sentiment. But I think it's prudent to remain open to the possibility that the aggregate effect of all propaganda, intelligence, and interference efforts by the Russian state in the past decade could have created the impetus for several significant things which otherwise would likely not have occurred.
Another example: the old Russian KGB propaganda about America inventing AIDS as a bioweapon was extremely effective and damaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Denver
More recent Russian propaganda about America running a bioweapon lab in Ukraine has been quite effective and is still believed by many.
> Again, propaganda generally has no or almost no effect.
This is a wild claim.
I read the early article, it claimed that most of the pro trump russian propaganda was consumed by republicans so it didn't change any viewpoints.
Ignoring the idea that it might have prevented a change, it's a pretty small sample size compared to, you know, all of human history.