LLMs and Data Poisoning Are Weaponized to Manufacture Consensus
medium.com
medium.com
You know what Western Consciousness lacks? A clear information Soviet Union is directly responsible for starting WW2 by attacking Poland (my country) in concert with Hitler.
There would be no WW2 if not for Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
Soviets indeed helped fight Hitler once he switched from being an ally to an enemy. If he didn't choose to attack them it would've never happened.
Furthermore they enslaved the countries they came to "liberate" for 50 years and hunted the remainder of our army till 1960s. So forgive me if I do not consider them worthy of any praise whatsoever.
I was taght in school that the reparations the Germany had to pay to the winers of WW1 were the cause of WW2.
Proof: Marshall plan after WW2.
German here. It's partially true, partially wrong. The NSDAP jumped from 2.6% (barely relevant) in 1928 to 18.3% in 1930 [1]. The cause for this is widely assumed to be the 1929 Great Depression leading to an ever growing number of unemployed people that together with the reparations issue made it ever more difficult to pass a budget bill [2].
(Side tangent... it's not surprising we've seen a revival and subsequent surge of the far-right ever since the 2007ff financial crisis.)
> Proof: Marshall plan after WW2.
The Marshall Plan came to be after the Western Allied Powers realized that they shared a somewhat similar worldview but the Soviet Union did not, and that Germany might be needed as a "buffer zone" should the Western-Soviet relations completely collapse.
Up until then... the plans for Germany that circulated were much different, getting to as radical as proposing to completely "salt the earth" aka Morgenthau plan [3].
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/190456/reichstagswahl...
The USSR did its part, stripping out select industries and moving them to Mother Russia.
But Soviets specifically had a reason. 20 years before WW2 they tried to "bring their revolution" West with force and they got their asses kicked properly in the main battle near Warsaw.
This was named "Miracle on the Vistula", because as it often happens with Russia they had numbers of people that should make it hopeless for the Polish.
Prior to that, not Soviet, but Tzarist Russia occupied Poland for over a hundred years splitting the country between itself, Germany and Austro-Hungarian empire. That was their "ideal state" and what they were trying to come back to with Ribbentrop Molotov pact.
In general they have invaded many times in history. Polish took part in an invasion of Russia only once. It wasn't even proper Polish army supported by the state/king, but few thousand mercenaries that contained Lithuanians, Cossacs and others that managed to take over Moscow and set up their own Tzar.
They were thrown out 2 years later. The Tzar was hanged, quartered and shot out from 4 cannons in 4 directions. You can imagine they didn't like the guy. I think the date those mercenaries were thrown out (4th November) is a national holiday in Russia despite happening 400+ years ago.
TLDR/ Russia thinks it's an empire and smaller countries like Poland should be it's pawns. Polish never liked the idea. The end.
> This erased the continuous reality stretching back to 1948 the Nakba, which displaced over 700,000 Palestinians and depopulated hundreds of villages (Morris, 2004; Pappé, 2006), alongside decades of military occupation, settlement expansion, and a sixteen-year land, air, and sea blockade.
The author himself erases things here, namedly the various attempts of Israel's neighbors to wipe Israel off of the map, or many Arab and African nations expelling their Jewish population (that often was there for hundreds if not thousands of years) to Israel.
The conflict is murky enough as it is (and in fact dates back to far, far longer times, including the collapse of the British Colonial Empire that wrecked many other nations with repercussions to this day, first and foremost India/Pakistan), there is no need to act like one is neutral and then in fact be selective.
Honestly, if there is no need to bring in the Israel/Palestine conflict into a topic (aka, you're discussing everything but the conflict itself), then just don't. It is far too complex, many points of view are determined by the timeframe one is considering... just don't. You will shoot yourself in the foot.
This is because I/P is sufficiently complicated and brutal that for any involved party X (Arab countries, Israel, Palestinians, Britain...), an interested party can make party X seem "inhuman, clearly we should defeat X anywhere we find them" to someone not previously informed on the topic.
So even if we don't select the evidence, or even select the date, but just selectively amplify, propaganda about it works just fine, across different media. The LLM news here is that as a media, LLMs transform biased background knowledge into eloquent confident _and tailored_ arguments for the bias, like a suave but motivated news anchor that is able to converse individually with _every listener_.
Because for all X, someone _is_ already amplifying the message "hate X", the main outcome of LLMs+Propaganda is not hate for a specific X, but just more hate.
And the solutions? The authors' ledger+timeline+blame+semantic checks are not a bad place to start.
For me, the core is that often the enemy we can and should defeat is not people, it is memes, like "hate _". LLMs (among other effects, good and bad) whitewash memes, and we all better be prepared to defend ourselves against their influence.
sure, but they don't actually illustrate that, they just point to a different "starting point", committing the same fallacy
HN isn't the place to discuss it of course, but as I'm sure you realize your own points are also murky and contested and many would object to the framing. The basic concern, that LLM framing may reflect biased media framing, is reasonable and applicable to that conflict, as any other.
I'd say what's important is seeing how the American administration is embracing this stuff.