Slashdot Mirror
Internet Water Army On the March
New submitter kermidge sends in an article at the Physics arXiv blog about what's called the "Internet Water Army," large groups of people in China who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments and reviews about various products. Researchers at the University of Victoria went undercover to figure out exactly how these informational (or disinformational) floods operate, and what they learned (PDF) could lead to better spam-detection software. Quoting:
"They discovered that paid posters tend to post more new comments than replies to other comments. They also post more often with 50 per cent of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average. They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again. What's more, the content they post is measurably different. These workers are paid by the volume and so often take shortcuts, cutting and pasting the same content many times. This would normally invalidate their posts but only if it is spotted by the quality control team. So Cheng and co built some software to look for repetitions and similarities in messages as well as the other behaviors they'd identified. They then tested it on the dataset they'd downloaded from Sina and Sohu and found it to be remarkably good, with an accuracy of 88 per cent in spotting paid posters."
Your first thought was cyber-payback for "EU says water isn't wet."
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I was paid to leave this new comment.
And, the moment this detection software is for sale, it will be inserted into the paid posters submission workflow.
It's just another SPAM arms race, the fact that nobody is challenging the reviewers yet is why it's so easy.
Well, at least we'll be safe in the English speaking world. Legitimate user reviews are always so intelligent and well-written I could easily distinguish freelancer's bullshit from the thoughts of intelligent users. Just look at the comments on Amazon and Youtube!
This "army" has been a staple of the CCP for years. They're usually pretty easy to spot on Chinese language sites and (increasingly) on English language sites. The name comes from the reputed 5 mao (or 1/2 of a Chinese yuan) they're paid for each message. That's about 7 US cents. For the Chinese psyche, it's much more satisfying to see a large number of shill posts that "agree" with the party line than to "waste" effort on even a thin veneer of truth.
I like Slashdot. Very good website.Soulskill best editor ever.
What could possibly go wrong? ....
In soviet Russia
Some jingle by the Golden girls
etc, etc, etc
88% to spot paid posters? Stick around the internet long enough and you can recognize them with better abilities then that software.
This post was a paid poster. Peddling a product that is less effective then other means available to people with a half decent but also half lousy reasoning as to why we need it.
Jim
As the comments in the linked article said, paid shills and astroturfers are a fact of life since time immemorial ...and ooooo....they're now doing it in China....ooooo.....I'm scared.....
and a bunch of other 'legitimate' news websites.
their overlords at corporate get some backhanded deal going, from govt or business, they agree to spam-blast information.
you arent just fighting 'underground spammers'. you are fighting the very concept of Public Relations.
So if this how slashdot plans to continue having random quality stories on weird topics that look good on google trends?
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"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
They just keep cutting and pasting the same debunked arguments and pretend that nobody notices.
Stagger the day's activity across forums so it's not one account posting every 2.5 minutes, throw in a bunch of "lol" or "qft" comments in other threads, disable the CTRL button and right clicking on the PC, and make sure to post something, anything weekly for a few months. Boom, defeated.
And this is why I blackhole all of apnic
Michael Kristopeit is cowering.
China = sluicegated.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
TDMA is "Time Division Multiple Access". In other words, we use time slots to control pipe usage.
This will definitely work as long as the time slots are big enough. The city sends water for an hour, drains the pipe so that it can serve as a waveguide, transmits ultra wideband internet for an hour, then fills the pipe back up so that water can be transmitted again. Throughput will be excellent.
Unfortunately this is the status quo. It's been long known companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Blockbuster, have been paying hordes to scavenge google or bing for posts like " Win 7 sucks" or Win 7 just as bad, and then post things like " I don't know, I have 3 computers running it and have zero issues like you say. Might be your hardware. This is just bringing it to the mainstreams attention IMO. I guess the days are coming to an end when I go to Best Buy to get something and look it up on my phone to get reviews. Now the kicker: How many times have you went to buy something from a non name brand and looked them up before using your credit card? Say you Google " mom and pop xx widgets R us" and the word scam or fraud. Well, when do the scammers start flooding the results to show stellar listings for the latest fraud sites? Kind of changes the whole community concept doesn't it? .. Just something to think about.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
It's working for global warming. I mean climate change. No, enhanced weather variability. Wait, let me start again.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think I noticed it a bit. Just a tad.
The new term was popularized because the common folk don't understand the difference between climate and weather. Doesn't mean "global warming" is really a less accurate term, since it refers to climate and global averages (as it always did). Thanks for trolling out, folks.
They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again.
I bet not a one of them has as many IDs as Michael Kristopeit.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Celebrities paid by sponsors to promote Nike, Adidas, Wheaties, Omega, Rolex, ... is the milder form.
I thought it was Russian hackers that got that water pump in Illinois, not the Internet Water Army...
I agree, the internet would be a better place with half as much spam instantly if all providers did this.
It's not "Our little corner of academia." It's every major academy of science in the entire world. And they aren't focused on "messaging" because they are scientists, not PR flacks.
It's true that in recent years the coordinated propaganda of the fossil fuel industry has managed to sway masses of uneducated people against the scientific community. But that's not because the fault of the scientific community. Some people out there are just going to believe whoever has the loudest microphone or the endorsement of their local pastor, no matter what the science says.
Keep telling yourself that if it makes losing more comfortable. It's that the fossil fuel industry is out to get you, that the public is a mass of morons. It's not about scientific integrity, credibility, or not being a prick to people you're trying to convince. Stay with that. It's working Grrrrreat.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
that the public is a mass of morons
Well, that at least is a well-known fact. And if you never had the pleasure of working in a customer service job, and never got the chance to discover this fact for yourself..
Then have a look at http://clientsfromhell.net/ and http://notalwaysright.com/
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Never done the Twitter thing, I found the following posted on some humor blog, nice response to someone paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the 7 cent thing.
- @KhloeKardashian: "OMG! Wheat Thins has a new limited time sweet cinnamon flavor. Why am I so excited about this?”
- @Kris_Humphries (Not Kris Humphries): "Because you’re an idiot."
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I have been commenting on a some Danish sites regarding tech companies moving go China. One thing I have noticed about China is that everytime someone points out the worker conditions(enviroment / pay etc) or mentions something about human rights, the comments are rated down if options exists and it is followed with answers like "have I efter lived there?", "don't believe the newspapers" etc. But when I become specific, like comments on internet censorship etc, the defense stops or becomes vague nonsense.
Where is the news here?
CorpSpeak is a program readily downloadable. Given a few keywords it can generate loads of nonsense that makes perfect sense. It would be easy to apply that program to the subject application.
Truth is truth. A kingdom even China without truth will not stand.
TripAdvisor is flooded by water army, too. Many comments are far from accurate.
Might as well use that stupid Great Firewall of China to do some good. Add "Free Tibet", "Ai Weiwei is innocent", and "Taiwan is a country" to your site to avoid this spam.
Science isn't about "winning" or "losing" in the court of public opinion. Science isn't an American Idol finale where consumers vote for their preferred scientific theory and thus decide the fate of the natural world. Do you honestly not understand that? Do you literally believe that we should seek scientific truth by polling the opinions of our least educated citizens?
I say this as someone who accepts the reality of climate change.
If the public is a mass of morons, then the self-ascribed smart people who remain hostile to them, rather than alter their behavior to accommodate and guide them, are even greater morons. It is not the fault of the ignorant when they remain ignorant, but it is the fault of the enlightened to make enemies of the ignorant.
.. It deletes all the comments. Voila! Only 12% are legitimate anyway..
Your comment is erudite and ermine. We would like to subscribe to your newsletter, please sent it postpaste with the next monorail.
We should write smarter webapps. You can detect floods easily via ip address. It's real easy to block by ip address, even a caveman can do it.
The Chinese are using 700 club tactics! Were screwed.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I had two new Chinese tumblr followers just this morning, both with very similar names, both using the exact same theme that has the exact same ads serving in it (that alone is a huge red flag. ads are a very non-tumblr thing), and they post HUNDREDS of images per hour. You either would have to be on crack or working in a sweatshop to crank out that volume of photobloggery.
this kind of crap could totally destroy the tumblr community:
http://araking2ns.tumblr.com/
http://bettylee8vtl.tumblr.com/
We have alternating current, you know.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
I have been noticing this a lot more myself. I tend to skim over reviews with broken English, and it seems to be a good identifier if a review is legit or not. I especially skip ones that use texting shortcuts.
who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments and reviews about various products.
all other media outlets around the world? Oh... one word difference. Replace 'comments' with 'articles'.
That would explain some of the comments I've seen on Amazon recently for knock-offs made in China. The pattern is usually; several people make negative comments about the quality or usability of an item, or point out a flaw that makes the item practically useless. You then get several posts within a short span of time praising the product, and (usually) saying that the others didn't follow instructions or didn't know how to use the product. The praising comments are usually in questionable syntax and tend to use the same phrases over and over.
Mind you, there *are* people who don't know how to use products they've purchased and blame the product, but it's odd that in some cases there are many who can't get a product to work, a few that think the product is great, and in all cases the few appear to know English only sparsely.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Science isn't about winning or losing. So when the folks at OPERA had some interesting findings about superluminal neutrinos they said "Hey, guys, this is interesting - our timers show stuff moving at greater than c. Help us investigate: here's our methods and data.
But climatologists are all about preventing inspection of their methods and data to prevent political exploitation of it. So that's how it is.
The former are scientists. The latter are politicians. Accept your role and get to winning. If you think social change is required to save the Earth from your predicted apocalypse you have two options: 1) persuasion. 2) force. Since apparently you don't have force yet because you've not persuaded men with guns nor the people who lead them, persuasion of the common man is the tool you have to induce change. And at that you're failing miserably because you're unloveable. You could try not being a bunch of pricks. The science isn't about winning or losing, but you're not doing science, so that's OK.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That's still a lot faster than a pigeon!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have seen this on Fark.com several times. It happens whenever there is a big military story going on somewhere in the world where the US has interests.
The last time I saw it was when the Green Revolution was going on in Iran. Suddenly out of nowhere a million new people who I'd never seen post before were having these HOORAH conversations with each other and shooting down anyone who dared post anything to the contrary. It was pretty damned incredible, and a bit scary too.
After the 19th or so NEWS FLASH story in a row they all just stopped posting altogether. But investigation of some of the accounts showed they'd been members longer than I had, but yet had very few comments aside from the whole revolution thing.
Look, you need to think about what you are saying because you are oozing ignorance.
Anybody can see the data and methods of the climate community. Climate studies are published in detail in the most rigorous and prestigious scientific journals around, including Nature and Science. So if you think that OPERA's neutrino investigation is science nonpareil, then you should love climate science because Nature holds both to the highest standards.
Meanwhile, the denial community never produces any peer reviewed publications. They just post on their blogs and give misleading testimony to Congress.
Go to the library. Get a copy of Nature. Everything will be reprinted in more detail that you will care to read. Read it. Understand it. Then, if you still aren't convinced, go produce your own peer reviewed research and get that published in Nature. Until you or somebody else in the denial community can do that you need to stop bullshitting everybody with your bullshit allegations.