Will Oremus Profile picture
Dec 14, 2019 5 tweets 3 min read Read on X
this whole thing is insane and very 2019. it appears some comedians staged the #moveslikebloomberg dance routine, and when the bloomberg campaign disavowed them, kept up the act by pretending to have been fired and mistreated. and everyone in the replies is falling for it?
Now they’re getting amplification for the #DropOutBloomberg hastag from shady(?) random accounts like this... ...as well as legit(?) lefty political accounts like this t.co/SkWUQKk1rD
On one level it’s a funny bit directed at a very make-funnable candidate.

On another level it’s a coordinated social media misinformation campaign aimed at manipulating a democratic election, and the Russian IRA is probably cheering it on if not actively joining in.
People who think this is harmless fun... I want to be one of you! But that’s not how the Internet works. Satire that misleads more people than it amuses is functionally similar to coordinated disinformation, and serves most of the same ends. See: Poe’s Law slate.com/technology/201…

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More from @WillOremus

Apr 19, 2023
This visual deep dive into one of the largest AI language datasets is nonstop fascinating and troubling and anyone who is remotely interested in how LLMs really work, their biases, or intellectual property should read it. washingtonpost.com/technology/int…
"Content without consent" is a concern that I could see catching on as more people gradually realize the content they've published and posted over the years is being secretly used to train for-profit AI models. washingtonpost.com/technology/int… Image
If your AI chatbot is spouting some disturbing views, it could be because the websites that contributed the most language tokens to its training dataset include the likes of RT, Breitbart and VDare. washingtonpost.com/technology/int… Image
Read 9 tweets
Apr 5, 2023
Asked for examples of sexual harassment at law schools, ChatGPT named a GW prof accused of touching a student on a class trip to Alaska, citing a WashPost story.

The prof is real. The rest was made up.

We wrote about what happens when AIs lie about you: washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
It gets weirder. Bear with me.

ChatGPT generated the fake scandal involving law prof @JonathanTurley in response to prompts from @VolokhC last week. Turley wrote about it in a @USATODAY op-ed Monday.

Today we tested the same prompt on Microsoft's Bing AI. And guess what...
@JonathanTurley @VolokhC @USATODAY Now Bing is *also* claiming Turley was accused of sexually harassing a student on a class trip in 2018. It cites as a source for this claim Turley's own USA Today op-ed about the false claim by ChatGPT, along with several other aggregations of his op-ed. Image
Read 7 tweets
Dec 16, 2022
remember when musk claimed he was a “free speech absolutist”
Amazing. Now Twitter has suspended my colleague, Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell, without explanation--apparently for his tweet critical of Musk, which included a screenshot of Mastodon's tweet.
Musk's Twitter now appears to be rapidly suspending the accounts of journalists and others who tweet screenshots of tweets from other banned account. It's a free-speech bonanza!
Read 5 tweets
Dec 14, 2022
bizarre as it sounds, i think this is actually the clearest and most plausible explanation yet for how musk justifies this entire twitter boondoggle to himself
musk saw twitter as the root of the “woke mind virus” which he blamed for everything from the media criticizing him to his employees complaining about racism & sexism to liz warren pushing a billionaire tax. and he thought buying it could put a stop to all that.
and then he added this longtermist rationale where if the woke mind virus continued unabated, great geniuses like him would forever be plagued and smothered by critics and regulators like in an ayn rand novel and then we’d never build rockets and then we’d never make it to mars.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 9, 2022
There are some mildly interesting details in here but presenting it as some new and shocking and secret finding is either ignorant or disingenuous. There have been whole news cycles about Twitter shadowbans. I know because I’ve written about them multiple times over the years.
Sorry, I do have more to say about this, just have to finish putting the kid to bed first lol
Twitter first announced—yes, announced! publicly! they even held briefings for me and other reporters on it!—the set of moderation practices that critics would later dub “shadowbanning” in May 2018. I called it “Twitter purgatory.” slate.com/technology/201…
Read 15 tweets
Dec 8, 2022
New: The war has sent *8 million* Ukrainians fleeing to Europe. With Russia shelling infrastructure ahead of a frigid winter, more are on the way. Germans and Poles have welcomed them—so far.

A massive Russian disinfo campaign is working to change that. washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
In 2016, Russian trolls famously used social media to sow division in the US around race, immigration, Hillary etc.

Today, they're trying to do something analogous in Germany, a critical Ukraine ally—tearing apart its consensus on Ukraine from the inside. washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
"Russian disinfo" gets thrown around a lot, but it's not always clear what it looks like, how it works, and the complex ways it plays out in the real world. Our goal with this story was to dive into that, combining new research by @ISDglobal w/ on-the-ground reporting in Germany.
Read 6 tweets

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