I decided to read this book “Empire of AI” after an interview with the author Karen Hao on the Better Offline podcast, which covers the technical and financial no there there of AI. And in this interview by Tim Miller at the Bulwark with Karen Hao, they talk about environmental impacts, but I think this the way automation is being leveraged to control information flows and people’s lives on the internet is a lesser addressed topic.
Will Sam Altman and His AI Kill Us All? The Bulwark May 23, 2025 Karen Hao: “she consistently felt like she was being shadowbanned and when I talked with um researchers and experts about this this particular issue they mentioned you know because she was involved in sex work that that’s how the internet works they use AI systems to track sex workers even in platforms that are completely unrelated to their sex work to limit their distribution”
I feel the need to highlight this, and collect examples of documentation about this, because at times, ordinary people have scoffed at any suggestion that the fake machinations on the internet are even real, or at least people resist the idea that they are as prevalent and powerful as they are. And this is even though PR is nothing new in the media and pop culture, and of course propagandists have leveraged every tool since the printing press, and probably since the campfire song. The new problem is that AI is such a really shoddy tool for the job and being ultimately controlled by the most shoddy of tycoons, people who aren’t even good at anything.
This is an article I included in the bunch of references in the post I put together a couple years ago: The Internet of Fakes:
MIT Technology Review – Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows. “This is not normal. This is not healthy.” By Karen Hao. September 16, 2021 In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.