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How Professional Russian Trolls Operate
New submitter SecState writes: Hundreds of full-time, well-paid trolls operate thousands of fake accounts to fill social media sites and comments threads with pro-Kremlin propaganda. A St. Petersburg blogger spent two months working 12-hour shifts in a "troll factory," targeting forums of Russian municipal websites. In an interview, he describes how he worked in teams with two other trolls to create false "debates" about Russian and international politics, with pro-Putin views always scoring the winning point. Of course, with the U.S. government invoking "state secrets" to dismiss a defamation case against the supposedly independent advocacy group United Against a Nuclear Iran, Americans also need to be asking how far is too far when it comes to masked government propaganda.
The term is "anonymous". How long is it going to take the current generation to learn the lessons of the past? Anonymous sources of information CANNOT BE TRUSTED. If you know nothing about the source of a piece of "information", then it is not information at all. This is why scientific journals moved to have peer-reviewed articles in the past, for example - so that there was a known group of people who had reviewed materials prior to publishing it. Its not perfect, but it is a damn sight better than not having anything at all (which is the Internet's current model of "information").
Seriously, the internet says "Hooray for BitCoin! an anonymous, deregulated currency! Stick it to "the man"!" which is quickly followed by "Wait? They took my money?" People say "Hooray for internet blogs written by unknown private individuals! Stick it to the media!" which is quickly followed by "Wait? What? You mean those anonymous people had agendas instead of being bastions of 'truth'?" Until this Internet generation grows up and learns a few lessons from history, they will continue to be taken like a bunch of naive school children.
Compare our invasion of Korea with that of Vietnam only a few years later. Before you say "Korea was UN-approved" — no, that's a lame excuse. Stalin boycotted UN at the time action on Korea was decided, but by the time of Vietnam USSR has changed its approach. That's all.
In both cases American military was sent to fight in remote lands against people, who didn't threaten America directly in any way — for fear of the domino effect of Communism. In both cases the fighting was heavy and numerous war-crimes have taken place.
And yet, there was no domestic opposition to the Korean war — virtually none. No protests against the draft, no accusations of returning soldiers being "baby-killers". John Kerry, for example, has gained more political capital for opposing the war (and returning his medals), than for fighting in it (for an entire 4 months).
Vietnam was widely considered a national shame long before the war was lost. Meanwhile the only source of any negativity about the Korean war in mass culture was the M*A*S*H series.
Why was the domestic reaction to the two wars so drastically different? The theory of propagandists controlled and funded (with or without their own knowledge) by the USSR would explain the known facts.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I have a simple question - Why do liberals only acknowledge the bias of Fox news or other such outlets, and never the more extreme bias of MSNBC or CNN? Why is this? Why? Look at CNN and how desperate and parasitic their content and clickbait titles are for views and clicks. They have nothing going for them except public memory of a former titan brand. I think I could study something like astrophysics and be less confused. How are people so dumb? I call myself a moderate
Well, a nice high profile one would be the entire McCarthy era, and Hover's infiltration of civil right's organizations under the argument that they were aligned with communists.
Yeah, this happens on Slash too, so apparently the Chinese astroturfing squad seems to lurk here as well. For example, in regards to cheating exams:
You have this guy mentioning that cheating test scores is also a big problem in China, followed by some more detailed posts as to why.
Then you have a response by an AC who basically says "oh it's just Westerners trying to make China look bad. We don't do that anymore! Look, I'm in the US now so I'm believable. Despite posting AC and having stereotypical Chinese grammatical mistakes common to non-landed Chinese astroturfers, modded +1
I point out that the previous response is an obvious astroturfer (aforementioned grammatical errors etc), and am modded down twice rather readily. But seriously, read the astroturfer's post out with a bad accent and it will sound like a Chinese villain from an old movie. The linguistic keys make it pretty clear the guy isn't somebody who's been living in the west for any length of time.
For the record, I have plenty of Chinese friends etc whom I've worked on language skills with. Missing pronouns is usually a fairly basic thing that gets fixed earlier on, as is the use of infinite verbs ("keep to spread" instead of "spreading"). So unless the poster had been living in Chinatown for the last few years, one would expect those language'isms to have cleared up by now.
Also, "flied lice", though attributed to a Chinese restaurateur in Lethal Weapon and added for humour, would be more of a Japanese/Korean language issue as they lack distinct "L" and "R" sounds in their language (or rather, "L" and "R" exist as single character/sound). Chinese don't really seem to have issues with consonant swaps in English.