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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."
It's just another SPAM arms race, the fact that nobody is challenging the reviewers yet is why it's so easy.
Some things are racist, this sounds more like cultural bias, if you will. I would say similar thing about social norms, but given the context, the same words can be deemed racist, or enlightening.
but to counter this method you need to be more unique i.e. put more time into each post, it is an economic weapon increasing the cost of abuse significantly and therefore reducing post quantity and number of sites economically target-able.
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 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.