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Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
@RVAwonk
Dec 9, 2019 • 8 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Yes, absolutely. But it goes beyond Fox News. This story can be traced back to the creation of right-wing think tanks, which were founded for the explicit purpose of helping conservatives win the "war of ideas", as former Reagan adviser Murray Weidenbaum once said. 1/
Conservative think-tanks arose from the expectation that conservative ideas deserve the same weight as objective facts. When that didn't happen, conservatives cried "liberal bias" and went off & created their own echo-chambers, with think-tanks as the foundation. 2/
Conservative think-tanks exist to produce ideologically-driven "research" and partisan "knowledge". When the media did not give this "knowledge" the same weight as objective facts, conservatives created their own sources of media to disseminate this partisan information. 3/
Conservatives used this to create the narrative that the mainstream media is corrupted by "liberal bias" -- simply because mainstream media refused to treat partisan information as if it carried the same weight as objective facts. 4/
In doing so, they not only undermined public trust in shared sources of knowledge -- they poisoned our political process by making it impossible to even agree upon a shared set of facts. How can you debate an issue if one side won't even acknowledge that objective facts exist? 5/
Fox News is the vehicle for this partisan information, and they've contributed to the problem far more than any other right-wing media outlet. But ultimately, this is about more than Fox News -- it's about an asymmetric relationship with knowledge producing institutions. 6/
Fox News is successful because of a 50+ year campaign promoting ideological rigidity, hyperpartisanship, & disregard for objective truths as core conservative values. There now exists an entire ecosystem to produce, disseminate, and promote right-wing propaganda as "facts". 7/
And yes, there are left-leaning think tanks and media outlets. But there's nothing comparable to the conservative ecosystem. They literally created an alternative knowledge-producing mechanism & media infrastructure because mainstream media was too objective. 8/

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More from @RVAwonk

Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Nov 24
X’s new “About this account” feature just accidentally revealed a vast network of covert foreign influence accounts posing as Americans but operating from overseas — the most sweeping public exposure of covert influence on a major platform since 2016. Story is linked below. Image
Some of these accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers. They present themselves as American patriots, veterans, moms, truck drivers, or lifelong Republicans. Many are explicitly MAGA. But their operators are posting from overseas while shaping U.S. political narratives.
It’s not just MAGA accounts, but mostly it is. Several large anti-Trump accounts were also revealed as foreign-run, as were public health networks. The common denominator is deception: pretending to be American participants in US politics while pushing highly divisive content.
Read 12 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Oct 28
I wrote about a secret tactic shaping what you see online — one almost no one’s talking about. It’s called Moderation Sabotage, and it’s how political digital operatives overwhelm social media defenses so lies go viral before truth can catch up. Link is posted below.🧵
Imagine flooding the system so completely that moderators can’t respond in time. That’s the playbook: swamp the filters, delay enforcement, and let false or incendiary content live long enough to trend.

By the time platforms react, the damage is done.
This isn’t random chaos. It’s deliberate. Trump’s digital allies — the same architects behind Stop the Steal — have refined Moderation Sabotage into an election-year weapon. Rather than hacking the code, they’re hacking the people who keep the code honest.
Read 11 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Oct 13
NEW: AI campaigns are learning to run themselves — and using our data to do it. Without stricter safeguards, we may soon see AI controlling the very governing bodies that could enforce those safeguards in the first place..

(Link in next tweet). Image
I took 2 months off due to health problems, and when I returned, I expected to see the normal disinformation playbook in action. Indeed, that was waiting for me. But so was something else: AI is now running for office & pushing humans out of the process.

weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/ai-political…

We’ve already seen AI playing a big role in politics, including several attempts to get an AI system elected to office in order to act as the decision-maker, while humans would simply act as the body for AI’s policies and initiatives. weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/ai-political…Image
Read 9 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Aug 13
The “controversy” over Sydney Sweeney is absurd and largely fake, but there’s one thing worth paying attention to — the tried and tested formula used by the right-wing outrage machine to manufacture liberal fury and then bait the left into making it a reality.
Here’s how it works:

First, invent the outrage. This usually involves picking a neutral or mildly provocative event and finding something about it to frame as being offensive to the left. In this case, the slogan (“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”). Image
Second, flood the zone. Carry out a social media blitz and manufacture the appearance of outrage by gaming the algorithm with repetitive content, which will then get pushed into trending feeds and recommended videos — creating the perception that people actually care about it. Image
Read 15 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Aug 10
I just published the 2nd major piece in my series about algorithmic tyranny — this time, revealing how Trump & the right-wing outrage machine are not just gaming algorithms, but rewriting the rules so they can keep gaming them indefinitely. I call it the Feedback Loop Coup. Image
Last week, I introduced the concept of Reverse Algorithmic Capture, a tactic used to force platforms to rewrite their rules through political & legal pressure. Feedback Loop Coups are similar, except they exploit *existing* rules to rewire algorithms & seize control of your feed.
We all know by now that platforms operate on the same fundamental principle: the more engagement a post receives, the more the algorithm pushes it into other people's feeds. The faster this engagement occurs, the more "urgent" the algorithm considers it, and the wider it spreads.
Read 20 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Aug 5
I have reported on and studied some incredibly dark topics, but there’s a rabbit hole underneath the practice of AI resurrections (ie, trying to recreate dead people through AI personas) that makes QAnon look like a fun walk through the park. And no one is paying attention.
The practice of creating AI personas to represent dead people — including using their likeness, image, voice, and words — is disturbing enough on its face, and of course very rarely involves consent. But it’s also totally unregulated. Because no one is paying attention.
There are researchers out here, warning that they have seen AI resurrections stalk their family members online beyond the point that their family members want to interact with them. Imagine an AI persona of your dead loved one begging to talk to you… and having to say no.
Read 12 tweets

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