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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| AI Can Tell Us How Russians Feel About the War. Putin Won't Like the Results. |
| 2023-02-27 |
| [Politico via Yahoo] Vladimir Putin is notorious for deploying propaganda on Russian citizens, one of the oldest plays in the authoritarian playbook. But does it work? When it comes to Russia’s war against Ukraine, the answer would seem to be yes. At the national level, public polling of Russian attitudes toward the war have shown support remaining relatively stable since the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion: On average, Russians still seem to support the war, even if not with the overwhelming positivity that the Kremlin might suggest. Even dips in national level public support have recovered over time, as polling showed was the case after Putin announced the "partial mobilization" in September. But in an authoritarian country, polling is unreliable. While polling works when people are willing to tell the truth, other tools are needed in places like Russia where such openness and access cannot be assumed. Artificial intelligence can help with this. For the past year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies has worked with FilterLabs.AI, a Massachusetts-based data analytics firm, to track local sentiment across Russia using AI-enabled sentiment analysis. Read the rest at the link |
| Posted by:Ebbains Threrenter5475 |
| #3 The news you get from Russia comes from Moscow and to a much smaller extent, St Petersburg. Almost nothing from the other 99% of Russian territory is heard from. But the fighting in Ukraine is done primarily by non-Russians and the returning casualties (nearly 100:1 Asian minority regions vs Moscow) are bringing the reality of the war back home with them. This AI tries to scrape some of those reactions and changing attitudes. Per capital casualties in Russian regions |
| Posted by: Ebbains Threrenter5475 2023-02-27 21:39 |
| #2 That buzzing sound you hear is the Acme(tm) Bullshite Detector going off. Any AI based on machine learning is only going to be as good as its training data. A chatbot (or human) trained on CNN is going to have different opinions than one trained on Fox News. In a country of 147 million people spread across 12 time zones, you are going to have a range of opinions. Certainly there is an anti-war anti-Putin faction, but near as I can tell, the negative sentiment about the war comes from its slow pace and not from the fact that it is happening. Putin is seen as standing for Russia. tl;dr: Despite what western media tells you, the Russian people are not going to rise up and over-throw Putin. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2023-02-27 13:55 |
| #1 But Politico wouldn't do propaganda. No, no, certainly not! |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2023-02-27 13:09 |
