from the propaganda-works dept
If you’re not aware, America’s unholy alliance between U.S. corporations and the right wing grifter economy has an elaborate public messaging and manipulation system that continues to demonstrate its influence and power.
The latest case in point: K Street policy and lobbying firms appear to have leveraged a bunch of right wing influencers to launch a coordinated social media campaign attacking the AI Overwatch Act, which would tighten restrictions on the export of advanced artificial intelligence chips to foreign adversaries.
The bill was introduced last December and hadn’t really been seeing a ton of traction (as we saw with the TikTok “ban” most of this country’s rhetoric on “protecting people from China” is corrupt, self-serving smoke). But Model Republic curiously noted that a whole bunch of prominent right wing influencers have been sharing rants against the bill, all including the same language and typos:
We’ve seen this sort of “astroturf” campaign many times before. It usually involves some K Street lobbying firm that covertly get right wing influencers and fake news companies to parrot policies of interest to party ownership or a corporate donor, resulting in a singular, brutal repetitive message that gets shared across both traditional and new media.
We saw it pop up during the TikTok hysteria campaign, when Facebook lobbyists were caught spreading scary stories in the press to get a competitor banned. We saw it during the scuttled appointment of popular media reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC, when telecom and media giants got right wing influencers and propaganda rags to frame her as an anti-cop extremist.
You’ll most effectively see this media manipulation symbiosis at work any time anybody proposes consumer protections corporate power doesn’t like, as we’ve seen with both basic privacy protections and during the net neutrality wars, when popular, basic consumer protections were broadly framed as extremist by right wing influencers and the corporate press.
In this case, Model Republic offers up a reasonable guess of what lobbying and policy org was responsible for this latest campaign:
“Several of the accounts quoted above have documented or apparent ties to previous campaigns run by Influenceable, the PR firm that pays conservative influencers to post coordinated content without disclosure. To be clear: we don’t know that Influenceable orchestrated this particular campaign, and it’s possible that another organization or no organization was involved. But the overlap with accounts that appear to be involved with past Influenceable campaigns is suggestive.”
It’s not clear which tech giant (or country) is funding this operation. Microsoft claims to be on board with the Overwatch Act, possibly because it potentially wrote some of it. China certainly doesn’t like the restrictions. And most tech companies really don’t want any regulations governing AI.
They don’t want rules preventing their data centers from polluting and killing minority communities, rules preventing companies from using AI to unfairly attack labor, or any rules whatsoever attempting to impose baseline ethical guardrails on their relentless pursuit of badly automated mass media engagement at unmanageable and impossible scale.
Whoever is behind it, these messaging campaigns are generally quite effective. It’s pretty easy for a handful of right wing influencers and news outlets to generate an entire media cycle out of thin air on a fairly limited budget. It’s relatively easy to manipulate our broken, lazy, and highly consolidated press in a way that undermines or badly frames a particular legislative proposal or candidate.
And while corporatists, culture war propagandists, and their deep-pocketed contributors have mastered modern media in a way that’s uniformly harmful, the nation’s good faith progressive reformers routinely still seemingly struggle to find where their pants are located in a media landscape that’s increasingly tilted in opposition to the public interest and an informed electorate.
Filed Under: ai, ai overwatch act, astroturf, influencers, manipulation, overwatch Act, propaganda, regulation, social media
Companies: influenceable
