[HN Gopher] Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation...
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Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation (2022)
Author : xyzal
Score : 74 points
Date : 2026-03-14 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com)
| dluan wrote:
| We have a massive poisoning of the commons catastrophe coming,
| driven by further authoritarian government overreach and control.
| I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN
| seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. I
| don't just mean half solutions like tor or social protocols that
| let you in and out of walled gardens.
|
| There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come
| up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this
| problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and
| out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me
| feels like that window is already slammed shut.
| mmooss wrote:
| There were many disinformation research organizations in the
| US, including at major institutions such as Harvard and
| Stanford, that were forced to close by conservatives through
| lawfare or apparently through donor pressure.
|
| (It's interesting that conservatives saw it as a partisan
| cause.)
| Mistletoe wrote:
| To quote The Cable Guy, there's only one answer, someone has to
| kill the babysitter (tv, social media, Big Tech). It's hard to
| kill the babysitter when everyone in Congress is invested balls
| deep in the babysitter. Eisenhower warned of the coming
| overreaching powers of the Military Industrial Complex, but no
| one is attacking the Government Stock Market Tech Complex
| (GSMTC).
| mannanj wrote:
| It's beyond that. It's the CIA deeply embedded in all the
| scary uncomfortable ways you would have hoped never possible.
| Presidents win and turn their stance and run around in the
| other direction, they don't what to be another assassinated
| Kennedy (and imo today they would have other fears worse than
| dying). Congressmen and women are definitely also aware of
| the deep presence and power of that agency and its perversion
| into American life and politics. They don't want to be the
| ones to be the sacrificial pawn sparking an outright violent
| American revolution and tear down of the agency.
|
| I was surveilled, experimented on and followed by them for
| being American-Pakistani and speaking out against them from
| 2022-2023. It was a scary time and I wish I were making this
| up. I wonder sometimes if they really are the good guys, and
| I just got things backwards. I also heard when you are
| kidnapped and in hostile territories for long enough, you
| fall in love with the kidnappers.
|
| Happy to share more details if anyone's curious.
| redeeman wrote:
| so what you're saying is that the US government is an
| illegitimate regime and everyone can fully justify
| destroying it as an enemy of the people?
| mannanj wrote:
| The CIA is not the US government.
| kubb wrote:
| It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed
| on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing
| through every thread.
|
| It's hard to distinguish who's a bot, who's a narrative pusher
| and who's an enthusiast. Which is exactly what you'd want from
| an astroturfing campaign. There's a clear benefit: people in
| the industry are reading this, and in doing so they're granting
| mindshare.
|
| There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support campaigns
| - personal key signature. But judging by how afraid people,
| especially in the US, need to be of their government
| surveilling them, this isn't going to catch on.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Yes. I've also been asking every engineer I know what they're
| doing with AI and there's a lot of people doing a lot of
| different things, but it's a deep mismatch with the online
| rhetoric.
|
| This phenomenon appears to be incrementally coming for every
| single topic and public platform.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I feel the same way. Most people I've talked to are using
| AI for better search. I don't know anyone using it heavily
| to do their main job (writing code). I think a lot of the
| accounts bragging about how much they are doing with AI are
| bots.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm even shocked when I hear people are using it for
| better search. I've found it to be terrible for search,
| and constantly fabricating things. It's distilled
| everything that is bad about new Google, where it prefers
| popular results to accurate ones - but with actual
| fabrication that becomes infinitely worse.
|
| I literally ask it to look for something, and immediately
| afterwards (before reading the long-winded result), ask
| it if the results were real or fabricated. It's just how
| the cost-benefit analysis works out, and I didn't learn
| until a ton of times reading the results, getting
| suspicious of a few, doing websearches to verify them,
| not finding them, then coming back to ask if they were
| real.
|
| " _Sorry! It 's absolutely fair that you called me out on
| that... It's important that you hold me to a high
| standard... You're absolutely right..._"
|
| I'm finding it valuable for compressing all of the docs
| in the world, so I don't have to look up what a function
| does or how to accomplish something in some framework or
| CLI. I find it capable of writing code if I move an inch
| at a time; build copious verbose debugging output that I
| feed back into it every time it screws up; and when it
| goes into a stupid loop being stupid, just debugging by
| hand before wasting hours trying to get it to see
| something that it doesn't want to see.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There's a lot of money wrapped up in people thinking a
| certain way: AI is useful. Work should be done in a
| corporate office. The American Dream is attainable.
| Recession is not coming. War is good. The world is
| dangerous. Others want to harm you. Lots of investment in
| astroturfing these themes because a population who believes
| them will more easily be separated from their money.
| mannanj wrote:
| I hate to sound like I'm turfing for cryptocurrencies, isn't
| there like an identity solution there that the crypto nerds
| solved for to keep identity verification anonymous and
| surveillance proof?
|
| Need to double check what is available, though I feel like
| that angle could work.
|
| I've been wondering also if a simple lie & deception
| detection type system could be a useful angles. It's
| complicated in practice; though the human intuition would say
| it's figured this out millennia ago- I can't tell you how
| many times my body has figured out someone's toxic negative
| vibe by feeling. And I think we probably understand this
| better than we think and can represent it in the computer
| space with analysis of signals and some follow on questions.
| Hope I'm not too naive here.
| arikrahman wrote:
| It feels the same way on GitHub trending. I used to check it
| frequently to see what the hottest newest tech was and stay
| up to date. Now it's oversaturated by whatever the newest AI
| bubble is. It also doesn't help that MCP enabled products
| like OpenClaw star their own repo and artificially inflate
| their perceived value.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Interesting - claw faking the benchmarks .. they match well
| with openA ideologically .
| gruez wrote:
| >It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being
| astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes
| are echoing through every thread.
|
| Isn't this what exactly you'd expect in a connected world?
| The best arguments from both sides proliferate, thereby
| causing "The same arguments and tropes are echoing through
| every thread".
| kubb wrote:
| > Isn't this what exactly you'd expect in a connected
| world?
|
| I would expect a figurative war for human attention. With
| so much information being available, everyone would try to
| make people focus on what they want to communicate.
|
| > The best arguments
|
| Some of these tropes and arguments aren't really the best.
| There's a lot of rhetorical gotchas, e.g. "that's exactly
| what I'd expect from a human" when an automated solution
| isn't up to par.
|
| > from both sides
|
| The only real "side" is the one actively pushing for
| something. Everyone else isn't a camp - they're just random
| people.
| gruez wrote:
| >I would expect a figurative war for human attention.
| With so much information being available, everyone would
| try to make people focus on what they want to
| communicate.
|
| How does this relate to online commenting? Are you
| expecting the "figurative war for human attention" to
| make comments more diverse?
|
| >Some of these tropes and arguments aren't really the
| best. There's a lot of rhetorical gotchas, e.g. "that's
| exactly what I'd expect from a human" when an automated
| solution isn't up to par.
|
| I think you're overestimating the epistemic rigor of the
| average internet commenter, eternal September, etc.
|
| >The only real "side" is the one actively pushing for
| something
|
| Are you implying the "astroturfing" is only on one side?
| If you might just be experiencing motivated reasoning
| and/or confirmation bias. Most of the astroturfing
| behavior can be applied to the anti-AI side as well, eg.
| people complaining about electricity or water consumption
| in every thread about the impacts of AI, or "ai slop".
| kubb wrote:
| > How does this relate to online commenting?
|
| A viable strategy is to disseminate messaging reinforcing
| a belief beneficial for the disseminating entity, in a
| way that invokes emotion (like fear or anger), especially
| in influential spaces allowing for anonymity.
|
| But in general this line of questioning won't lead to a
| satisfying conclusion. The assumptions you requested
| (connected world) aren't specific enough to determine
| what we should expect from comments in online spaces (and
| by extension, to demonstrate that the current situation
| is a natural outcome).
|
| > I think you're overestimating the epistemic rigor of
| the average internet commenter, eternal September, etc.
|
| Yeah, but this place, quite frankly, is above average.
| Not to the point of being immune to manipulation,
| obviously.
|
| > Are you implying the "astroturfing" is only on one
| side?
|
| No. I'm pointing out the "two sides" framing that you
| insist on is a mistake. There is only one organized camp
| with a clear financial incentive to have people believe
| in "Autonomous Coding Agents" which justifies capital
| investements in that area.
|
| People who are concerned about power consumption, people
| who don't like hardware unavailability, and people who
| think that LLMs are useful tools, but they're not even
| close to autonomous delivery of software systems are all
| distinct groups without financial incentives. But they do
| have the right to push back against the relentless
| messaging barrage from the camp.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What's interesting about that is that indeed, there are a lot
| of people pushing the 'autonomous coding agents are great'
| narrative but there is one crucial bit missing: they
| absolutely never show their code.
| iamnothere wrote:
| > There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support
| campaigns - personal key signature.
|
| You would be surprised at how cheaply opinions can be
| purchased, especially globally.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Its already here.
| calibas wrote:
| > I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on
| HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this
| problem.
|
| It's against the HN guidelines to insinuate that astroturfing
| happens on HN.
| cwillu wrote:
| Discussion of astroturfing on a post that is specifically
| about astroturfing is such an obvious exception that I'm
| having a hard time taking your reply in good faith, but this
| is me trying to do so anyway instead of just downvoting and
| flagging like the guidelines suggest I do in such cases.
| mhitza wrote:
| If you can point me at someone that would fund such projects
| (not VCs), would be happy to apply. Projects like NLNet aren't
| keen on funding larger scope projects. At least if you do not
| have the thought leader influencer clout.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| What are your ideas for this?
| mhitza wrote:
| Decentralized platform, with traceable decisions, mixing
| direct web of trust, delegated, and community moderated
| content labeling. Content servers with pay to post
| submissions, to allow sustainable hosting and hosting
| delegated moderation.
| alwa wrote:
| I agree that it feels like the tiny window of opportunity
| hasn't quite shut yet, and it's a problem space I know I should
| take more interest in. What do you see as the viable technical
| directions? Something along the lines of what Altman was trying
| to do with his Orb? Something along the lines of the C2PA's
| Content Credentials?
|
| [0] e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-
| humanit... and the feature piece at
| https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/
|
| [1] https://contentcredentials.org and https://c2pa.org
| whatshisface wrote:
| Instead of collecting biometric info from humans and IDing
| all of their online movements, you could mandate that LLM
| output be watermarked (using a technology that Scott Arronson
| was hired by OpenAI to help develop, after which the project
| was shut down under Altman right after proving that it could
| work) so that _their_ online movement would be IDed. The
| implication in this story that it was shut down to keep the
| Orb around in principle (telling humans they had to be tagged
| to distinguish them from machines that could more easily be
| tagged) is very easy to pick up.
| alwa wrote:
| Is that viable given the proliferation of open-weight LLMs
| that don't apply that sort of watermarking? If somebody
| with malign intent _can_ skip the attestation, presumably
| they will, right?
| whatshisface wrote:
| If every major LLM producer did it, it would not be easy
| for malicious actors to remove it. That's on top of the
| fact that most of the issue is coming from careless
| actors.
| ajkjk wrote:
| strong agree, I feel like it poisons the fabric of society
| somehow when everything you interact with is fake or even just
| has a good chance of being fake, regardless of the also-shitty
| fact that it is also often trying to influence you.
| apsurd wrote:
| Also how the being fake doesn't even have to be malicious. now
| every tom, dick, and harry wants to create content. All the
| world's a stage, follower count go up.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I held a hope that it would create an evolutionary pressure
| that would weed out people who fall for foolish arguments i.e.
| arguments without any sort of structure that should be capable
| of convincing anyone of anything. But that's just wishful
| thinking. People fall for anything as long as it's flattering
| and it allows them to do what they want to do when they want to
| do it.
|
| Every propagandistic argument is going to be like that for 80%
| of people, and 40% of people are going to be within that 80%
| about 99% of the time. They think the biggest issue of our time
| is how much people complain.
| walterbell wrote:
| My browser highlights a few hundred accounts. For HN and other
| comment-oriented sites, local userscripts are supported by
| browser plugins, including mobile Safari. These can highlight
| known usernames and implement blocklists. Most LLMs can generate
| a userscript on demand for non-obfuscated sites, including userid
| list for manual edit.
| Bridged7756 wrote:
| This is notorious in platforms like reddit, with people jumping
| in to suggest no name products in response to questions. It
| doesn't help that reddit allows private profiles, thus allowing
| astroturfers to get away with it. Also, another case is LLM
| astroturfing, we're bombarded with doomerism and obituaries about
| programming, some of said opinions are subtler, short comments,
| the most dangerous ones, because little by little they jab you,
| though the most conspicuous ones are easy to identify. And then
| there's the political astroturfing. In my country smokescreens
| are the defacto tool, but it is suspicious of the amount of high
| quality edits and memes that came out about the Epstein files,
| essentially cementing him as a "meme" and not a monster that
| abused minors.
| plun9 wrote:
| Here is an example:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/dty9nd/com...
| Here, PM_ME_UR_LIDAR uses the pronoun "their" referring to
| Ouster, the lidar company. But PM_ME_UR_LIDAR was working at
| Ouster, Inc. at the time the comment was written.
| cwillu wrote:
| (2022)
| dang wrote:
| It's there now. Thanks!
| bpavuk wrote:
| related: https://doublespeed.ai/ - basically astroturfing as a
| service.
|
| their landing page stops short of saying that Doublespeed would
| be "a good fit for your political campaign." I'd prefer fighting
| an AI-powered drone over becoming a victim of "Dead Internet-aaS"
| startup. at least, flying lawnmowers are honest
| droidjj wrote:
| Wow... that's one of the most dystopian things I've seen in a
| while.
| bpavuk wrote:
| right???? especially that "never pay a human again" at the
| end... Palantir is a sweetheart on Doublespeed backdrop
| jacquesm wrote:
| I have one of those 'flying lawnmowers' here and I'm not sure
| you would like to get up close and personal with them. They are
| super dangerous even when they are nominally under your
| control. But I agree with you that on the larger canvas the
| astroturfing will in spite of being more bloodless will do far
| more damage.
|
| People are just not ready for being skeptical against this,
| they've barely gotten used to phone scams and now they have
| astroturfing and deepfakes to contend with.
| bpavuk wrote:
| well, I had one fly above my head in 2025, too. I know what
| compare against
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ugh, that sucks, I hope it was not a combat situation.
|
| I've got a couple of them here mostly smaller ones (3", 5")
| and one large one (9") and I'm _super_ respectful of those
| props and the ones here obviously don 't have any kind of
| payload. Even so I'd hate to see one come at me, I've seen
| what they can do to pieces of hardwood.
| bpavuk wrote:
| no, it was not, I'm too young to get drafted :) although
| I'd argue that nowadays, the line between a civilian and
| a combatant is blurred more than ever. at least in
| Ukraine it's like that
| jacquesm wrote:
| > no, it was not, I'm too young to get drafted :)
|
| Good for you.
|
| > although I'd argue that nowadays, the line between a
| civilian and a combatant is blurred more than ever. at
| least in Ukraine it's like that
|
| This is very true and very few people outside of Ukraine
| realize this.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| > Recent events in the world have highlighted just how
| influential social media can be, both in a national context and
| internationally. To list a few examples: platforms like Twitter
| and Facebook played a prominent role in the events surrounding
| the recent US presidential elections; social media and messaging
| platforms made possible the many decentralized mass protests that
| have popped up around the globe, from the pro-democracy movements
| in Hong Kong, Thailand and Belarus to the Black Lives Matter
| protests in the United States; and of course, the whole of the
| internet, for better or worse, played a role in shaping how the
| world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic. But with great power
| comes the great potential for manipulation and misuse.
|
| I think everyone would agree with this but is there any formal
| evidence of how Twitter and TikTok affect elections or
| legislation?
| Lerc wrote:
| I recently did some looking into how public perception campaigns
| work.
|
| I found it amazing that I could not find any organisation that
| tracks these campaigns. These are often very well funded and
| those funds go to people.
|
| Part of the problem is a successful public opinion campaign
| results in something that most people believe, we probably only
| get to see the failures. Challenging something that is widely
| held is not well received, whether or not you are right or wrong.
|
| Some things I did find out. Fake news stories don't change
| people's opinions very much. They enable media to shape
| narratives because people will reject genuine stories outside the
| narrative because they know that fake news stories exist. Fake
| news exists to be seen as fake to establish that the things you
| disagree with could also be fake.
|
| There are companies that specialise in this.
|
| Reputation management companies might tell you who their clients
| are or what they do, but never at the same time. I suspect the
| best ones do neither.
| rrhjm53270 wrote:
| As an individual, this paper suggests that I must move beyond "Is
| this news true?" to "Why does it look like everyone agrees with
| this?"
| jacquesm wrote:
| It is much worse than that: it is: is _anybody_ I interact with
| real?
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