Communications of the ACM

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David Tonhofer

April 07, 2023 12:07

Dear M. Marcus,

While absolutely agreeing with the general message of your article concerning the potential misuse and lack of trustworthiness of large language models GPT-X (also called "stochastic parrots"), it is distressing that, in an article about "misinformation" (so-called), we need to read the following:

> [These systems] cost almost nothing to operate, and so they are on a path to reducing the cost of generating disinformation to zero. Russian troll farms [i.e. the notorious "Internet Research Agency" I suppose] spent more than $1 million a month in the 2016 election (http://bit.ly/3WWlq1z) ...

The bitly link brings us to the site "Insider" (which I do not consider that a reputable outlet but another of the modern galaxy of outlets practicing "churnalism" and "injection of facts" sourced from "our side"'s mirror images of the IRA, you may notice my curmudgeonly distrust of the stuff "out there"), dated February 16, 2018 (5 years ago), titled:

> "A Russian troll factory had a $1.25 million monthly budget to interfere in the 2016 US election" by "Brennan Weiss"

The information is sourced to some document package called "charges filed":

"A notorious Russian "troll factory" had a $1.25 million budget in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to interfere in the US political system, according to charges filed by the Department of Justice."

Apart from the fact that it is unclear what such campaign, if it even existed, would have as goal (delay the Ukraine war or even nuclear war by making sure Hillary Clinton is not elected, maybe?), we all know in what direction those Department of Justice investigations went, including the so-called "Mller Investigation" - nowhere fast. Muck was raked but results were sparse.

Let's look at updated information by Aaron Mat from 2018 (a person whom I DO consider a reporter, incidentally). He brings us the following in The Nation, with sources:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/russiagate-elections-interference/

"Spending: Also hurting the case that the Russians reached a large number of Americans is that they spent such a microscopic amount of money to do it. Oxford puts the IRAs Facebook spending between 2015 and 2017 at just $73,711. As was previously known, about $46,000 was spent on Russian-linked Facebook ads before the 2016 election. That amounts to about 0.05 percent of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined. A recent disclosure by Google that Russian-linked accounts spent $4,700 on platforms in 2016 only underscores how minuscule that spending was."

How can we reconcile those opposing views?

The rest of the article contains more statements about Russia's mysterious means and intentions which I won't go into, but the reference to the RAND report "The Russian Firehose of Falsehood Propaganda Model", which is basically psychological projection, bears a particular mention. The well known RAND think tank is the organization that put out the report "Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground" (September 2002), at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html, which lists where conflicts advantageous to the USA should happen. In those places, they then happen. RAND, being the intellectual powerhouse that it is, leaves us with an epistemological conundrum by adding the following on the above web page:

"Editor's Note, September 2022: We encourage you to explore this report and its accompanying research brief. However, because Russian entities and individuals sympathetic to Putin's decision to invade Ukraine have mischaracterized this research in recent weeks, we also encourage you to explore this helpful resource on Russia's firehose of falsehood approach to propaganda and our research on Truth Decay, which is a phenomenon that is driven in part by the spread of disinformation."

Truly worthy of Raymond Smullyan's tales of "Knights and Knaves".

With best regards,

David Tonhofer

P.S.

More on the RAND paper by a person that some may consider a "Russian troll":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqVPM0KSUpo