I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?

It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy

Go to r/virtualreality and try to give a negative opinion about meta and the quest 3.

You regularly see posts with 10k+ upvotes and about 5 comments. Even the users say it's scummy as hell.

Actually that is not true your interactions are very authentic. Beep boop.

That's alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn't take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that's just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there's tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it's probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.

What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the ~~onion~~ metaphorical tequila worm^1^ and are now parroting these trolls?

1. Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You're not thinking straight and did something you wouldn't do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it's totally normal to do.

It makes me feel weird when I try to recommend stuff I really like. I'll be so in favor of the things I like that it sounds like I'm selling it to you because I want you to like it too. I'm sure some people think I'm shilling the Steam Deck.

You can tell by the amount of reddit posts or comments that links you a paywalled article. Like what the fuck?! Is everyone paying for this shit?

Glad they included "at least" because there's no way it's that low.

First things first.

Second, given that the author has hidden this in a paywall--you have to sign up in order to access the article and presumably any links--I'm going to immediately distrust the motives.

Third, Medium is a glorified blogging site; anyone can say anything on it.

Thanks for sharing