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Are you chatting with a pro-Israeli AI-powered superbot? (www.aljazeera.com)

submitted 6 months ago by GFGJewbacca@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 67 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Before they had bots, they had the Act.il app.

People could submit random social media comments/posts that were critical of Israel, and if you went to that site and commented, you got "points" that could be redeemed for gift cards.

Not much money, but it was all online so people from a lower income country could make decent money off it compared to local employment.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ishmaeldaro/act-il-social-media-astroturfing-israel-palestine

After blow back they delisted the app

Now I think it's just a website instead.

It's good people are finally talking about all the propaganda Israel puts out tho. But it's not a new development. They're just switching from humans in poverty to AI.

Hell, we're probably better off if they think AI can do as good of a job at this as humans.

Quick edit:

Mentioning the act.il app on Reddit used to get you banned from a lot of the major news/politics subs

So it was really hard to talk about.

[–] Asidonhopo@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I remember reading there was something like this back in the mid/late 00s too, maybe without the giftcards but you could sign up for email alerts when there was a forum thread that needed to be brigaded, long before even reddit was a thing.

Edit: read about it on Metafilter at the time but it seems to have been purged. If you're interested maybe the post is findable on the Internet Archive