Right Wing Influencers Caught Copy Pasting Identical Rants Against New AI Regulations
from the propaganda-works dept
If you’re not aware, America’s unholy alliance between U.S. corporations and the right wing grifter economy has an elaborate public messaging and manipulation system that continues to demonstrate its influence and power.
The latest case in point: K Street policy and lobbying firms appear to have leveraged a bunch of right wing influencers to launch a coordinated social media campaign attacking the AI Overwatch Act, which would tighten restrictions on the export of advanced artificial intelligence chips to foreign adversaries.
The bill was introduced last December and hadn’t really been seeing a ton of traction (as we saw with the TikTok “ban” most of this country’s rhetoric on “protecting people from China” is corrupt, self-serving smoke). But Model Republic curiously noted that a whole bunch of prominent right wing influencers have been sharing rants against the bill, all including the same language and typos:
We’ve seen this sort of “astroturf” campaign many times before. It usually involves some K Street lobbying firm that covertly get right wing influencers and fake news companies to parrot policies of interest to party ownership or a corporate donor, resulting in a singular, brutal repetitive message that gets shared across both traditional and new media.
We saw it pop up during the TikTok hysteria campaign, when Facebook lobbyists were caught spreading scary stories in the press to get a competitor banned. We saw it during the scuttled appointment of popular media reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC, when telecom and media giants got right wing influencers and propaganda rags to frame her as an anti-cop extremist.
You’ll most effectively see this media manipulation symbiosis at work any time anybody proposes consumer protections corporate power doesn’t like, as we’ve seen with both basic privacy protections and during the net neutrality wars, when popular, basic consumer protections were broadly framed as extremist by right wing influencers and the corporate press.
In this case, Model Republic offers up a reasonable guess of what lobbying and policy org was responsible for this latest campaign:
“Several of the accounts quoted above have documented or apparent ties to previous campaigns run by Influenceable, the PR firm that pays conservative influencers to post coordinated content without disclosure. To be clear: we don’t know that Influenceable orchestrated this particular campaign, and it’s possible that another organization or no organization was involved. But the overlap with accounts that appear to be involved with past Influenceable campaigns is suggestive.”
It’s not clear which tech giant (or country) is funding this operation. Microsoft claims to be on board with the Overwatch Act, possibly because it potentially wrote some of it. China certainly doesn’t like the restrictions. And most tech companies really don’t want any regulations governing AI.
They don’t want rules preventing their data centers from polluting and killing minority communities, rules preventing companies from using AI to unfairly attack labor, or any rules whatsoever attempting to impose baseline ethical guardrails on their relentless pursuit of badly automated mass media engagement at unmanageable and impossible scale.
Whoever is behind it, these messaging campaigns are generally quite effective. It’s pretty easy for a handful of right wing influencers and news outlets to generate an entire media cycle out of thin air on a fairly limited budget. It’s relatively easy to manipulate our broken, lazy, and highly consolidated press in a way that undermines or badly frames a particular legislative proposal or candidate.
And while corporatists, culture war propagandists, and their deep-pocketed contributors have mastered modern media in a way that’s uniformly harmful, the nation’s good faith progressive reformers routinely still seemingly struggle to find where their pants are located in a media landscape that’s increasingly tilted in opposition to the public interest and an informed electorate.
Filed Under: ai, ai overwatch act, astroturf, influencers, manipulation, overwatch Act, propaganda, regulation, social media
Companies: influenceable
Comments on “Right Wing Influencers Caught Copy Pasting Identical Rants Against New AI Regulations”
Well no humans want more AI slop, so naturally where else would support for AI come from but AI?
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Except for the humans who make money by imposing slop upon us.
Why do we Hate all of this?
Its to transparent.
Consider, I am receiving 30-50 calls per day as Spam.
They are trying to get me to Signup for 5 services and such.
Only about 5. that about 6-10 per service.
This has lasted almost 2 months.
Who is doing this? as most companies Wouldnt Bother to Call me 100-1000 times in 1 month.. No matter how I answer the automated questions. Even those that answer the phones are Cussing at us. Us as in Many friends are getting the same thing.
Why waste time Calling over and over.
Cellphone company suggests changing number? yep.
They dont know how to Block a random Phone number. REALLY cant check if its random except the Incoming Data. Not that you cant Hardware lookup the Incoming Lines.(yes its a rant)
So, Why Bomb the net sites over and over with the same Crap. After seeing it appear more then a few times on a page. You stop looking at it.
Like looking up the weather, more then 2-3 times in a day.. LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, if you can.
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I get a spam call on my phone about somewhere between once a week and once in a few weeks. Or at least that’s my rough guess. Fewer if you don’t count the ones coming from my own phone company. Then again, I live in one of those places that those same right-wing influencers love to describe as dystopian socialist hellholes.
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i used to get 4-10 calls per day. now i haven’t had a single call in months. not sure what happened.
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Weird. iknow people who have been getting more spam calls over the past few months after it had died down a little. Probably random variations in some overall trend. (Did the regime not kill some minor spam call protections which existed briefly?)
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There’s nothing worse than conservatives acting like democrats.
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Isn’t interesting how “conservatives” consistently do a lot of morally and ethically repugnant shit which they refuse to take responsibility for because according to them, it is entirely the fault of the democrats.
So I can understand how a “conservative” like you really really hate it when an actual bona fide conservative isn’t a cowardly lying and morally corrupt self serving piece of shit.
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Democrats are into copying and pasting identical comments? Examples?
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The OP is implying that The Left™ repeats the same talking points verbatim, regardless of who is speaking and what the subject is, because The Left™ is organized by a shitload of wealthy left-wing benefactors (read: rich Jews, e.g. George Soros) to repeat those talking points. But as with all right-wing accusations, it’s far more of a confession—one built by right-wingers projecting their own tactics onto The Left™ in a sort of “look what you made us do” way. They think right-wingers doing it means The Left™ is doing it too. It’s why right-wingers keep accusing protestors, legal observers, and the mutual aid community in places like Minneapolis of being “bankrolled” by wealthy left-wing benefactors: That’s how right-wing political operations generally work, since very few of them would come out and help their fellow man only out of the small sliver of goodness still left in their hearts.
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Yes, exactly! To some extent, they don’t really get that we exist.
That is, of course they know that we’re around and say the things we say and do the things we do, but they don’t get either why we do that, or how many of us there are. They would never, ever acknowledge that there are tons of people out there who have very good, or at least plausible and understandable, reasons to oppose them and everything they stand for.
That’s why, as you point out, they tell themselves and each other that opposition to them consists only of a few evil ultra-rich Jews and a somewhat larger number of people who are getting paid by those evil ultra-rich Jews, and perhaps some more people who’ve been fooled by the second group.
That’s also part of the explanation for their constant election fraud claims: they would never acknowledge that there are enough people who have their own reasons for being against them and the things they want for them to ever lose an election fair and square, so whenever they lose an election, the only reason they can imagine for why that might have happened is that someone committed fraud.
And it’s why they often can’t imagine that there might ever be sound business reasons for a commercial entertainment enterprise to employ someone like Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel. (I guess with today’s technology, it doesn’t really make sense to use the phrase “keep on the air” in that context any more.)
As for people repeating talking points, well, yes, to some extent, many of the people in each political camp often say many of the same things. They have reasons for why they signed up for their political camp in the first place, after all. And psychologically, people might be better at noticing that kind of thing in their opponents than in themselves, so they might really believe that only their opponents do it. But I’m pretty sure that outside the organized right-wing, it’s pretty rare for people to literally copy and paste the things their paymasters told them to say.
Conservative influencer: for the people who just don’t have it in them to rise to the integrity, respectability, and morality of sex workers.
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AKA, The Flu.
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The idea that a sex worker lacks integrity or morality is the most bourgeois notion I’ve heard in the past hour.
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I think it’s fairly silly for people to earnestly use the word “bourgeois”, but I agree with your larger point.
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That’s a really fucked up thing for you to say.
Yes, I know, this will sound like a very unoriginal and unsuccessful attempt at being funny. But I’m actually completely serious about this. It’s very wrong and damaging and harmful to attack people you don’t like by saying they’re “worse” than sex workers. And I don’t mean because it would be mean to the people you don’t like.
For a similar reason, I generally don’t like it when people call fascists “losers”.
If you can’t create original content then cheat.
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If you can’t create something original, then respect your betters. And don’t pollute the infosphere with your pitiful cashgrab garbage.
Their entire identiy is copypasta astroturf bullshit. Not surprising they tell on themselves – they are incapable of anything else.
Why they want “critical” AI to be exported to actual enemy states is a weird identity marker to choose; oh wait, they’d stab their own genitalia if they thought it could “own the libs”
After Tenet media were exposed taking Russian money to have conservatove youtubers repeat their talking points and Sinclair had dozens of local TV stations repeat pro Trump talking points from a script in must run segments, is anyone shocked by this anymore? They no longer have to hide it or even put in any effort, they say the words they’re told, boost the signal and money comes in.
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And on top of that, I think there was once an attempt by right-wingers to use a montage of Sinclair people parroting the lines they’d been fed to “prove” that the “liberal media” are like that.
"foreign adversaries"
You are the foreign adversary.