Censorship, AI And New Propaganda

AI and the new kind of propaganda

Johan Eddebo

Meanwhile, there are currently massive efforts in the background and below the surface, all across the playing field, towards implementing big data and AI technology for not only the purposes of classical, increasingly obsolete propaganda or simple surveillance. No, this time, we’re exploring entirely novel methods of behavioural modification and narrative control intended to GET OUT AHEAD of the crystallization of discourses and even the formation of identities and worldviews.

They want to control the formation and reproduction of “social imaginaries”.

So the idea is to use massive data collection and AI pattern recognition to preemptively disrupt the formation of behaviourally significant narratives, discourses or patterns of information.

With these tools of “early diagnosis” of information that potentially could disrupt the power structure and its objectives, it then becomes possible to nip it in the bud incredibly early on, way before such information has even coalesced into something like coherent narratives or meaningful models for explanation or further (precarious) conclusions.

The whole process would work something like this.

AI scours the massive amounts of data collected in real-time from social media and digital communications networks, including everything from cell phone transcripts to instant messaging applications (why do you think WhatsApp (now owned by Meta, formerly known as Facebook) allows you to call everyone in the world for free?).

You’ve then trained the algorithms to pick out “disruptive” patterns in the communications that precede the various sorts of developments you want to avoid, such as for some piece of information to go viral, but you would also want to identify potentially robust clusters of information that won’t necessarily go viral rapidly, but that have the capacity to generate strong and enduring narrative frameworks that over time could threaten the status quo. This would include such complex phenomena as religious and political reform movements, innovative counter-cultural approaches, or even artistic endeavours that could impact people’s meaning-making.

You then pick out key “influencers”, i.e. nodes or potential nodes in the patterns of communication, and the crucial and totally devious addition to run-of-the-mill approaches like shadow banning or other types of soft censorship that’s new to this stage of digital propaganda, is the proactive seeding of counter-narratives that can be done at this point.

So you gently and carefully “nudge” the potentially disruptive individuals in the preferred direction, to mold and shape the flows of information over which they have influence, with the end goal of actively shaping or blocking the crystallization of any viral formations or potentially robust narratives or new “social imaginaries”.

Full spectrum narrative dominance.

As reported by Lee Fang, one company that recently emerged, and which has its sights set on “keeping tabs” on online conversations and actively employing “countermeasures” at the behest of major corporations and Western governments, goes by the name of “Logically.AI”.

Logically.AI is as spooky as they come, with their US headquarters in Arlington, VA., i.e. next door to the Pentagon and DARPA, and was allegedly founded at the tender age of 22 by this strangely untraceable ghost with the implausible name of “Lyric Jain”.

Anyhow, what would then the overall mode of operation look like?

Imagine that you or I express some unit of “malinformation” in our online interactions that gets picked up by one of these pattern-recognizing algorithms trained to detect potentially disruptive pieces of information. Let’s say that this particular statement, entirely truthful, gets tagged with the moderate risk of supporting a set of conclusions that could have a negative impact on one of the major pharmaceutical brands with close ties to the state-corporate power structure. Totally random example.

What this ingenious AI propaganda system then does, is to automatically cordon off this statement by shadowbanning, downranking and other forms of concealment in the information flows. It also tags us with being a potentially disruptive agent, increasing scrutiny of our on- and offline activities. Of course, you can also effectively separate “disruptive agents” from each other by automatically demoting their posts in each others’ flows, no matter what the content, and through throwing up all sorts of obstacles for their online interaction. But these are old strategies.

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