Beijing did a test run in Taiwan using AI-generated content to influence voters away from a pro-sovereignty candidate
China will attempt to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India this year with artificial intelligence-generated content after making a dry run with the presidential poll in Taiwan, Microsoft has warned.
The US tech firm said it expected Chinese state-backed cyber groups to target high-profile elections in 2024, with North Korea also involved, according to a report by the company’s threat intelligence team published on Friday.
“As populations in India, South Korea and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections,” the report reads.
Microsoft said that “at a minimum” China will create and distribute through social media AI-generated content that “benefits their positions in these high-profile elections”.
We saw that shit here in Taiwan. Fake AI content that was circulating Line messenger and TikTok.
TikTok seems so innocent but people do not understand how nefariously TikTok can be used. Most folks are are defenseless targets because they are not attuned to how psyops has been successfully used against them already.
It’s super targeted. I really wish they would ban it here like they are trying in the US.
Exactly, and that’s also why it’s so effective. You can say whatever lies you like if you only say them to the people who will lap it up, there’s and no chance for anyone else to correct them as they don’t even hear the lie.
I honestly don’t see how it’s worse than say YouTube, for example. Instead of spoonfeeding conspiracy shit to everyone, it only ends up with the tiny pool who wants it. Youtube on the other hand pushes right wing BS to me every third recommendation.
Agreed. I could argue that facebook is even more targetted as well. I never understood why tiktok gets so much more hate than the rest.
This is unrelated to the actual topic, but the tiktok ads can be kind of ferocious. I like to turn it into a game of how quick I can swipe through ads off less than a second of image recognition before skipping real content… I call it the tiktok tax. There is a lot of reasons to hate tiktok, but they are never what people focus on lol.
I wish YouTube were forced to stop that shit also. Let’s throw Facebook in there too.
Same. I use YouTube for fix-it and hobby videos, occasionally a game review. I get all sorts of right wing bullshit videos suggested to me. The right is spending a lot of money to steer people that way.
So like uh I’m not trying to out myself as a boomer but how do they use Tiktok nefariously? I used it for about 5 minutes once, the whole experience was just not for me. Do they just take people’s videos and put captions on them?
No, opinion and ideas are insulated and picked by algorithms so that, out of the available content, they also feed you videos about specific topics and agendas, and suppress slightly the ideas and agendas they aren’t trying to push.
It’s subtle, but you don’t need to fool an individual quickly, you only need to incrementally modify opinions on a grand scale. People won’t notice, and see these as organic and natural shifts in the ideas and opinions of their peers.
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It’s a lot harder to add context with only 60 seconds of video. Stripping context is one of the easiest ways to flip a narrative. There are things unique to the TikTok format that are uniquely dangerous.
Not since MySpace has any social media “seemed” innocent. If someone thinks that the inception and ongoing existence of these this is out of some weird inbuilt altruism on the part of tech billionaires I’d like to ask them to donate their brain to science after they die so that we might unravel this unsettlingly vast incongruity.
If only we had similar ways to fight it similar to the g0v movement in Taiwan so people can check whether something is fake through a repository of reported “news”