* CLS Strategies, a Washington, D.C. communications firm, was named by Facebook/Meta in 2020 when Meta removed fake accounts and pages tied to operations in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Mexico. Meta defines coordinated inauthentic behavior as efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central. PRWeek also reported the takedown as fake accounts and pages managed by CLS.
[1] [2]
* Rally Forge, a U.S. marketing firm, was linked by Facebook to a 2020 domestic U.S. operation run on behalf of Turning Point USA, involving fake accounts and coordinated behavior. Axios reported that Facebook removed 200 accounts, 55 pages, and 76 Instagram accounts.
[3] [4]
* New Knowledge / Project Birmingham is another ugly example. In the 2017 Alabama Senate race, Democratic-aligned operatives experimented with Russian-style disinformation tactics, including fake or misleading Facebook activity and buying retweets. The effort was reportedly small and probably did not decide the election, but it proves the category exists inside the U.S. political ecosystem.
[5] [6]
* There are also U.S.-linked pro-Western covert influence operations. Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory analyzed accounts removed by Twitter and Meta for platform manipulation or coordinated inauthentic behavior; later reporting said the Pentagon ordered a review after fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military were taken down. Meta later attributed a campaign targeting the Middle East and Central Asia to people associated with the U.S. military.
[7] [8] [9]
* Cambridge Analytica is adjacent but not identical. It had U.S. offices and U.S. political clients, and it was part of the broader “election manipulation for hire” world, but its central scandal was data harvesting, psychographic targeting, and political ad targeting, not necessarily fake-account bot networks in the same narrow sense.
[10]
Family next door had 17 kids (yes, from one mother), 5 dangerous dogs, and absolutely despised us (somehow we thought having a few acres of land would make worrying about neighbours less necessary). There was an ongoing decades-old land feud with the farmer behind both of our homes. The aforementioned dangerous dogs killed several of the farmer's sheep, so the farmer finally shot and killed one of the dogs during an attack on said sheep, which escalated tensions. We had 2 and 4 year old kids who, it's worth noting, were roughly the size of sheep and about as tempting for the dogs to kill, so we were basically terrified to let our kids outside. Neighbours routinely insulted us, yelled at us, and threw
garbage (including old chemical containers, sharp metal, etc.) on to our land.
They also routinely trespassed and shot fireworks over our thatch roof (the roof was part thatch, part modern) - very concerning when your roof is more flammable than kindling. Finally they left a dead crow in a bag by our door which felt like a threat, so we sold the place at a €100k loss and moved to the Netherlands.
Gardai were absolutely lazy, uncaring, and useless, and did absolutely nothing.
Now I encourage everyone I can to stay as far away from rural Ireland as possible.
No, we moved to Houten (about 5km from central Utrecht). It's been great! Friendly neighbours, good school that my kids walk to (they can walk and bike all over the place actually), pretty efficient bureaucracy, great public transit.. Though you know, even some places in the Netherlands (Hilversum comes to mind) won't stop people parking on pavements for some reason, which is annoying. Overall I really like it though.
Mostly to be careful. The house was an absolute dream on paper. It was even something you could commute to Dublin from on the train in a pinch.
I eventually gained some biases that the former-me who lived in the lefty "Dublin 2 and https://irishtechcommunity.com/" bubble wouldn't have been particularly quick to espouse. Now that it's been a few years I think I'm a little better at seeing different sides of things politically, at least.
Yeah, as a non-Mormon, I agree. I think the Mormon connection is a paranoid distraction. The behavior of the police can be explained by the same kind of corrupt-small-town-police-defending-locals-from-outsiders behavior that happens across the country.
> The behavior of the police can be explained by the same kind of corrupt-small-town-police-defending-locals-from-outsiders behavior that happens across the country.
Mormons aren't implicated, but I fail to see how this can explain the behavior of the Oregon police.
> "A horse is an extremely sophisticated biological machine, but it has no idea what makes itself tick."
To my ears, a lot of detail is hidden in "knowing what makes itself tick". The limit of human Umwelt, cognitive closure, is an arena I find fascinating.
Modern people tend to identify understanding with mechanistic explanations. Veins, glycogen, immune states, hoof pumps. These are interesting and satisfying to us. But does that kind of explanation satisfy only because we are apes with ape language and interests, leaving aside even that we live in a society that values those explanations?
If a horse-level intelligence existed, perhaps its most satisfying explanations would not be "I can inspect the venous plexus in my hoof," but something else. Maybe more proprioceptive: pressure, load, gait. Or maybe that's just still my primate prejudice poking through.
What would satisfy a horse scientists might seem opaque or insufficient to us, but maybe our biochemical account would seem equally beside the point to it?
Maybe there is no species-neutral answer to what counts as understanding what one is.
On a deeper level, I suspect that a "complete understanding" in an absolute or divine sense is infinite. Our perceptions are necessarily limited, only a model of reality. In order to understand in a way that helps us survive, we must filter out a lot of information that is not absolutely irrelevant, but is irrelevant to us. Even Funes remembered only that which is relevant to a human, that which he could perceive in the first place. He could not remember changes in magnetic fields, background radiation, subtle shifts in gravity.
Indeed, specification of what "understanding" even is is one of the hard problems that would have to be solved before answering such a question! Nobody disagrees, for instance, that an LLM has no understanding, awareness, or even access to the underlying numerical weights of its neural network, but still there is much debate whether it understands anything at all, even subjects that it is clearly superhuman at performing in. Perhaps "understanding" will only have a meaningful definition to us if it is tied with conscious awareness, but that's hardly better.
Another very relevant Borges story is "On Exactitude in Science." If we could precisely model every physical law and even the precise distribution of matter in the universe, but this model conveyed to us no intuition or usefulness on a human level, can it even be called understanding? Instead we seek teleological anthropomorphic explanations in everything, and it's baked into how we discuss things. "Big cats developed powerful muscles to run fast and catch prey," "our immune system exists to keep us from getting sick," "rooks are worth more than knights," "the universe favors states with the highest possible entropy," "de Rham cohomology detects topological holes."
For me, there is a sign-up modal overlay that prevents reading or scrolling, even though the entire article loads. How did others manage to read the article?
* Rally Forge, a U.S. marketing firm, was linked by Facebook to a 2020 domestic U.S. operation run on behalf of Turning Point USA, involving fake accounts and coordinated behavior. Axios reported that Facebook removed 200 accounts, 55 pages, and 76 Instagram accounts. [3] [4]
* New Knowledge / Project Birmingham is another ugly example. In the 2017 Alabama Senate race, Democratic-aligned operatives experimented with Russian-style disinformation tactics, including fake or misleading Facebook activity and buying retweets. The effort was reportedly small and probably did not decide the election, but it proves the category exists inside the U.S. political ecosystem. [5] [6]
* There are also U.S.-linked pro-Western covert influence operations. Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory analyzed accounts removed by Twitter and Meta for platform manipulation or coordinated inauthentic behavior; later reporting said the Pentagon ordered a review after fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military were taken down. Meta later attributed a campaign targeting the Middle East and Central Asia to people associated with the U.S. military. [7] [8] [9]
* Cambridge Analytica is adjacent but not identical. It had U.S. offices and U.S. political clients, and it was part of the broader “election manipulation for hire” world, but its central scandal was data harvesting, psychographic targeting, and political ad targeting, not necessarily fake-account bot networks in the same narrow sense. [10]
[1] August 2020 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/august-2020-cib-report/
[2] Facebook deletes dozens of fake accounts, pages run by CLS Strategies https://www.prweek.com/article/1693342/facebook-deletes-doze...
[3] October 2020 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report https://about.fb.com/news/2020/11/october-2020-cib-report/
[4] Facebook removes inauthentic campaign linked to Turning Point USA https://www.axios.com/2020/10/08/facebook-turning-point-usa-...
[5] Researcher whose firm wrote report on Russian interference used questionable online tactics during Alabama Senate race https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/researc...
[6] Project Birmingham (disinformation campaign) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Birmingham_%28disinfor...
[7] Unheard Voice: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika_stanford...
[8] Meta, Twitter take down accounts pushing pro-U.S. messages https://www.axios.com/2022/08/24/meta-twitter-take-down-acco...
[9] Fewer Bots, More Ads: The Pentagon's Evolving Online Influence Campaigns https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/fewer-bots--more-ads--t...
[10] Cambridge Analytica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
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