All for Public Opinion Manipulation... The 'Shocking' Identity of an Account with '80,000 Followers'

Local time on the 18th, the U.S. daily The New York Times reported that state actors from Iran and China, along with Israeli companies, have been conducting autonomous public opinion manipulation on social media using artificial intelligence.

According to U.S. officials and security experts cited by The New York Times, these countries and organizations rapidly expanded online public opinion manipulation activities at a speed and scale surpassing humans, with minimal human intervention, by utilizing artificial intelligence.

They utilized China's open-source artificial intelligence models, which can be freely downloaded and modified, to create agents—bots capable of independently performing specific tasks.

Hundreds of AI agents autonomously generated fake accounts on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok.

Subsequently, they rapidly distributed false posts related to political and current affairs issues through these fake accounts to sway public opinion.

It was tracked that the campaigns by China and Iran were state-led, while the campaign by Israel was led by private enterprises.

In the case of the Iranian campaign, it targeted the American public, and the fake accounts generated by the agents disguised themselves as ordinary Americans residing in major cities.

These accounts tagged journalists and politicians while distributing popular memes and anti-Republican opinions.

They amassed approximately 80,000 followers through activities in the first half of this year.

Previously, Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, also announced late last month that it had blocked an Iranian propaganda operation mobilizing artificial intelligence.

Officials noted that this is virtually one of the first instances where AI agents exclusively handled all stages of public opinion manipulation activities, ranging from account creation to the coordination of online messages.

While these AI agent-based activities were at a crude level, they caught the attention of U.S. intelligence agencies, tech companies, and security experts.

This is because it has sparked fears that publicly available artificial intelligence models could be abused to virtually perform online public opinion manipulation on their own.

Some U.S. officials expressed concern that similar attempts could be made targeting American voters ahead of the November midterm elections.

Kyle Crichton, a researcher at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, predicted that as technology continues to develop, AI agent-driven public opinion manipulation attempts will become more common.

Researcher Crichton explained that agents can become quite sophisticated, gaining the ability to blend in naturally like actual human users beyond mere scale expansion.

(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.