157C. Spamdexing, Dark PR, and the Reddit Mafia
The first time I was the target of a major Dark PR campaign was in 2005. Since then this has become big business and the race over control of public thought has become super high tech.
Having been a journalist since 2001, I was well aware of the influence that news/content makers can have on public opinion. That same year I had to stop writing under my real name because of 9/11 related racial death threats I was receiving. Some of those threats included my home address. I ended up writing under my pen/game name of Sarcerok until 2010. Switching names reduced my search engine footprint every time I had to do it. Now people keep telling me I should change my name to avoid racism but I really don’t want to start over again as a “new” person.
2005 found me on the wrong end of a PR campaign. I, along with most of my game journalist peers, had been watching a curious situation where there was one journalist who had exclusive access to the Shadowbane MMORPG alpha/beta test. So our only official information about this product kept coming from him. His press was always positive and often contradicted other information that was being leaked about the project. Many were suspicious but it wasn’t until I had smoking gun information that I went to press with it. This “journalist” was an actual employee of some sort of a PR firm hired by Ubisoft, the publisher of Shadowbane.
What followed was a hellscape of a Dark PR campaign targeting me that blacked out the sun. It also led to a hack of UnknownPlayer and the deletion of all of my papers (2001 to 2005) from the internet. My power supply on my PC coincidentally failed right about this time and took out all of my local copies as it fried my hard drive.
Since then, and especially after I assisted regulators in 2013, this sort of thing is just something I’ve had to deal with in my life. All of my family and close friends have instructions not to post pictures of themselves with me, for their protection.
In my previous paper on how ChatGPT5 has been designed to outsmart a lot of the methods that have previously been used to trick AI for PR purposes, this got me looking into the subject more closely. What ChatGPT5 now considers “noise” and attempts to ignore would fall into 3 categories:
Spamdexing: I had no idea just how complex this had become. “Spam” on the internet is very complex and it seems like a constant battle to defeat safeguards.
Dark PR: This is what I got hit with in 2005. Watching the Heard vs Depp trial, and then the stuff with Blake Lively, this seems to have become a normalized tool in Hollywood. I had previously been unaware that Facebook had secretly targeted Google with a Dark PR campaign. Though of course not at all surprised.
The “Reddit Mafia”: I don’t use Reddit. I had no idea there was some sort of organised campaign there against me until ChatGPT5 told me through my friend. I found this YT content that explains how Reddit content has been manipulated by just a few individuals for ideological purposes. Presumably they can also monetise this to promote content their patron wants, and delete content their patron doesn’t like.
The thought that major platforms like Facebook are being used for Dark PR, even against direct commercial rivals, really shows how out of control the situation is. If a foreign power got control of one of these platforms, the havoc it could inflict would be catastrophic. A journalist that might have been critical of the business practices of one of these platforms (like myself) could really find themselves in an undesirable position.
Spamdexing is so pervasive in web3 that to say it is normalized would be an understatement. It’s use is mandatory in that space because everyone else is doing it. When I owned my own web3 development studio (Arrivant) I would get multiple messages a day from agents wanting to sell me Spamdexing services. I still do just because I’m associated with various projects.
Perhaps the Reddit Mafia is even more concerning than the threat of Dark PR. The idea that just a few people could use hacks, exploits, or nepotism to hijack one of the largest platforms in the world is Orwellian in scope. I’ve long had similar suspicions about wikipedia since I discovered that the entry for “Incel” described this as a terrorist group. I objected to the idea that 27.4% of single men (0.274*50M= 13.7M) and 14.4% of single women (0.144* 44M= 6.3M) in the USA were terrorists. That’s 20M victims of dating strife just in the USA that are now domestic terrorists because someone hijacked and locked a wikipedia page for ideological reasons. That page is then cited all over as credible and this has a big affect on AI search results, further victimizing these people.
When I look at it this way, I don’t feel so bad about whatever the Reddit Mafia did to me, that ChatGPT5 recently said it was learning to ignore. But 5.0 did admit that 4.5 and previous versions were teaching people that I was a bad person because of whatever was going down on Reddit.
I do think all these issues need more attention. If the platforms were doing their due diligence, I think a lot of these more obvious problems could be solved easily, without the need for nuclear powered super AI to solve our basic social engineering problems.
I find it unfortunate that the longer we use AI, the worse we get at talking to each other. Since most people don’t understand how the internet works (and I can’t blame them since it’s constantly changing), it makes them extremely vulnerable to scams. Scams seem like the top industry in some of the more lawless countries.
The idea that anyone could be born Misaligned, and then labelled a “terrorist” (even as a child) just for being Misaligned, or because someone paid someone who controls the administration powers over 2500+ Reddit subjects through some exploit, or a similar situation with wikipedia… I would like to say we are one step away from the Soylent Green scenario already. But honestly, this isn’t even one step away. It is here. Since anyone labelled a terrorist can be subjected to extrajudicial AI assisted termination without any defence, today (not some hypothetical future), the power to control language becomes the power over life and death. If you think it can’t happen to anyone in your neighborhood because you live in an Aligned-only area, that’s not how power works. Power just keeps expanding until checked.
I would love to get comments from people who know more on this topic than I do, especially marketing types since you have to deal with all of this on a daily basis.