Slashdot Mirror
Professional Russian Trolling Exposed
An anonymous reader writes: Today the New York Times published a stunning exposé revealing the strategies used by one of the Web's greatest enemies: professional, government-backed "internet trolls." These well-paid agent provocateurs are dedicated to destroying the value of the Internet as an organizing and political tool. The trolling attacks described within are mind-boggling -- they sound like the basis of a Neal Stephenson novel as much as they do real life -- but they all rely on the usual, inevitable suspects of imperfect security and human credulity.
It's just about time to drag the American organized political trolling on sites like reddit, twitter, and tumblr into the open too, right?
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
Just block the fuckers and stop worrying about stupid shit already. The have a button for that. Unless you WANT to gather these trolls as active followers, then you're all set! Here's a tip; make websites, don't live on them. When you have more important things to do, then Twatter and Farcebook look like what they really are; huge motherfucking wastes of time to people who are creative.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
It's just about time to drag the American organized political trolling on sites like reddit, twitter, and tumblr into the open too, right?
I've often wondered about certain comment threads on slashdot. Framing certain actions as "hijacking the conversation for propaganda purposes" seems to hit the Bayesian priors higher than just "a lot of people really feel that way".
The conversations attached to Uber articles are weird, not at all what one would expect.
The recent one about California raising the minimum wage was suspect: affecting roughly 2.4% of wage earners, you would expect posts like "has no effect because costs are passed on to consumers", "raising everyone's wages make costs rise to compensate", and so on to be roundly debunked by the first person to google some numbers.
It's worse around election time. In a presidential election year, about 6 weeks beforehand we start to get framing posts - some of which are quite insidious. "I agree with him on *that* issue, but everything else he stands for is batshit crazy". It seemed like every response to a Ron Paul was that way: his immediate position is OK, but it puts the "batshit crazy" idea into people's minds with no supporting evidence.
...and it's starting to happen for Rand Paul as well.
Then there's the visibility-massaging techniques: posting an opinion that's not *quite* right just to get people to respond so that text further down gets pushed below the fold where no one can see it. Posting a definition that's not *quite* right so that people argue the definition back and forth and avoid the core issues, and of course modding things down.
I sometimes monitor certain posts and see them modded down... only to see them modded up a few hours later. That indicates to me that there are people trying to promote an agenda with the moderation system, but get overruled by the general population.
In addition to participating in the conversation, take a step back and look at the overall context of the conversation some time. Instead of just responding, think about the reasoning behind *why* the person made the post that they did.
It is sometimes quite enlightening.
In a way this is right, trolling and astroturfing are done on the mass media via PR mouthpieces, press releases and advertising.
I think the difference is that it's so professional and done with such public transparency (ie, you can call the PR office and get mailed a press kit, nobody pretends they're not doing it) that it lacks the kind of nefarious, ministry of propaganda kind of dishonesty that a state-sponsored organized astroturfing campaign has.
I just don't think those tactics would work all that well within the US. It seems like whenever an organization DOES try an astroturfing campaign ("Citizens for Enhanced Comcast Monopoly") it gets spotted so quickly for what it is that it seems to achieve negative results.
I'm not making allegations, I'm explaining what happened. The consulate was attacked by a well armed local terrorist franchise that had carefully planned their evening project. Everyone on the US side new within hours (even as it was happening) exactly what had occurred. The White House certainly did. They then went about a deliberate campaign of lying about what happened, because telling the truth about it would have been acknowledging that a key part of their at-the-time ongoing re-election campaign was their narrative about how exactly such terrorist groups were "on the run" and losing their ability to cause trouble. The event demonstrated that their often repeated campaign talking point was either itself a lie, or reflected a remarkably obtuse/naive understanding of what was happening on the ground in places like Libya.
The GP was questioning the existence of a US counter-example of what we see regularly in the Russian/Ukraine mess (where Russia blatantly lies about what's happening on the ground, using all sorts of classical methods in their media, including the professional trolls discussed in TFA). I said that we had a close example that we could examine - where something that happened on the ground and was well understood by everyone in defense and intelligence, right up the food chain to the White House, was never the less lied about for weeks in the service of spinning for the imminent election. They sent people like Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton out to deliberately troll, multiple times, in order to muddy the waters and distract from the fact that what happened was taking the fun out of part of their re-election campaign narrative.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.