>‘Jake’ claimed that a “top BBC anchor resigned on air and was immediately detained by security services” and that “crowds have surrounded the residence of the newly appointed ‘Governor General’ imposed by London”.
>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
A lot of this stuff doesn't work by changing people's mind on topic X, but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy. For example, one thing that you can quite often hear from a Russian that has been confronted with something unpleasant is "well, who knows what's true". This is usually not a figure of speech, not some kind of washing down of facts, but rather an accurate representation of their mind.
Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
It's quite possible a lot of this stuff just doesn't work, or only has an extremely slight effect. The internet is so full of nonsense, I'm not sure how much effect you can add by tossing some more on the top of the pile.
But, these sorts of bots are fairly cheap to run, and they have time on their side to try a bunch of different ideas.
I hear that sentiment from a lot of right wing friends in US fwiw. IME here it's more a coded speech and / or an escape from difficult conversations. The coded speech part steers it towards general conspiracy topics, which are often a simple way to blanket discard everything "liberal".
An actual example: "What did you think about Bill Gates climate book?" (they'd read it) -> "He was associated with Epstein, he's a creep. I don't trust anything he says". Then, "What do you think about Trumps delaying and denying of Epstein associations" -> "There's so much back and forth, who knows what to believe."
To be clear I think your take is correct, its just I think that if the space were saturated in a direction that were more convenient towards their "team", they won't have much difficulty taking a clear stance.
Maybe it’s not meant to be signal. It’s meant to be noise that makes the signal increasingly hard to distinguish. You get used to there being bullshit and now you can’t tell precisely which unlikely but maybe plausible messages are true. It helps weaken the ability for the target to be able to engage in meaningful discourse.
I hate to admit it but I failed the NPR real vs fake video quiz [1] and it is exactly because of this. There is so much fake noise out there that it is very hard to tell what is true.
Thanks for sharing this. I got all 4, but none of which were so obvious that I had absolutely no doubt. I had to reason about all of them. And I'm absolutely confident that a LOT of perfectly reasonable people can potentially score zero on this test.
Same. Managed all 4. But the differences are tiny and I'm only 70% confident. Most of my judgement is based on human reactions to a changing situation.
Yeah, I have pretty much stopped analyzing the media itself for cues, and am evaluating the scene and the actors. Are they convincing? The behaviour of the cops in the first video were entirely unconvincing. I didn't consider the video quality, artifacts, lip sync issues, etc.
Thanks for sharing. I am curious which of the four quiz questions you failed—to me they looked relatively easy to tell apart, but I follow the progression of this tech very closely.
Personally, I've mislabeled the one with the animal in the restaurant as AI generated. I might have clicked too quickly because it was looking like the animals trampolines video's. I've not really looked at the timestamps.
I'm generally good at detecting AI generated content but I might have a few false positives. :)
4/4 for me, but probably only because I knew about that tear gas incident, and that snake was way too loud and they don't tend to move like that unless it's sand.
The tear gas was the only one that had me guessing. Knew the video was real, but wasn't sure it wasn't doctored just at the end with the throw. Overall, it read more real than fake, I was just sure they were going to try to "gotcha" me.
It's for the Scottish. It's in Iran's interests for Scotland to become independent because that would enforce change on the United Nations Security Council. The UK ceases to exist and loses its veto, then what happens on the UNSC after that is anyone's guess.
The UK doesn't cease to exist though, it just shrinks. Plus the USSR fragmenting and Russia (as the main constituent part, the nuclear power and the country the independent republics were happy to acknowledge as the continuation of the USSR) becoming the successor state is pretty well-established precedent for what happens when states fragment, whose legitimacy Russia probably doesn't want to contest too strongly...
General disruption in the UK would help the Iranian government a little, but I managed to click on one of the accounts before it was suspended, and its most popular tweets received very interaction (and were pretty banal statements of independence support indistinguishable from stuff thousands of completely normal Scottish people posted) I assume their attempts to seed wilder rumours were low effort and had very little success.
Russia was allowed to inherit the USSR seat on 3 conditions:
- It took on all the sovereign debt from the newly independent nations.
- It relinquished nukes that were left behind in Ukraine.
- The United Nations collectively agreed to it.
I don't think any of those things would happen in the UK's case. But of course it doesn't matter what you or I think. It only matters what _Iran_ thinks will happen if Scotland gains independence.
Russia didn't lose its veto when the USSR collapsed and neither would the UK lose it in such a case. If the UK was in danger of losing its veto it would never allow Scottish independence.
It doesn’t matter whether independence is realized, what Iran wants is more time and effort spent on domestic disagreement, so less is available to support international engagement.
This is a tool of international competition and the U.S. and U.K. have been trying to do it to Iran (and others) for even longer than the reverse.
Manx is the demonym for people from the Isle of Man. It's odd to see it written "Isle of Manx" in a list of other demonyms, but the word Manx itself is far from modern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_people
Not Iranians - what would anyone gain by influencing Iranians' views of Scottish nationalism? My experience has been that people outside the west barely know Scotland exists and are not going to care about it anymore than the average Scot is likely to have strong feelings about Laos.
It may be aimed at Scots but sometimes be done too blatantly so slips into the implausible. It may be aimed at influencing just those prone to conspiracy theories - who might be few but more likely to extreme actions.
If their objective is to damage the UK they can do that without breaking it up. For example, for example by fostering violent Scottish Nationalism, or even just sowing hatred between the Scots and the English, or between Scots who want to remain the UK and those who do not..
Its quite unusual for separatist movements to both remain peaceful themselves, and not to be violent suppressed. Even other western democracies have not managed, nor did one other part of the UK for a long time.
My other nationality is Sri Lankan so I have seen how bad it can get. I do not think that will ever happen in the UK, but even a very small number of sufficiently nasty people can do a great deal of damage.
People leave Iran for UK. The idea is that if UK seems less attractive and stable, fewer people will be strongly inclined to pursue it. It also normalizes chaos at home.
I think there are parallels to draw to how Fox News tried to paint a picture of places in Europe being on fire and overtaken by gangs and radicals years before that became close to actual reality.
We are the target of this propaganda, and I don’t mean the Scottish independence stuff. The US and Israel are jamming the airwaves with anti-Iran propaganda to manufacture consent to attack Iran. Every day we’re being subjected to a ton of this stuff on every channel (including HN).
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
tbf the US is a very different place where you'd have to at least double check rumours that the executive hadn't decided that tanks in cities were the best way to address crime in cities.
The UK rumour people probably believe is more likely to be "English police suppress tweets of valued contributors to the Scottish nationalist movement"...
Northern Ireland is a big part of why the UK doesn't think the optics of deploying tanks are a show of strength and doesn't think it comes without a cost...
I think these accounts may not be as political as many people think. It has been observed that foreign bot accounts often support both positions on contentious issues.
Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency? Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
Now, I do certainly believe Russian cybercriminals do work for the government now and then in return for tolerance. But it may be less mustache-twirling chaos farming and more plain old scams.
> Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
bingo.
you need a trail of real-looking accounts. not just for posting, too, but also to link to, or retweet, or like, etc., in ways that get algorithms to put stuff on the top of a feed.
there may be only one actual account pushing the marketing or propaganda, but you need 5k more to upvote or share -- and those accounts can be just random AI slop or reposts of something. take the top replies of a popular post and shorten it, then post it a day or two later. or repost the most popular generic post of last month, etc.
You don't actually need real looking accounts. Almost all of this stuff is done with the most superficial and obvious accounts.
You don't need any reputation at all because the sites do very little actual work to block literal nation state level information warfare campaigns (because that would cost money and reduce their metrics)
You also don't need any reputation because the real humans who will be boosting your false narrative or "information" are the type that take someone else telling them "No, that's fake because <reason>" to be high quality evidence that it is "The real truth THEY don't want you to know"
Like, these accounts will quite literally only be active from 9-5 Moscow time despite being "In the US", and yet that is apparently not a strong enough signal for companies to target them for review or bans?
> It has been observed that foreign bot accounts often support both positions on contentious issues.
Absolutely
>Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency?
No, you've misunderstood. Pushing both sides isn't evidence that they aren't literally posting as information warfare. The Kremlin goal is not really any party wins in particular (though they have preferences), but to weaken a country by ensuring it spends more effort on internal struggles.
Both Iran and Russia (as well as many other nations) have known information warfare arms that actively post with the intent of stirring up shit. They really don't try to legitimize those accounts because the don't actually need the con to be hidden, because nobody fucking checks, because microblogging platforms like X are full of people who have self selected to be especially credulous, especially bad at interrogating a source of information for quality, and really really bad at recognizing how many times they have fallen for outright false info.
> Both Iran and Russia (as well as many other nations) have known information warfare arms that actively post with the intent of stirring up shit.
So we have been told. What if these are just repurposed cybercriminals, spammers and fraudsters? To me, it makes perfect sense that fraudsters try to convince their own corrupt authoritarian government, "no, we're spreading chaos and distrust, it's great for our country actually! You should protect us and pay us!" when they don't give a rat's ass whether the "distrust propaganda" is useful or not, they're just pumping their scams.
The thing I'm arguing against is mainly that this thing works and can be stopped with aggressive censorship. I don't think that's true even if Putin and co. totally buy into the "spreading distrust" narrative. It wouldn't be the first time our spooks and their spooks agreed on a bizarre view of the world.
I’m certain that a key pillar of Russian propaganda in the USA is to repeat the horseshit that Europe is some degenerate shithole/caliphate arresting people left right and centre for tweeting. See also the US’s total obsession with London and its supposed “no go zone” for white people. The irony is that the US is far less white than Europe is, so they really cannot point fingers at us. It’s worked fantastically at separating the US from all of its allies. We saw that at the Munich security conference last year.
In reality we are their closest and truest friends and yet they’re relentlessly shitting all over us, even threatening to invade now. The only comfort is that the USA will inevitably reap what it is sowing.
A lot of the racist and islamophobic talking points get exported from the US, then they seem to mull around in Europe for a while, and eventually the US right wing points at what the right is saying there (particularly in the UK) and reimports the rhetoric, often as if it's now solid evidence.
It happened with anti-vax as well. I remember finding it very striking when I started hearing US anti-vaxxers refer to "the jab" in 2020. That's a term we never used in American English.
Yeah this is one conspiracy I believe. There's this narrative at the moment that the UK is some dystopian hellhole where you'll get arrested for basically anything you post online. It's very pervasive to the point that fairly normal American people I follow online have repeated such things.
Now, the UK has plenty of problems, I do not deny that. But the situation is nothing like it is presented online.
My thinking is that this is meant to make people in the US feel that the rising authoritarianism isn't so bad in relative terms "well the UK is far worse!".
Apart from anything else, where are they rolling 'down' from? The castle? I mean I know it's technically a castle, but it's not like there are a bunch of troops there just waiting to spring on Holyrood, no?
.. correct, a good old fashioned non-AI mis-googling error. The castle barracks is the "New Barracks", so called because it was built in 1799, and I saw the blocky stonework construction and went "close enough". Sources are a bit vague on how currently used it is. https://edinburghtourist.co.uk/questions/who-lives-edinburgh...
Yeah, fair point. I was just not sure if they have enough troops to take the parliament in any meaningful sense (not that this stuff should really be taken seriously).
Of course, if there are pipers involved, then everyone better watch out ...
Seems totally risible stuff. On Twitter, I've mostly seen this story shared by British nationalist accounts, presumably because they think it tarnishes the cause of Scottish independence by throwing support for it into question.
Having said that, partisan people on social media are always happy to share stuff that they agree with regardless of the source. Presumably these accounts posted less loopy stuff sometimes and got retweets.
You only need look at Musk’s Twitter and right wing media outlets to hear about the U.K’s no go zones for white people — which do not exist. Accounts professing to be from Scottish people are not trying to influence Scottish people, they’re trying to influence Americans into believing that Scotland has already fallen victim to what the fearmongers say is coming for America.
It's part of their government's "Death to England" vision, which they describe as a "policy". Splitting up the UK is part of it. It's ineffective and bizarre, but this insular theocracy has a long track-record of such decision making.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
The accounts appear to be suspended, so it is true that Scottish people are not being influenced by these accounts.
In fact, the link in the story about tanks in Edinburgh goes nowhere. Combined with the links to suspended accounts, the article almost reads like it was written by a sock puppet...
These numbers are for _all_ arrests under the Malicious Communications Act in that year. So while that category includes arrests for tweets, it also includes all arrests for any offensive communications via an internet-enabled device. So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp. Similarly, it can include just about any arrest where the crime was planned on an internet enabled device.
Sure, but it’s pretty hard to believe that the domestic violence arrests are increasing exponentially, isn’t it?
ETA:
> So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp.
Are you absolutely sure of this? It sounded good on the first read, but I’m very skeptical now. It seems to me that the arrest is going to be for battery, even if the charges filed later include the WhatsApp messages.
In the uk, during interview, you can only be questioned for offences you’ve been arrested for. So it’s common to get over-arrested, and later charged with the serious crime rather than the minor ones.
The overwhelming majority of people arrested under the communications act aren’t charged under it. They’re either released, or charged under a more serious offence.
The point is, communications should not be surveilled at all by the state. It shouldn't matter that the Internet is sometimes used to commit crimes, the bigger issue is that the vast majority of non-criminal traffic is subject to snooping.
I don't have proof, but systems are certainly designed to make this possible. And since it's possible, it is safe to assume that it is happening. (The Snowden leaks corroborate massive information sharing between "Big Tech" and the U.S. government, for example.) Hence you should categorically refuse to use anything Meta (that includes, among others, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp), or Google, or Microsoft.
Were they surveilled? Or simply read on someone's device after they were lawfully arrested, or sent to the police by the victim? You seem to be making a bit of a jump there
It's not that you can unredact them from scratch (you could never get the blue circle back from this software). It's that you can tell which of the redacted images is which of the origin images. Investigative teams often find themselves in a situation where they have all four images, but need to work out which redacted files are which of the origins. Take for example, where headed paper is otherwise entirely redacted.
So with this technique, you can definitively say "Redacted-file-A is definitely a redacted version of Origin-file-A". Super useful for identifying forgeries in a stack of otherwise legitimate files.
Also good for for saying "the date on origin-file-B is 1993, and the file you've presented as evidence is provable as origin-file-b, so you definitely know of [whatever event] in 1993".
>but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.
This is at least a little disingenuous (or ill-thought-out), when you account for the fact the company is a spin-off/subsidiary of a large & successful Italian agency. While I'm certain these things helped keep the business sustainable, the fact of the matter is that the company was still incubated rather than bootstrapped. The only real difference is that it was incubated by its parent company, rather than by the VC industry.
Define “successful Italian agency” :) If breaking even every year with 20+ employees counts as successful, then yes—successful. But I think you may have a mistaken idea of the level of support and investment that the “incubating” company actually provided. With the limited effort I put into this product over the years before it started to work, all I really needed was any stable job and a few hours each week. You don’t need a particularly favorable setup to pursue a bootstrapped approach... but you do need to be very comfortable with the timeline for seeing results.
Reddit has been an absolute dumpster fire from the get-go. Its Wikipedia page has one of the largest “controversies” sections of any publicly listed company. Many of the controversies are so significant they have their own Wikipedia page.
Not wanting to particularly defend Reddit but a controversies section on a wikipedia page is hardly a good metric, in my opinion. Wikipedia is often used to malign various entities (and protect others).
I think this article is "why startups died pre-2020", rather than "why startups die [now]".
Lots of this article relates to the reasons startups died when cash was freely available - both from VCs and from the markets you were trying to find product in. For example, if you started an online learning company in March 2020, you'd have hit product right away (along with a thousand competitors), and been lathered with cash from every direction. But three years later, all of those startups were struggling, and I don't know of _any_ that survived. That's not a case of the business owners in 1000 discrete companies giving up. That's the entire world economy reverting back to in-person learning, and the disappearance of the ultra-low interest rates for the company to fall back on while it pivots.
In 2025, founders need to be acutely aware of exogenous factors, as they can be business-obliterating events without the social safety net of 0-1% IR.
Interesting opinion. Perhaps it's because I am a founder pre-2020 and lots of my thinking was shaped around that. What else do you think changed post-2020?
Why do you say pre-2020? 2020-2021 were the easiest times ever for funding with a lot of money-printing and zero rates (unlike 2018-2019!). Only in 2022 things started to get worse, and ground to a halt, at least for everyone outside of the AI bubble, from 2023.
Now all who i know who are still operating, do so simply with the money raised before. Companies are going belly up left and right simply because that money runs out.
The site is back up, but it feels fairly silly that a platform that has inserted itself as a single point of failure has an architecture that's got single points of failure.
The other companies working at that scale have all sensibly split off into geographical regions & product verticals with redundancy & it's rare that "absolutely all of AWS everywhere is offline". This is two total global outages in as many weeks from Cloudflare, and a third "mostly global outage" the week before.
Given that the author describes the company as prompt, communicative and professional, I think it’s fair to assume there was more contact than the four events in the top of the article.
The AI agents don’t appear to know how & where to be economically productive. That still appears to be a uniquely human domain of expertise.
So the human is there to decide which job is economically productive to take on. The AI is there to execute the day-to-day tasks involved in the job.
It’s symbiotic. The human doesn’t labour unnecessarily. The AI has some avenue of productive output & revenue generating opportunity for OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever.
It’s a fundamental principle of modern economics that humans are assumed to act in their own economic interests - for which they need to know how and where to be economically productive.
humans are assumed to act, and some activities may generate consequences, to which a human may react somehow.
certainly there is a "survivor bias" but the rationality, long-term viability, and "economic benefit" of those activities and reactions is an open question. any judgement of "economic benefit" is arbitrary and often made in aggregate after the fact.
if humans knew how to create "economic benefit" in some fundamental and true way, game theory and most regulatory infrastructure would not exist, and i'm saying that as an anarchist.
While I think this is good advice in general, I don’t think your statement that “there is no process to create scalable software” holds true.
The uk gov development service reliably implements huge systems over and over again, and those systems go out to tens of millions from day 1. As a rule of thumb, the parts of the uk govt digital suite that suck are the parts the development service haven’t been assigned to yet.
The Swift banking org launches reliable features to hundreds of millions of users.
There’s honestly loads of instances of organisations reliably implementing robust and scalable software without starting with tens of users.
The uk government development service as you call it is not a service. It’s more of a declaration of process that is adhered to across diverse departments and organisations that make up the government. It’s usually small teams that are responsible for exploring what a service is or needs and then implementing it. They are able to deliver decent services because they start small, design and user test iteratively and only when there is a really good understanding of what’s being delivered do they scale out.
The technology is the easy bit.
The UK Gov has many service and process docs [1]. It started out that way but has grown rapidly and changed. Including a library for authentication, frontend templates and libraries, custom docker images.
UK GDS is great, but the point there is that they're a crack team of project managers.
People complain about junior developers who pass a hiring screen and then can't write a single line of code. The equivalent exists for both project management and management in general, except it's much harder to spot in advance. Plus there's simply a lot of bad doctrine and "vibes management" going on.
("Vibes management": you give a prompt to your employees vaguely describing a desired outcome and then keep trying to correct it into what you actually wanted)
> and those systems go out to tens of millions from day 1
I like GDS (I even interviewed with them once and saw their dev process etc) but this isn't a great example. Technically GDS services have millions of users across decades, but people e.g. aren't constantly applying for new passports every day.
A much better example I think is Facebook's rollout of Messenger, which scaled to billions of actual users on day 1 with no issues. They did it by shipping the code early in the Facebook app, and getting it to send test messages to other apps until the infra held, and then they released Messenger after that. Great test strategy.
GDS's budget is about £90 million a year or something. There are many contracts that are still spent on digital, for example PA consulting for £60 million (over a few years) which do a lot of the gov.uk home-office stuff, and their fresh grads they hire cost more to the government than GDS's most senior staff...
SWIFT? Hold my beer. SWIFT did not launch anything substantial since its startup days in early 70-ies.
Moreover, their core tech did not evolve that far from that era, and the 70-ies tech bros are still there through their progeniture.
Here's an anecdote: The first messaging system built by SWIFT was text-based, somewhat similar to ASN.1.
The next one used XML, as it was the fad of the day. Unfortunately, neither SWIFT nor the banks could handle 2-3 orders of magnitude increase in payload size in their ancient systems. Yes, as engineers, you would think compressing XML would solve the problem and you would by right. Moreover, XML Infoset already existed, and it defined compression as a function of the XML Schema, so it was somewhat more deterministic even though not more efficient than LZMA.
But the suits decided differently. At one of the SIBOS conferences they abbreviate XML tags, and did it literally on paper and without thinking about back-and-forth translation, dupes, etc.
And this is how we landed with ISO20022 abberviations that we all know and love: Ccy for Currency, Pmt for Payment, Dt for Date, etc.
Is it? No auditor will read binary, so you already need a preprocessing step to get it to a readable format. And if you're already preprocessing then adding a decompression step is like 2 lines tops.
>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
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