iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

The Trump admin isn't just trying to help Russia beat Ukraine, and backing off opposition to Russian atrocities such as kidnapping children, they're now deleting records of abductions and other war crimes, helping Russia cover it up and avoid future consequences, condemning the kids in the process.

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Wilson Fink @wilsonfink.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

On the anti-science, anti-democratic fools dismantling the very systems that safeguard them from their own idiotic beliefs...

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ian bremmer @ianbremmer.com · 18/02/2025

putin is a war criminal. i have no problem with the us president (or macron or scholz) talking with him. but under no circumstances should his crimes be normalized or white washed. what’s happening right now is a stain on the united states and its role in the world.

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David Frum @davidfrum.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Short-term pain for long-term isolation and decline!

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Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

5 years ago yesterday I wrote an essay arguing that institutions were thinking about online media, insurgencies, & manipulation campaigns all wrong. Fighting the last war. The Digital Maginot line, I called it. It went viral then. Here it is on its anniversary. www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/t...

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series The Feed
There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality. The conflict is still being processed as a series of individual skirmishes - a collection of disparate, localized, truth-in-narrative problems - but these battles are connected. The campaigns are often perceived as organic online chaos driven by emergent, bottom-up amateur actions when a substantial amount is, in fact, helped along or instigated by systematic, top-down institutional and state actions. This is a kind of warm war; not the active, declared, open conflict of a hot war, but beyond the shadowboxing of a cold one.

The Information World War has already been going on for several years. We called the opening skirmishes "media manipulation" and "hoaxes", assuming that we were dealing with ideological pranksters doing it for the lulz (and that lulz were harmless).
In reality, the combatants are professional, state-employed cyberwarriors and seasoned amateur guerrillas pursuing very well-defined objectives with military precision and specialized tools. Each type of combatant brings a different mental model to the conflict, but uses the same set of tools.
There are state-sponsored trolls, destabilizing societies in some countries, and rendering all information channels except state media useless in others. They operate at the behest of rulers, often through military or intelligence divisions.
Sometimes, as in the case of Duterte in the Philippines, these digital armies focus on interference in their own elections, using paid botnets and teams of sockpuppet personas to troll and harass opponents, or to amplify their owner's candidacy. Other times, the trolls reach beyond their borders to manipulate politics elsewhere, as
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Algorithmic distribution systems will always be co-opted by the best resourced or most technologically capable combatants. Soon, better Al will rewrite the playbook yet again - perhaps the digital equivalent of Blitzkrieg in its potential for capturing new territory. Al-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation. Authenticity debates will commandeer media cycles, pushing us into an infinite loop of perpetually investigating basic facts. Chronic skepticism and the cognitive DDoS will increase polarization, leading to a consolidation of trust in distinct sets of right and left-wing authority figures - thought oligarchs speaking to entirely separate groups.
We know this is coming, and yet we're doing very little to get ahead of it. No one is responsible for getting ahead of it.
Tha Lar nunhlam ic thic. nlatfaume anon'+

$If the warm war is allowed to continue as it has, there is a very real threat of descent into illegitimate leadership and fractured, paralyzed societies. If algorithmic amplification continues to privilege the propagandists most effective at gaming the system, if combatant persona accounts continue to harass civilian voices off of platforms, and if hostile state intelligence services remain able to recruit millions of Americans into fake "communities", the norms that have traditionally protected democratic societies will fail. We don't have time to waste on digital security theater. In the two years since Election 2016, we've all come to agree that something is wrong on the internet. There is momentum and energy to do something, but the complexity of the problem and the fact that it intersects with other thorny issues of internet governance (privacy, monopoly, expression, among others) means that we're stuck in a state of paralysis, unable to address disinformation in a meaningful way. Instead, both regulators and the platforms throw up low-level roadblocks. This is what a digital Maginot line looks like.$

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Alexander S. Vindman @avindman.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Elon, here you go again making false and completely unfounded accusations without providing any specifics. That’s the kind of response one would expect from a conspiracy theorist. What oligarch? What treason?

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Wilson Fink @wilsonfink.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

This is going to be an enormous challenge to those who care about truth

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Cole @cole-august.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

"He pretends to be a non-partisan truth-seeker while flooding the zone with MAGA lies" ~ Matt Johnson @theunpopulist.net

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Wilson Fink @wilsonfink.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Inspiring message: No quitting

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Wilson Fink @wilsonfink.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

It's absurd to ever have thought he cared about free speech

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