Generally I would think that Platner's Reddit would be totally disqualifying. However, we are at a really interesting moment in politics, and esp in Dem politics, where maybe some of these things can be forgiven. The fact that this came like 9 months before the primary is probably helpful to Platner. Also, I am impressed that his digital team has turned around the Reddit leak to also highlight those positive things, like like what you mention here. I hope he stays in the race if only because he's an interesting candidate and keeps things fun.
I think if this came up in vet I would just say "well this will suck when it comes out and be in every ad" but let him make the decision whether to go through it anyway. When you play the new kind of candidate game these surprises come with the territory. Always better it comes out early than late, like you say.
Question: if it wasn’t for the Twitter account linking to the Reddit user, would there have been a way to connect the comments to Platner? Creating an explicit connection between the stuff you post under your real name and the stuff you post under a username seems like a rookie mistake. We don’t (yet) have the tools to trawl Reddit and ask, “find a user whose posts sound like Graham Platner,” right?
It would have been much harder, especially given the comments being deleted. I’m not familiar with a tool like you imagine but also seems like the only thing it would need would basically be compute and time since you have all Reddit between certain dates? I assume more impressive stuff is out there in spying as a service land, but as of yet it doesn’t make its way down to campaigns in any widespread fashion.
That makes sense. It sounds like something a highly unscrupulous LLM developer might be working on. I have zero interest in being a public figure, but I’m still a little paranoid that one day AI will be able to connect me to a long defunct StarCraft forum (my teenage opinions were, uh, not good).
Generally I would think that Platner's Reddit would be totally disqualifying. However, we are at a really interesting moment in politics, and esp in Dem politics, where maybe some of these things can be forgiven. The fact that this came like 9 months before the primary is probably helpful to Platner. Also, I am impressed that his digital team has turned around the Reddit leak to also highlight those positive things, like like what you mention here. I hope he stays in the race if only because he's an interesting candidate and keeps things fun.
I think if this came up in vet I would just say "well this will suck when it comes out and be in every ad" but let him make the decision whether to go through it anyway. When you play the new kind of candidate game these surprises come with the territory. Always better it comes out early than late, like you say.
Question: if it wasn’t for the Twitter account linking to the Reddit user, would there have been a way to connect the comments to Platner? Creating an explicit connection between the stuff you post under your real name and the stuff you post under a username seems like a rookie mistake. We don’t (yet) have the tools to trawl Reddit and ask, “find a user whose posts sound like Graham Platner,” right?
It would have been much harder, especially given the comments being deleted. I’m not familiar with a tool like you imagine but also seems like the only thing it would need would basically be compute and time since you have all Reddit between certain dates? I assume more impressive stuff is out there in spying as a service land, but as of yet it doesn’t make its way down to campaigns in any widespread fashion.
That makes sense. It sounds like something a highly unscrupulous LLM developer might be working on. I have zero interest in being a public figure, but I’m still a little paranoid that one day AI will be able to connect me to a long defunct StarCraft forum (my teenage opinions were, uh, not good).