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The world get a little more dangerous

A lot of people have pooh-pooh’d the idea that Elon Musk’s degradation of twitter is of any real world importance and I’ve always thought that was ridiculous. No, it doesn’t really matter that a bunch of right wingers are hurling insults at everyone — what else is new?

But this does matter:

A viral hoax that briefly sent the stock market down last month apparently first gained traction on Twitter through a conspiracy-mongering, pro-Russian account.

The picture that grabbed attention on the morning of May 22, captioned “Large Explosion Near the Pentagon,” was generated by artificial intelligence without much sophistication, experts said. But it is probably a harbinger of things to come, especially as generative AI gets better at producing images to meet the demandsof anyone’s imagination.

Research by The Washington Post, misinformation tracking firm Alethea and othersfound that the earliest confirmed Twitter posting of the image came from an account called @CBKNEWS121. In its less than two years on Twitter, CBK has posted a grab-bag of references to QAnon and other baseless conspiracy theories, current events, and memes and statements praising former president Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. On May 3, it tweeted “I stand with Putin,” followed by a heart emoji.

CBK is in the new wave of Twitter accounts with blue check symbols that only mean the accounts were paid for but boost how often and how prominently their tweets appear. Taking advantage of other changes in Twitter standards and enforcement, some of the early amplifiers used the name of a real media organization to enhance credibility.

The hoax served the interests of some of the most significant forces behind viral misinformation — quick-buck artists and those who serve them, fringe attention-seekers and state propagandists — which can form long-running or ad hoc alliances that overwhelm the reduced watchdog staffing at the biggest social networks.

Until twitter just degrades to the point where nobody pays any attention to it at all, this is the sort of thing that could be catastrophic. It is quickly becoming the greatest propaganda tool in the world with AI becoming ever more sophisticated and virtually no standards at all. Thanks to Musk.

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