The bad-actor–vulnerable-mainstream ecosystem (IMAGE)
Caption
The bad-actor–vulnerable-mainstream ecosystem (left panel). It comprises interlinked bad-actor communities (colored nodes) and vulnerable mainstream communities (white nodes, which are communities to which bad-actor communities have formed a direct link). This empirical network is shown using the ForceAtlas2 layout algorithm, which is spontaneous, hence sets of communities (nodes) appear closer together when they share more links. Different colors correspond to different platforms. Small red ring shows 2023 Texas shooter’s YouTube community as illustration. Right panel shows Venn diagram of the topics discussed within the distrust subset. Each circle denotes a category of communities that discuss a specific set of topics, listed at bottom. The medium size number is the number of communities discussing that specific set of topics, and the largest number is the corresponding number of individuals, e.g. gray circle shows that 19.9M individuals (73 communities) discuss all 5 topics. Number is red if a majority are anti-vaccination; green if majority is neutral on vaccines. Only regions with > 3% of total communities are labeled. Anti-vaccination dominates. Overall, this figure shows how bad-actor-AI could quickly achieve global reach and could also grow rapidly by drawing in communities with existing distrust.
Credit
Johnson et al.
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Original content