What a time to be alive. We are in an age where every new technology shall be seen as a way to produce more advertisements.
You might not know it, but catapults were originally invented to deliver ads across long distances. Only later was their usefulness for warfare discovered.
After the invention of the airship, catapults became obsolete for advertising. They continued to be used though in the trenches of World War I.Pfft, catapults. A trebuchet can launch a 90kg advertisement over 300 meters.
“we have been trying to contact you about your car’s extended warranty”
In modern times something similar happened with the atomic bomb, which was originally developed by the Mushroom Marketing Board to be a giant illuminated billboard in the sky. It was repurposed as a weapon after it was found to reduce, not increase, mushroom sales in neighborhoods where it was deployed.
Welcome to the printing press
”BUY MORE JESUS!”
Can we go back to when every technology was just weaponized instead? No? This is somehow worse.
“How can this invention help us sell more sugar water?”
Oh my goodness, I’m listening to a cover of Lola by The Kinks (that repeatedly says “La la la lo-Lola,” in case you’re not familiar with it) when I saw your comment and username! What a neat coincidence.
Is your username choice a reference to that song, by any chance?
Wow, that is a coincidence. But nah I’ve never heard that song before lol
This is a relative upgrade of classic Persona Management Software, using an AI to produce the comments instead of a human.
I was wondering when this would leave the military and political sphere and enter the mainstream… and here we are, it’s straight being advertised pretty blatantly.
Further, it is why we need the same strict advertising laws we have for television and radio for the internet.
If it’s an ad, it should have to say it’s a fucking ad.
I’ve been pissed about this since Correct the Record and Cambridge Analytica. There is zero political willpower to do anything about it because the political groups were some of the earliest adopters of this fucking trash.
Ads, of any nature, political or otherwise, should be fucking labelled accordingly, god damn it. This isn’t fucking hard.
EDIT: I wonder if this will result in independent websites like Lemmy to start using a filtering service similar to a Pi-Hole checking if the source of the comment is in any way tied to an advertising content delivery network. Start banning users and comments based on their source as an ad. Surely this would lead to advertisers using VPNs to try to bypass it, but… it’s time we at least started considering ways to fight this.
Hell yeah! This comment is spot-on and it totally rocks and so do you.
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Bots have been doing this on Reddit forever, it’s a lot more noticeable now that most of the good users who generated content have left.
I remember when I first started noticing bots bad was in 2016. They have been there for a while now. It’s advertisers turn now though. It’s at the end stages
“Most Reddit Addicted City” was Eglin Air Force Base in 2014. Eglin has a history of research about social media influence at their facility.
That post has been pretty blackholed by the internet at this point. The bots probably started as early as 2010-2012.
The Obama AMA was in 2012, That to me is the turning point for reddit, it’s when it’s population exploded overnight (which meant old users could no longer enforce cultural norms for the platform), it’s when news media really started taking the platform seriously and I think when a lot of the political influence of reddit was realized.
Thanks Obama
South St. Paul also has an Air Force base in it. Which is also on that list
Makes sense. I noticed it was bad because it was obviously election related and completely off topic for the subreddit. So it went past the high quality into the simple and bad
Have you seen /r/worldnews the first 10 page of comments are all hardcore Israel supporters.
It’s kind of jarring because they’re not really in the rest of the site.
The information warfare units only seem to care about the frontpage so they really stand out. Especially how ham fisted they are about it.
I got a huge strike, which eventually led to me being account banned from Reddit (seven year account, 600k karma) for calling out Israel for the pogrom against the Palestine people. Reddit is really trash now, most of the reference questions are 2+ years old.
It’s in a necrotic state of rot right now.
Have you seen /r/worldnews
I try my best not to
Reddit has had an issue with being a platform of public manipulation for a while. This is not new, it’s just much more noticeable now, and thus a lot less effective.
Reddit was always full of reposts and content yoinked from other sites, it’s just that the content taken from other sites was curated. There was also a fair amount of original content mixed in. The people who bothered to do the free labor of curating content from other sites or creating original content, have largely left or retreated to smaller subreddits.
Where as before the influence and marketing campaigns were mixed in with genuine/well curated content, now they are 90% of what is left. Even their content is worse than it used to be since it’s largely just LLM generated slop now.
AI is poisoning everthing.
Persona Management Software has existed for at least a decade. The only difference here is you’re removing the human that controls it from the equation, because AI is now advanced enough to produce what sound like realistic responses in real-time. You used to still have to have a human with a bunch of pre-written scripts running hundreds of sockpuppet accounts through Persona Management Software. Now it’s just one step removed with the AI working with the pre-written scripts for you.
AI is simply enhancing what was already a long-standing terrible practice. It was already a terrible practice before AI was involved. In this case, it was poisoned before AI was even applied.
If manipulating reddit isn’t already a betting sport, it’s not far away. Guessing it is in Russia (or at least a drinking game), just like the rest of the big ‘social’ netwerks. Enjoy your next election. Wherever you are :)
