Would a brigade effort to "engage" with Trump ads in streaming services force the campaign to waste extra money, and make a viable psyop when they measure their telemetry?

I read once that a good thing to do was to physically mail a low denomination check to the campaign. All because the work and effort to record and deposit the funds was so labor intensive by an actual person.

13

You'll need to mail thousands of them for it to matter. The labor and expense for you to do that is greater than the labor and expense for them. Plus, I feel like they'd probably just throw the checks away if they are like a penny, or something stupid low.

5
- Postdate them lol
  
  1

I was just wondering about a general privacy goal of having an LLM bot just flood the zone with random data to try and confound advertising models, simulating clicks and likes/engagement across the spectrum just to wreck any meaningful data correlations.

If you were aiming this concept at two specific targets, i.e., costing the Trump campaign money and screwing with their data, things could get really interesting. Like an open source bot that would coordinate bizarre trends across large cohorts of users to convince the data miners that, for example, a disproportionate number of voters in key regions are demographically or behaviorally skewed.

33

Take a look at this browser extension: https://adnauseam.io/

As online advertising becomes ever more ubiquitous and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating ad clicks universally and blindly on behalf of its users. Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks' databases. As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile.

32
- AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks' databases
  
  Do those clicks appear to be coming from me, or from some random fake identity?
  
  False floods of data or not, there are some things I'd rather not have any identifiable contact with at all.
  
  10
- Ooh, that’s nice. Now change “omnivorous” to “targeted” and things get interesting.
  
  Thanks, friend!
  
  5
Personally, I’d just limit it to feeding them data that a large undecided segment believes a few provably false outlandish things, so that they publicly endorse said things when they could be spending time doing something socially destructive.

19
- Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?
  
  12
- I mean wouldn't it be crazy, to get something like people are eating cats and dogs publicly said.
  
  4
I like the idea, but I'd worry about getting sued for fraud. Though it's not likely that would be a top issue what with his trying to stay out of prison.

7
- I’m not a lawyer but I’m not sure how liable you’d be. People run bots all the time. Plus, this is all about numbers. You can’t sue thousands of people like that.
  
  2
The major networks can determine bots from people.

1

I always click on ads for companies I don't like. The cost to them is trivial, but whatever. It's a petty vengeance.

6

Anything that you can think of has already been thought of, modelled, and done by international actors who have more resources, technical capability and time than you, and have far fewer morals.

You want a specific outcome to this election? So do Russia and China. They're a lot better at this than you are and are orders of magnitude more invested in it.

7

I'm spitballing for a conversation. I don't think I'm a pivotal strategic player.

Edit: that said, I do think what you said is certainly worth mention, so I want to get ahead of my defensiveness.

So to continue, do you think that such a tactic would be valuable for a state funded interest?

8

Web ads already drain accounts like water in a bathtub. Your ideal click thru rate is in the mid 2% and that's just clicks, not conversions. If you are a politician it's a lousy and expensive way to market yourself. Just like businesses you do it just to crowd out others that are doing the same thing.

13

As much as the hacker in me would love to do this, I sincerely hope ideas (posts... not ideas really) like this don't become fodder for the paranoia propaganda machine driving MAGA.

11

Let’s be honest, they’d probably already be screaming foul play regardless.

11
I have no problem taking flack for it. In my view they're so far off base that a flurry of unforced errors unravel with every variable.

3

Don't stoop to their level

-13

Stoop lower and fucking destroy them

27
- Dig a pit below their levels so they'll fall in it, then fill the pit.
  
  13
Bruh. “They go low, we go high” gave us fucking Trump. That strategy didn’t work. We are not trying it again in a nearly identical context.

24
- And if you start a brigading campaign against them, it'll just be used to raise their platform.
  
  -8
Unfortunately there's no version of politics without gaming. Merit is clearly not enough to win alone, however I do believe all things being equal the participants with stronger merit are more resilient against the games.

5