Beijing did a test run in Taiwan using AI-generated content to influence voters away from a pro-sovereignty candidate

China will attempt to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India this year with artificial intelligence-generated content after making a dry run with the presidential poll in Taiwan, Microsoft has warned.

The US tech firm said it expected Chinese state-backed cyber groups to target high-profile elections in 2024, with North Korea also involved, according to a report by the company’s threat intelligence team published on Friday.

“As populations in India, South Korea and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections,” the report reads.

Microsoft said that “at a minimum” China will create and distribute through social media AI-generated content that “benefits their positions in these high-profile elections”.

  • @rayyy@lemmy.world
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    483 months ago

    TikTok

    TikTok seems so innocent but people do not understand how nefariously TikTok can be used. Most folks are are defenseless targets because they are not attuned to how psyops has been successfully used against them already.

    • @jaschen@lemm.ee
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      173 months ago

      It’s super targeted. I really wish they would ban it here like they are trying in the US.

    • @jeremyparker@programming.dev
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      33 months ago

      So like uh I’m not trying to out myself as a boomer but how do they use Tiktok nefariously? I used it for about 5 minutes once, the whole experience was just not for me. Do they just take people’s videos and put captions on them?

      • @SlothMama@lemmy.world
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        143 months ago

        No, opinion and ideas are insulated and picked by algorithms so that, out of the available content, they also feed you videos about specific topics and agendas, and suppress slightly the ideas and agendas they aren’t trying to push.

        It’s subtle, but you don’t need to fool an individual quickly, you only need to incrementally modify opinions on a grand scale. People won’t notice, and see these as organic and natural shifts in the ideas and opinions of their peers.

      • @Bernie_Sandals@lemmy.world
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        33 months ago

        It’s a lot harder to add context with only 60 seconds of video. Stripping context is one of the easiest ways to flip a narrative. There are things unique to the TikTok format that are uniquely dangerous.

    • @jaemo@sh.itjust.works
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      13 months ago

      TikTok seems so innocent

      Not since MySpace has any social media “seemed” innocent. If someone thinks that the inception and ongoing existence of these this is out of some weird inbuilt altruism on the part of tech billionaires I’d like to ask them to donate their brain to science after they die so that we might unravel this unsettlingly vast incongruity.