Jonas R. Kunst

@kunstjonas.bsky.social

2458 Followers 376 Following

Professor of Communication and Psychology at BI Norwegian Business School and the University of Oslo Past Yale, Harvard, UiB. Editor-in-Chief at Advances.in Father. Views are my own.

The Operational Workflow of Cyborg Propaganda. Cyborg propaganda utilizes an AI multiplier to scale distinctiveness. A central coordination hub issues a single strategic directive (e.g., “Oppose the new tax bill”). This coordination hub may retrieve data from an AI system monitoring emerging narratives and shifts on social media. The hub may vary in terms of automation versus human involvement. To overcome recruitment bottlenecks, the system utilizes network harvesting, where users are incentivized to supply data on friends and neighbors, linking private social graphs with public voter registries. An AI-driven multiplier engine then processes the operative directive alongside individual user profiles, analyzing their posting history, syntax, and background characteristics of each participant. The system generates thousands of unique, context-aware message variations, effectively performing ‘style transfer’ to match each user’s voice. Simultaneously, the system may employ gamification or monetary rewards to incentivize user engagement. Verified human users then ratify and broadcast these posts or comments. The resulting information cascade creates a manufactured consensus that exhibits the linguistic diversity of a genuine grassroots movement, thereby bypassing duplicate-content filters and signaling authenticity to social peers. Crucially, the system operates as a closed feedback loop: The AI Monitor continuously tracks the performance of these posts or comments on social media, feeding engagement data back into the organizer directive to adjust strategy in real-time. Simultaneously, successful narratives are harvested to reinforce and fine-tune the AI Multiplier to produce increasingly persuasive content in subsequent cycles.
The Matrix of Coordinated Influence. Traditional frameworks for analyzing online influence focus on the distinction between human and automated actors (Identity Axis) or between spontaneous and coordinated behavior (Articulation Axis). Bot Nets (top-left) rely on synthetic identities and automated scripts. Troll Farms (bottom-left) use human operators to manage fake personas. Grassroots Action (bottom-right) involves verified citizens sharing self-authored views. Cyborg Propaganda (top-right) represents a new paradigm: verified human users disseminating centrally generated, algorithmically generated narratives, effectively ‘hybridizing’ the authenticity of the grassroots with the scale of the botnet.
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