Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online. They also spread false information
Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online. They also spread false information
As the presidential election draws nearer, the spread of bogus information online is getting a huge boost from social media accounts that have been created anonymously.
The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest.
“Extremely concerning,” X owner Elon Musk replied twice to the post this past week.
“Are migrants registering to vote using SSN?” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of former President Donald Trump, asked on Instagram, using the acronym for Social Security number.
Trump himself posted to his own social platform within hours to ask, “Who are all those voters registering without a Photo ID in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Arizona??? What is going on???”
…
Yet by the time they tried to correct the record, the false claim had spread widely. In three days, the pseudonymous user’s claim amassed more than 63 million views on X, according to the platform’s metrics. A thorough explanation from Richer attracted a fraction of that, reaching 2.4 million users.
The incident sheds light on how social media accounts that shield the identities of the people or groups behind them through clever slogans and cartoon avatars have come to dominate right-wing political discussion online even as they spread false information.
Asimov: *nails it*
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
The bad guys since high school and in countless tales and yet still in governments and corner suites and at pulpits: *weaponizes it*
You know who you are: *treats it all like team sports* *thinks is player* *is ball*
This is a perfect example of truthful mainstream propaganda.
I have no doubt all of the facts in this piece are correct, but their also aligned in such a way to suggest to the reader that the real root of the problem is that commoners are allowed to have anonymous social media accounts not tied to a real name or some government ID program.
This. This right here, people, is why the community rules exist and why I'm happy to see them consistently enforced.
“Users”
It makes sense. What's the first thing you're going to do when you arrive in a foreign country, when you have no money, don't speak the language, don't know what you're going to do tomorrow, have been through hell after literally walking thousands of kilometres?
Register for voting in the local presidential election of course! You still have your napkin that your communist contact gave you with a quick scribble: "Beeden, good; Troomp, no good".
2001 called and asked for its headline back.
See: the people still pushing DNC conspiracy theories almost a decade later.
X did not respond to a request for comment, which was met with an automated reply.
I'm pretty sure that automated reply was just 💩, since that's what he does with all of his other companies.
I mean, okay. But that's not specific to right-wing stuff.
I'm pseudonymous -- "tal" isn't my given name or surname. I like participating in forums under a pseudonym. I'm not really enthusiastic about forums -- like Google Groups -- that tried forcing users to use their real names.
Like, if the issue is with use of pseudonyms in general, I don't think that that's gonna work, because I would bet that people generally like using forums under pseudonyms.
Pseudonyms reduce use of reputation compared to systems where a real-life identity is involved, because someone can always get a new one.
There are ways to still leverage reputation in pseudonymous environments. So, okay. I'm a pretty prolific commenter. I bet that there are people on here who have learned to recognize "tal". You can build a reputation associated with a pseudonym, and then people can trust pseudonyms based on the reputation they build.
One thing you can do is to have the software make reputation statistics more-visible. Like, Reddit Enhancement Suite tracked your upvotes and downvotes, and would tell you, next to usernames how many times you'd upvoted or downvoted someone in the past, so that each person had the computer helping you track what you generally thought of their comments in the past.
You could maybe do something like get "expensive" identities that aren't linked to a real identity. Like, say I need to pay $100 to buy a pseudonym from someone ("12954881241221@100-dollar-id.verisign.com"). I generate a public/private keypair. I send Verisign the public key and money, and and they cryptographically sign it. At that point, I can be "tal", but have bans and reputation linked to that underlying ID, and if I get banned or something, it'd cost me 100 bucks to get a new identity. Could have multiple identities, different costs. The problem is that the cost there may not be sufficient to deter someone running a dedicated disinfo campaign. I mean, okay, so say an identity is $100. I buy a thousand, that's $100,000. If you want to run a disinfo campaign, that's probably not a lot of money.
Note that with enough money, you can also attack the above "reputation" route, either by paying people to build up an identity -- as was probably done to build reputation associated with the "Jia Tan" group's attack on xz that was in the news recently -- or by simply buying accounts from legitimate users who are willing to sell their account.
Another way of saying: right wing communities are under heavy attack