Yesterday – actually the day before, but it was reported yesterday, a civil suit which the NAACP had filed in federal court against one Donald J. Trump** et al., for attempting to disenfranchise black voters, was reassigned – to Judge Tanya Chutkan. My, my. It really is normal to assgn cases with the same defendand in the same jurisdiction to the same judge. But it’s still very amusing.
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Wonkette – Biden Campaign Joins Trump’s ‘Truth Social,’ Just To Be A [Troll]
Quote – The [Biden campaign regime] signed up using the “Dark Brandon” meme as their profile pic, and their first “truth” was “Well. Let’s see how this goes. Converts welcome!” They typed “Well.” for their first word. Just like that. They told Fox News Digital that they’re “meeting voters where they are.” There is no part of this that isn’t trolling. This didn’t cost them money. There is not one inbred moron on Truth Social the Biden campaign is truly seeking out as a voter. But sure, converts welcome! Click through (to Substack) for details. “Let’s see how this goes” indeed. ROTFL.
The 19th – Women donors are underrepresented in fundraising for state elections. The impacts are wide-ranging.
Quote – It’s a nationwide phenomenon,” Sanbonmatsu said. “It is an important form of participation, and we do find large imbalances in how much money women and men are giving to politics — and it’s less visible than looking at voter turnout.” The share of all money raised from women donors was as low as 14 percent in Nebraska and 18 percent in Illinois, the report found. Colorado led the nation in this time period with 46 percent of all money raised coming from women donors, as it became the second state to elect a majority-woman legislature. Click through for details – There are some (though I wish there were more.) Yes, I’m proud that Colorado is leading the way here. I also noticed that, in Colorado, if you look at women’s tosal donations as a percentage of men’s total donations, that figure is 85% Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that close to the figure which represents the wages women earn as a percentage of what men earn?
Food For Thought For another opinion., click on the image. 😀
Glenn Kirschner – Judge Chutkan imposes gag order on Donald Trump in DC case to protect witnesses and others.
The Lincoln Project – The Choice is Clear
Thom Hartmann – This Army Aims to Stop Americans From Voting
Patrick Fitzgerald – Jackson (Johnny Cash Song Parody ft Donald Trump, Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith) [The song on which this parody is based, which was a hit for Johnny Cash and June Carter, was not a love song but a marital duel. It was loosely based on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” If you llook up the lyrics, or watch a Cash/Carter video of “Jackson” you may find this even funnier)]
Guy Shows his Rescue Pittie the Wonders of Fall for the Very First Time
Beau – Let’s talk about much ado about $6 billion….
Yesterday, this paragraph was in the public radio newsletter: “Colorado said the bridge that collapsed near Pueblo in a fatal train derailment was owned by the railroad company, but the company says the state owns it.” It’s going to be a long wait. Sigh. “Photos and videos posted by authorities showed the partially collapsed bridge with the semi-truck caught beneath in the right lane. The images also show a pileup of train cars and wheels scattered across the scene and loads of coal covering a portion of the highway. Thirty-nine cars of the 124 being hauled derailed, the National Transportation Safety Board said.”
Also, my ballot arrived. I already knew how I wanted to vote on the two issues, but there is also a school board election. Five candiedates. Two vacancies. At least this time Ballotpedia came through on a couple of them (one yes, one no) and another candidate ‘s name was unusual enough that just her name brought up that she’s registered D. So I had two that I could vote for, and did. The other two should have filled out the questionnaires.
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John Pavlovitz – The One Place to Stand in The Israel-Palestine Violence
Quote – As a person of faith, morality, and conscience, I don’t know where to stand in times like these—other than with squandered, brutalized life. That means I don’t get off so easy as to be able to make a tidy little declaration and walk away feeling good about myself. It means I have to leave the shallows of ambiguity and into deep waters of nuance and history and human nature. It means I have to read and learn, to listen and reflect, to pray and wrestle. It means I’ll end up with fewer answers and more questions and I might be sick to my stomach. But this place of staring at the ugly unfigureoutable is where I am, where many of us are. Click through for full secular sermon – which is what I found it to be. Yes, John is a pastor, but he does his best to speak to everyone, and often succeeds. I think he succeeds here.
Colorado Public Radio – Navy honors sailor who helped stop Club Q shooting
Quote – During a ceremony on Thursday, Oct. 5, Rear Adm. Scott Robertson, director of Plans, Policy and Strategy for North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command, presented the medal on behalf of the Navy…. “I myself can only hope that I would channel the courage in our Navy core values like he did,” Robertson said. “But, we don’t have to wait for crisis to apply core values. We can and should apply them every day. That’s what I am taking away from the lessons you taught us all.” Click through for full story. This is a week or more old – I saved it until Pat got back. Thank God Tommy Tuberville didn’t have his way before this occurred – it could have been much worse.
Yesterday, I received confirmation for my visit to Virgil. I also learned that, on Monday, a train derailed on I-25 “near Pueblo” and that I-25 is closed indefinitely. I looked deeper and discovered that in this case, “near Pueblo” means at about exit 106, and that, when it derailed, it took a railroad bridge with it, dumping the bridge remnants onto the interstate. I normally use the interstate from Exit 128 to Exit 99, so I expect to need an alternate route. (I suppose I can be grateful the train didn’t explode.) I’ve been looking at road maps, and it’s pretty clear that the safest route which I can depend on it being there is via Cañon City. Virgil was in Cañon City for a few montjhs last year, so I know the route, or most of it, and the part I don’t know is US 50, so it should be well marked. An extra half hour should probably do it. Of course that also means I’ll be home later than usual, so please don’t worry. I’ll do my best to be extra oprganized in advance as much as possible so I don’t have to cut into sleep time.
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The Daily Beast – Dad of Palestinian Boy Stabbed 26 Times in Chicago Reveals Last Words (hanky alert)
Quote – The Chicago landlord suspected of stabbing a Palestinian-American six-year-old 26 times had a “good” relationship with the boy and her mother before the killing, the child’s father told The Daily Beast on Sunday…. “[Wadea Al-Fayoume, the boy] “He is an angel. Basically a small angel in the form of a person. To this minute, I cannot believe how this could have happened,” the father, Oday El-Fayoume, told The Daily Beast. “My ex-wife and son knew him, and they had a good relationship. It is hard to picture this man holding a knife about to stab my son. I keep thinking that my son was probably running towards him before getting stabbed, trying to give him a hug.” Click through for story – which you probably have heard, since it is egregious, so it’s all over. I should also provide a barf bag alert, because I can already hear the gun crazies yelling, “See! See! Guns aren’t the problem!”
The 19th – This Latinx geologist and TV show host is disrupting stereotypes of who can be a scientist
Quote – On a sunny day, perched on slanted beige rocks of the San Andreas Fault line, Michelle Barboza-Ramirez is dressed in a white sun hat, with retro sunglasses and dangly flower earrings, discussing how plate tectonics transformed the Los Angeles landscape as the camera rolls. “Take a look behind you. These rocks are tilted. Like hella tilted,” they tell Blake de Pastino, a fellow host of the popular PBS show “Eons.” The camera pans to the background. “If you didn’t know anything about geology, you’d see them and you’d be like, ‘Wow, that’s so weird that these rocks formed sideways.’” This conversational tone makes Barboza-Ramirez, who is a paleontologist and geologist, relatable to viewers. Click through for article. Don’t get confused that Barboza-Ramirez’s pronouns are they/their. There is actually only one of them. (Not that there shouldn’t be more – Latinx scientists, that is.)
Yesterday was one of those days I just couldn’t seem to get ahead. Sometimes that happens – but it doesn’t give me a lot to talk about, nor time to talk in. Not being Seinfeld, or one of his writers, I can’t really get any content out of it. Maybe that’s not a bad thing.
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Crooks & Liars – GOP Activist Who Couldn’t Wait For RBG To Die Shoots Wife, Kills Self
Quote – Fun fact: Alembik first received national attention after he tweeted that “Ruth Bader Ginsburg can’t die soon enough,” and of course, now he’s dead…. I’m glad his wife was not killed. Btw, we need common sense gun laws. Everyone in his orbit seemed to know that he was struggling with mental health issues — and he had a gun. In fact, he had a concealed carry permit, or at least he did in 2007 Click through for story. Personally, I”m wondering what’s wrong with people who said he was always smiling. That’s not a smile. (Not to be confused with “alembic,” which was a medieval Arabian still used in alchemy.)
Western Slope Now – Ouray’s new via ferrata!
Quote – A via ferrata is a protected mountain pathway consisting of a series of rungs, rails, cables, and bridges embracing the rock face…. the via ferratas became a civilian attraction in Europe by the 1950’s and have moved into the USA only within the last decade…. This course climbs 1200 feet across 12 pitches, with trails intermixed between. Click through for details. Yes this article is lightweight. That’s fine with me. Ouray, named for a Ute chief, is an adorable little town, sadly in a very red part of Colorado. There’s a small hotel where Lillie Langtry once stayed. The website has a short video which includes some lovely scenery.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
As we first noticed in 2016 (I’m mot saying that was when it was first done; I’m pretty confident that was not the case) there are people all over the world who are willing and able to use all kinds of disinformation to influence elections in a nation other than their own. Most, maybe all, of them, believing they have no obligations to any nation other than their own, are utterly unscrupulous. (and I am sure that the US does it also – and that we are by no means immune from being utterly unscrupiulous.) And now, in addition to all the social media – much of which is so corrupt that any thinking person must doubt anything seen or heard there – there is Artificial Intelligence. I know I have addressed this subject before, more than once (maybe too many times, if that is possible), but it just keeps getting worse. This article addresses some of the latest – “advances.”
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AI disinformation is a threat to elections − learning to spot Russian, Chinese and Iranian meddling in other countries can help the US prepare for 2024
The intersection of politics and social media is fertile ground for AI-powered disinformation. AP Photo/John Minchillo
Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence.
Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. presidential election. Over the next seven years, a number of countries – most prominently China and Iran – used social media to influence foreign elections, both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. There’s no reason to expect 2023 and 2024 to be any different.
But there is a new element: generative AI and large language models. These have the ability to quickly and easily produce endless reams of text on any topic in any tone from any perspective. As a security expert, I believe it’s a tool uniquely suited to internet-era propaganda.
This is all very new. ChatGPT was introduced in November 2022. The more powerful GPT-4 was released in March 2023. Other language and image production AIs are around the same age. It’s not clear how these technologies will change disinformation, how effective they will be or what effects they will have. But we are about to find out.
A conjunction of elections
Election season will soon be in full swing in much of the democratic world. Seventy-one percent of people living in democracies will vote in a national election between now and the end of next year. Among them: Argentina and Poland in October, Taiwan in January, Indonesia in February, India in April, the European Union and Mexico in June and the U.S. in November. Nine African democracies, including South Africa, will have elections in 2024. Australia and the U.K. don’t have fixed dates, but elections are likely to occur in 2024.
Many of those elections matter a lot to the countries that have run social media influence operations in the past. China cares a great deal about Taiwan, Indonesia, India and many African countries. Russia cares about the U.K., Poland, Germany and the EU in general. Everyone cares about the United States.
AI image, text and video generators are already beginning to inject disinformation into elections.
And that’s only considering the largest players. Every U.S. national election from 2016 has brought with it an additional country attempting to influence the outcome. First it was just Russia, then Russia and China, and most recently those two plus Iran. As the financial cost of foreign influence decreases, more countries can get in on the action. Tools like ChatGPT significantly reduce the price of producing and distributing propaganda, bringing that capability within the budget of many more countries.
Election interference
A couple of months ago, I attended a conference with representatives from all of the cybersecurity agencies in the U.S. They talked about their expectations regarding election interference in 2024. They expected the usual players – Russia, China and Iran – and a significant new one: “domestic actors.” That is a direct result of this reduced cost.
Of course, there’s a lot more to running a disinformation campaign than generating content. The hard part is distribution. A propagandist needs a series of fake accounts on which to post, and others to boost it into the mainstream where it can go viral. Companies like Meta have gotten much better at identifying these accounts and taking them down. Just last month, Meta announced that it had removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook groups and 15 Instagram accounts associated with a Chinese influence campaign, and identified hundreds more accounts on TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), LiveJournal and Blogspot. But that was a campaign that began four years ago, producing pre-AI disinformation.
Russia has a long history of engaging in foreign disinformation campaigns.
Disinformation is an arms race. Both the attackers and defenders have improved, but also the world of social media is different. Four years ago, Twitter was a direct line to the media, and propaganda on that platform was a way to tilt the political narrative. A Columbia Journalism Review study found that most major news outlets used Russian tweets as sources for partisan opinion. That Twitter, with virtually every news editor reading it and everyone who was anyone posting there, is no more.
Many propaganda outlets moved from Facebook to messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp, which makes them harder to identify and remove. TikTok is a newer platform that is controlled by China and more suitable for short, provocative videos – ones that AI makes much easier to produce. And the current crop of generative AIs are being connected to tools that will make content distribution easier as well.
Generative AI tools also allow for new techniques of production and distribution, such as low-level propaganda at scale. Imagine a new AI-powered personal account on social media. For the most part, it behaves normally. It posts about its fake everyday life, joins interest groups and comments on others’ posts, and generally behaves like a normal user. And once in a while, not very often, it says – or amplifies – something political. These persona bots, as computer scientist Latanya Sweeney calls them, have negligible influence on their own. But replicated by the thousands or millions, they would have a lot more.
Disinformation on AI steroids
That’s just one scenario. The military officers in Russia, China and elsewhere in charge of election interference are likely to have their best people thinking of others. And their tactics are likely to be much more sophisticated than they were in 2016.
Countries like Russia and China have a history of testing both cyberattacks and information operations on smaller countries before rolling them out at scale. When that happens, it’s important to be able to fingerprint these tactics. Countering new disinformation campaigns requires being able to recognize them, and recognizing them requires looking for and cataloging them now.
Even before the rise of generative AI, Russian disinformation campaigns have made sophisticated use of social media.
In the computer security world, researchers recognize that sharing methods of attack and their effectiveness is the only way to build strong defensive systems. The same kind of thinking also applies to these information campaigns: The more that researchers study what techniques are being employed in distant countries, the better they can defend their own countries.
Disinformation campaigns in the AI era are likely to be much more sophisticated than they were in 2016. I believe the U.S. needs to have efforts in place to fingerprint and identify AI-produced propaganda in Taiwan, where a presidential candidate claims a deepfake audio recording has defamed him, and other places. Otherwise, we’re not going to see them when they arrive here. Unfortunately, researchers are instead being targeted and harassed.
Maybe this will all turn out OK. There have been some important democratic elections in the generative AI era with no significant disinformation issues: primaries in Argentina, first-round elections in Ecuador and national elections in Thailand, Turkey, Spain and Greece. But the sooner we know what to expect, the better we can deal with what comes.
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AMT, in continuing TomCat’s blog, I hope to influence elections myself. I hope to influence people in the US to support and vote for candidates like Joe Biden and to vote a full Democratic ticket right down to the proverbial dog catcher (which, at least in my area, is no longer an elective office. But definitely as far down as school boards, and farther if possible.) But I don’t want to do it with disinformation. I’m not above emotional appeal, however. In fact, I am working on four possibilities for a meme which I hope will be scary enough to get attention. The first two have appeared in the Open Threads for October 2 and October 11, and I expect to post the final two on October 17 and October 27 respectively. I’m soliciting reactions to try to determine which is most effective (or whether a mix and match version would be better than any of them.) The fastest way to reach them would probably be to use the Archives, the bottom feature in the right sidebar on the home page or any individual post’s page. As in national elections, the more people voting, the better the result.
For another opinion., click on the image. 😀
