Invisible Rulers

“Report-Analyze-Publicize.”

Another IPA guide laid out seven “tricks of the trade”—rhetorical devices by which the invisible ruler attempts to sway the crowd:

Third, the crowd loves density: there can be no component parts, just the singular crowd. And fourth, the crowd needs a direction:

is vital for an informed public, and government can prioritize it in three areas: in disclosing state actor influence operations to the public, in declaring their own takedown requests, and in ensuring that outside researchers have the tools necessary to study the powerful private actors of Big Tech.

Posts that are beginning to go viral could be thrown into a queue for a crowd-sourced fact-check,

“freedom of speech not freedom of reach”

As storytellers, influencers use the same techniques as screenwriters, novelists, and playwrights: familiarity, novelty, and repetition.

Putting humans back in the loop in certain capacities, such as through middleware, is potentially transformative. So is scaling back the algorithms. It’s probably time to get rid of wholly automated trends features. Gaming them is a key element in creating majority illusions, projecting false consensus, and driving abuse toward Main Characters.

More generally, however, rather than focusing on the specifics of moderation, government regulators can focus on increasing transparency surrounding the practice. Transparency