The web is a Blade Runner nightmare, but there is a way to stem the tide of lies Peter Pomerantsev https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/17/web-blade-runner-lies-misinformation-internet
decades of academic communications research have shown, people tend to adopt opinions they think are common, what the internet researcher Samuel Woolley calls “manufacturing consensus”. Faking social media accounts leads not just to individual users being deceived, but to a society that loses touch with what it really thinks, where what it “really thinks” can be reprogrammed...
In the social-media slums and darknet alleys of our Blade Runner internet, you meet the sleazy dealers of semi-legal and downright illicit services to help you manage this reality-warping game to your advantage...
“Team Jorge”, an Israeli online black ops unit uncovered by the Guardian and its partners in a stunning sting operation, is part of a whole scuzzy industry (“Team Jorge” deny responsibility)....
the brutal fact is the whole way platforms have been built is both a priori exploitative of citizens, and simultaneously easy to exploit by bad actors. It’s a system built on surveillance and sucking people’s data to manipulate them; where citizens have no control over, or even understanding about, the algorithms that dictate what we see and subsequently feel and ultimately do online. The Jorges are not a bug, they are a feature of our current internet.
Instead of the malign Blade Runner city, where all is owned by exploitative companies with an underbelly of online bandits, it would have the digital equivalent of public parks, libraries, town halls. But we are nowhere near it now.
So can we survive today? What can you do if you’re, for the sake of argument, an activist who wants to undermine mobilisation for Russia’s genocidal wars? Or you’re running a campaign to disrupt the far right in Europe? Or the narcos in Latin America? Will you wait for a new internet? We don’t have time. No, you will go to the dark alleys of our Blade Runner internet and seek out a Jorge.