The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America
theintercept.com114 points by Fricken a day ago
114 points by Fricken a day ago
I’d be shocked if the Pentagon isn’t running an AI propaganda mill targeting <insert any region of the world>.
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What I think many of the jaded comments about how "it was ever thus" miss is what it means that American soft power is reduced to AI slop.
During the Cold War, the CIA famously funded all sorts of cultural endeavors, but much of the output (if not directly CIA-created, then at least bolstered by the Agency) is still held to have been culturally relevant: abstract expressionism (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...), the Kenyon Review (https://www.thecollegianmagazine.com/the-kenyon-review-and-t...), etc.
Lots to criticize in the Cold War, but I think you can at least make the argument that this was emblematic of an American cultural power that was self-assured of its own value and legitimacy.
In comparison, now we have...LLMs creating personal finance tips?
School of Americas-trained death squads on one hand and hoity-toity arts and culture on the other. Soft power certainly casts a wide net.
Yeah, good point. And I think you could probably make a fair case that the choice of where to apply that sort of ugly anti-democratic violence and subversion probably reflected culturally chauvinist and racist ideas about which cultures would be receptive to hoity toity arts and culture (European, White) and which would not (the others).
But I don't know that I find a lot of fault with, like, funding the Kenyon Review. That sort of seems like a fine thing to do. I'm not sure there's a discernible difference between that and just sort of generally funding arts and culture, which a) seems fine, but b) also certainly serves to aggrandize "our" culture and promote the glory of "our" way of life.
None of these were significant either, not worth even 1 neuron -- but they did provide a bit of copy for upscale yankee-CIA tinfoil-hat journalism - even books - a few decades later.
Genuine question, were we ever great at this?
If "we" = "the USA":
1. I think the examples I linked to are real, in the sense that they were both a) CIA funded (or boosted) and b) are broadly credible cultural output.
2. Voice of America was a real media outlet with real cultural impact.
There are also non-American examples. The BBC World Service is (or was) pretty widely listened to, which strikes me as a pretty big soft-power boost for an otherwise waning colonial power.
I do think what separates those from (apparently) this example is that they were all output that had genuine value to the target audience. That's sort of like the discussion around USAID: it was, indeed, also often CIA-adjacent and, during the Cold War, was anything but a purely altruistic endeavor (which is why it's so funny to see reactionaries describing it as some sort of bleeding-heart operation), but it nonetheless provided genuine value to recipients of its relatively meager budget.
What seems to be the dominant philosophy in Washington now is either a) America can get all the same cultural influence for cheap via AI, or b) soft power influence doesn't matter anyway because America has the Tomahawk missiles.
I think both of those views are likely to be incorrect.
If the American system is so good, why does it always need to be promoted in such strange ways? LA people should be so eager to be pro-America
If <company product> is so good why do they spend so much money on marketing?
Information is not self recommending. There's a lot going on in the world, attention is scarce. Moreso today than ever before, but it's been true for a long time.
China is doing propaganda. Russia is doing propaganda. Iran is doing propaganda. That's life, play the game or lose.
This is like sales and marketing, idealists think you can build the perfect product and it will sell itself. It won't. It's an adversarial marketplace and you have to show the world what you did, against people who are trying to tear you down.
I just left Reddit, where a Cuban that moved to America is hosting an AMA.
It’s incredible. The guy seems to be giving brutally real opinions, the good and the bad, and telling his life’s story. Reddit readers ( admitting they’ve never been to Cuba ) try to shout him down and tell him what he should be thinking.
It’d be nice to hear more first hand stories like that.
It is an arms race just like any other. Country A says "we're the best", country B says "Country A is a bunch of liars, look at us", country C says "in contrast to the clear propaganda coming from A and B the truth is that we've found the answer to every question", A counters with "B does nasty things to ${ethnic_group}", B says "C stole every answer from us", C says "A and B are ruled by geriatric know-nothings", etc. Propagandists are going to propagandise no matter whether they're in a representational republic, a democracy, a constitutional monarchy, an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Some of the propaganda is closer to the truth than other but it is still propaganda.
> If the American system is so good
Putin doesn't plaster Europe with propaganda because he thinks the Russian system is good. He does it for power. And if your system is that good, propaganda is effective.
There's a joke that goes something like this:
> A Soviet visits America and says: "Wow, the propaganda is so good here! Much better than back home", an American replies: "What propaganda!? We don't have propaganda here!", to which the Soviet responds: "Exactly!".
Well, yes, obviously. Did you notice there is also one (rather, a whole ecosystem) targeting Russia, one for Iran, one for China, one for EU, one for Japan, etc?
> one (rather, a whole ecosystem) targeting Russia, one for Iran, one for China
I'm fine with this.
> one for EU, one for Japan, etc?
I'm not okay with this. Wouldn't lump the two together.
The USA meddling in South American politics? Say it ain’t so!
It’s so bizarre to me that in the US heartland, Latinos are demonised, yet beyond US borders they care so much about the democratic welfare of their South American amigos.
When it comes to traditional spycraft, I'm of the opinion that everyone does it and everyone has to. Everyone does it. It's of tremendous value. And it doesn't particularly hurt us when we get caught.
But the First Amendment is a cultural touchstone for America. Even if everyone else does this nonsense, it's not of demonstrable value and it does hurt us when we get caught like this. Unilateral disarmament isn't usually an option. But it is, I think, when it comes to this.
I think we should pass a law banning undisclosed social media, psyop and other unattributed propaganda campaigns among (a) allies and (b) other democracies (as judged by a neutral source).
you can actually learn a lot about the world by just guessing whats happening. you don't even need to read the news, you can just guess correctly.
> Enter your email to keep reading for free. > This is not a paywall.
Yes it is. I'm supposed to pay with my email and chance to be spammed. No, I won't be doing so.
Thankfully, it works in reader mode, and you don't even have to go to a paywall bypass.
Have they ever stopped? CIA and SOCOM have been dangling themselves into Latin American lives since they were invented. Assassinating presidents, spewing propaganda, assisting in coups.
It would be a surprise, it they weren't using AI to add to the mix.
oh just the one?
This is odd. They have the budget to run with real journalists and outlets. Is this some reverse-psychology move? Where they want people to see that its AI and thus not take it seriously? What aim does that achieve?
Real journalists / content writers have pesky morals and tend to become whistleblowers when they've had enough.
Nothing interesting, much less sinister, is happening on the site though - and it seems to have zero traffic. It is likely just spreading encrypted signals to the military elsewhere.
What are you talking about? There are entire groups of renowned "journalists" that turn out to be CIA collaborators. The renowned New York Times admitted they receive approval from the US government. Bellingcat, renowed "independent investigative journalists", turns out to be CIA-funded, and is awfully quiet with their investigations in situations where it does not suit NATO allies' agenda.
There's a reason why the public distrusts journalists more and more. Many people still think the problems are limited to domestic journalism, and haven't connected the dots yet w.r.t. that foreign policy journalism is just as bad, if not worse.
The only systematic state propaganda in question is the propaganda you are retailing here. Bellingcat-o-mania in particular is a pure, paid, propaganda initiative of Putin's Assadist phase. Billions were spent to produce armies of brains that type what you just typed.
And yet people love X which pretty famously during the "Twitter Files" was revealed to also assist US psy-ops.
The public just distrusts large organizations now because those large organizations haven't been effective with their stated missions.
It's not necessarily easy to find people who will want to work with that, especially when you were the Trump administration.
I mean there used to be a fair amount of government loyalists remaining, working for outlets like Voice of America who, probably, sincerely thought they were doing a good thing. But they butted head with the Trump administration hard.
For all loyalists there is a grifter to true believer ratio, and for the current admin it's bad. Why pay a hard-to-find true believer to make actually convincing propaganda, when you're a grifter yourself and have the opportunity to take the budget for yourself and let an LLM half-ass it?
yep, with brazil at the center...
Hollywood is not just targeting Latin America. Marvel and DC are everybody fascists dreams.
Latam already has enough problems with socialism we hardly need more of it.
It seems some AI propaganda has already worked on you.
It seems you're not from LatAm.
I am and I can say with full certainty that the "socialism threat" paranoia in our region is incredibly stupid.
The real threat has always been corrupt governments and corporations meddling in politics that gave away the birth of guerrillas (and even sponsored them) like here in Colombia.
The "socialism bad" has been in many cases just an excuse for so many here to hold themselves in power and make the lifes of the less fortunate completely miserable.
Power just corrupts, be it from "left" or "right".
I fully agree with you. However, when non-LatAm people talk about "socialism", they probably think of European-style socialism, which is awesome. LatAm socialism is a lot more extreme, and closer to full-on communism - my country still has people stuck in the 60s cold war era mentality and fully supporting the ideals of of the Soviet Union, still praising Cuba and Venezuela, reality notwithstanding.
European-style socialism would be better. Full 60s socialism would be significantly worse. It's quite likely that people ITT are using "socialism" to refer to either, and we're all talking past each other.
It's strange that people look at the millions dead from starvation from communism, and the quite recent destruction of Venezuela, and still think communism can somehow work this time.
What works better, in your opinion?
Or, what system is not responsible for human atrocities?
The modern market economy + democracy + regulation + social programs.
The atrocities normally attributed to such systems like the Korean war, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Vietnam war, Iraq war, etc actually turns out to not really be atrocities when you look just a little bit closer, or at least are trading a small atrocity for a much larger one.
There is a significant difference between socialism and communism, Americans seem to purposely conflate the two, they are not the same.
Smells like "no true scotsman" fallacy because they are nearly synonyms. Nobody in USSR could tell the exact difference or at least there was no consensus, and you are expecting modern Americans to do better huh?
This basically sums it up:
> According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_social...)
(To make it more fun Marxism is also its own thing)
But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.
No, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which.
To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it
Today there are examples of socialist but not communist countries in Europe. But if you compare them to Venezuela or Brazil you would be crazy.
Maybe we need better terminology
The German Social Democratic Party is the literal actual identical party of Marx and Engels.
That we assign to the Bolsheviks the mantle of one or another 19th c epithet is a kind of secret pact between the two sides of the Cold War. It is itself doctrinal Leninism even if the State Department spreads it. Its func
There are lots of socialist countries in the world that are doing fine.
Pretty much every remotely developed country is capitalist. The wealthiest country with a non-capitalist economy is Cuba or Turkmenistan, depending on where you draw the line.
The context of this discussion is Brazil and the intentions of the socialist Brazilian government. Are you claiming that the socialist party in Brazil intends to dismantle capitalism? In case you are unaware, countries can have capitalist economic systems and still have significant socialist traits like: large public sectors, state enterprises for natural monopolies and important industries, subsidized education and healthcare, etc.
My previous comment came off as disagreement that I didn’t intend. Most countries in the world are both socialist and capitalist.
I don’t intend to defend the “socialism bad” argument. There are several countries (many in Europe) that have great outcomes while being about as socialist as left-wing Latin American governments. I think a fairer criticism is some of the Latin American parties have a track record of flawed implementation that caused distrust among a lot of the population.
Uhh, China...
US has a higher government spending as a % of GDP than China.
Yeah our military is a good example of what a centrally planned communist US might look like.
US military spending is 3% of GDP.
This has me wondering, do people think the military is 1/3 of the US economy? That would explain a lot of discourse.
Also depends on how you define capitalism, and whether you consider Socialism with Chinese Characteristics to be capitalist.
Is this where we pretend a bunch of rich market-capitalist European countries are “socialist” or are you talking about China and Vietnam?
You can’t have it both ways though. The policies enacted in Northern Europe would definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians, Democrats included.
Small amounts of socialism on top of a solid base of market economy. I'm from Sweden, this is well known but yea, many are super confused about this.
> definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians
The US has generous social assistance, just less of it than some European countries. It has unions more powerful than many European countries. Meanwhile the most popular Dem-aligned politician in the US has recently introduced a bill to partly nationalise AI companies.
> You can’t have it both ways
You’re responding to my first comment in this thread
For some people, even the government interventions by those specific rich market-capitalist European countries are "too socialist" and get the exact same "didn't you realise Stalin killed millions?" kinds of responses.
It's just a motte-and-bailey argument. You say you're okay with social democratic policies when you're opposing anything stronger, but oppose social democratic policies when anyone is trying to actually implement them.
PRC is way more capitalist than Norway or some other European countries. Approximately, one is capitalist dictatorship and the other socialist democracy.
Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.
Nordic style social democracy works quite well though. Communism sucks, but too much unregulated Capitalism isn't great either, as we can see in USA and many other countries that suffer from extreme inequality.
Nordic style social democracy only works well (I think) if the country has reliable sources of income separate from corporations; Norway has a trillion dollar investment fund from oil and gas revenue that is still being added to. The Netherlands earned billions from a gas field in Groningen which they used to fund the social securities systems (subsidies, benefits, etc). But with the closing of those gas fields (they were causing earthquakes, plus environmental concerns) that source of income is gone, and with that + baby boomers retiring + NL being a tax haven so we don't earn much from the huge sums passing through + skyrocketing cost of living, these systems are being broken down one by one.
Social democracy is a class-collaboration system where both the owning class and the working class compromise on their own interests (minimizing vs maximizing real wages) for the sake of stability or national interest. Class-collaboration systems -- however desirable they might be --are inherently unstable because the conflict between the owning class and working class is built into the basic structure of the economy. It's also the case that the state, which administers the conditions of this collaboration, is not a neutral party, but a tool of the owning class. Since the 70s, and especially since the 90s, that's resulted in the rollback of social democratic measures put in place after the Great Depression when the bulk of the owning class recognized them as necessary for stability. State oil revenues are a material factor that has slowed that rollback in e.g. the Nordic countries relative to the Anglosphere, but the underlying dialectic isn't any different.
I'm from Sweden. These "social democracy" systems are really market economies to 90% at least. It's kinda funny to call them socialist. Like calling a modern human a Neandertal because some of their genes are from that species.
It's strange that someone mentions socialism and then another person replies saying communism doesn't work. Are these two the same for you?
For Americans it is.
Meanwhile, in Europe (I don't know Latin America well enough, although I know a few well-known right-wing leaders that didn't have stellar records) socialist governments consistently have a better record on basically everything from press freedom to economy to public health compared to economically liberal ("centrist") governments. But they're socialist so it doesn't count.
Well, they share the same core componnent of disregard for property rights and freedom of contract.
> disregard for property rights and freedom of contract
Are you complaining about taxation and regulation? Both are cornerstones of every successful state in human history.
Any form of centralized power is bad for the vast majority of civilization. always has been
I'm curious: what civilizations can you point to in which there has been no centralized power?
Your own network of friends and family.
my friends and family may be civilized, heavy emphasis on the may, but they are not a civilization.
millions died due to exploitative labor practices by colonialist invaders exploiting the resources and cheap labor potential of the people in it yet I don't see you aknowledge that.
communism wasn't behind american slavery or the Belgian occupation of the congo.
Not a fan of communism but I dont' think unfettered capitalism is much better. both systems benefit a minority of people at the expense of the majority largely because they allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
At this point, anyone spouting vitriole about communism and socialism like they are the same thing just come off as lacking basic capacity to understand nuance at best and mentally ill at worst.
Unfettered capitalism postdates 'colonialist invaders' by two or three centuries. Spain and Portugal didn't notice capitalism ... so they turned into backwaters.
Deliberate starvation is more of a capitalist thing. It's not like China or communist parts of India have a big famine problem, while the US and their partners are causing famines in e.g. West Asia right now.
Left wing policies actually work pretty well, this is why the US has spent so much resources undermining movements and states trying to implement them, and this is why the Soviet needed nuclear weapons to survive for as long as it did.
A better example of capitalism doing actual famine would be the Irish Potato Famine, which was concurrent with the writing of the actual Communist Manifesto.
Communism has also had famine, famously both the Holodomor in the USSR and the Great Leap Forward in China.
The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
How is it better?
It's kind of weird to attribute those famines, or e.g. the Kazakh famine contemporary with the holodomor which was arguably worse but is less well known, to communism. Quick industrialisation would be a much better, though partial, explanation. If it was a property of communist or socialist projects, why'd you need to reach almost a century back to find examples?
We're massively overproducing food now, and still have famines. Egalitarian distributive policies are key to ending hunger.
> Communism has also had famine
The most enormous understatement. They had the biggest famines ever seen.
> The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
That's nonsense. There is no money that can "subsidize" anything if people are already starving because the country screwed up the agricultural system. Starvation is more powerful than monetary systems.
Famine ceased to be a major world issue after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which abetted infantilism of different types in most of the countries that originated after WW2.
In my childhood there were always children starving everywhere but the causes of this were finally throttled, by and large, in the 90s and 00s, with a bit of regression in the recent past. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
This is one of the most important features of the history of the last half century but goes completely unnoticed.
Yeah, because to the capitalist starvation is not a bug, it's a feature. It's how you manage to keep up profits under competition and automation, by pressuring the cost of labour with the threat of misery. Almost fifty million people in the US, of which some fourteen million are kids, are food insecure.
Deliberate famine and starvation campaigns is still a thing capitalist countries engage in, e.g. in Yemen, Cuba, Haiti and Palestine. Due to international support of RSF the ongoing crisis in Sudan could count as well.
You can be capitalist without being right wing in this administration cares more about the latter
Being capitalist (edit: the ideology) implies being right wing.
> Being capitalist implies being right wing
Oh boy, no it does not. Supporting low-intervention markets (i.e. brutal competition among corporations) alongside high taxation of gains (and strong services for individuals) is absolutely coherent and both capitalist and not right wing. (It's a decent description of my politics.)
Aren't you a venture capitalist? A left wing one?
> Aren't you a venture capitalist?
Pretty much.
> A left wing one?
Wouldn't say that. I like wealth redistribution and taxation as a tool of both economic empowerment and political equalisation.
I do have friends whom I'd consider left wing. I agree with them on many issues, from unionising bars to raising the minimum wage. I disagree with them on others, e.g. regulating everything for the sake of it.
> regulating everything for the sake of it.
Eh, if you're not hiding behind a LLC I can see regulation not being necessary.
Like you want to build a factory and dump the sewage into the river? Fine, but uh you're personally going to prison forever then.
> you want to build a factory and dump the sewage into the river?
The weird thing is this crap gets deregulated while hairdressers get fined for not having the right subchapters of licenses.