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.
Is anybody pretending that corporations and politicians aren't already effectively doing the same thing?
Only they pretty it up with foundations and think tanks who put out position papers to benefit the talking points of the people paying for them.
Propaganda comes in many forms. And from many sources.
And even some of the people who will be hand-wringing about this propaganda will be endorsing some other stuff.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Look at any site, twitter, instagram, facebook, reddit. If you post something about say MH17 and the information about the Russians being involved, all of a sudden the trolls come out about Ukrainian aggression, whores in Kiev etc. As the TFA indicates, this can create panic considering how hooked people are on Social Media but it'll also be more than anything else, the death of anonymity on the Web. Why? because people on Social Media sites will demand it because of the trolling activities and having to filter through a bunch of propaganda and targeted misdirection.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Internet Trolls You!
I'm a satanic clam.
It's just about time to drag the American organized political trolling on sites like reddit, twitter, and tumblr into the open too, right?
Well, astroturfing is no new tactic but ... I think what this article deals with is scale. 400 clearly skilled (bilingual at the least) individuals running multiple catfish personalities online day in and day out ... the whole thing on a budget of $400k a month? That level and size is probably unparalleled by ... say, Digg's conservative idiots.
You have one entity orchestrating the 12 hours a day work of 400 individuals on topics that are pro-Russian and tangentially pro-Russian. They are sophisticated enough to "hit play" at a certain time to unfold a natural disaster or assassination or anything to destabilize/confuse a region and they do so over many accounts on multiple social media platforms. They create video, screenshots, websites, etc. And they use proxies and sufficiently sophisticated means to appear to be disjoint at first glance.
They appear to have run an exercise on a rubber plant explosion in Louisiana for no other discernible purpose than to test out their new super powers or demonstrate their abilities to their customers/leaders.
Frankly put, I'm unaware of "American organized political trolling" that rivals this. This is paid. This is tightly controlled. This is prepared. This is unified. American organized political trolling is just a run-of-the-mill monkey shitfight with the occasional Koch Bros/Soros website (usually easily sourceable) thrown in.
Now if you can point me to a faked ISIS attack on American soil right before an election that was done by some political group stateside, I'd be interested to hear about it.
My work here is dung.
the USA has better free speech protections. therefore, nonsense on the internet has less power
i am certain there is organized political trolling in the USA as well, by the government and by organizations with agendas, but it is less effective in the west
countries with less free speech protection (like china and their 50 cent bullshit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5... ) will rely on this sort of organized trolling as a means of persuasion and control, domestically and internationally. more than the west, simply because the west has less need to manipulate these whisper campaigns because nonsense on the internet has less power because are exposed to it more in a free speech environment and are more resistant to it. they simply have better trained more critical minds
the governments of authoritarian countries fear provocative opinions more, therefore they engage in this sort of nonsense more, because they view controlling people's opinions as important. their people wind of living in a walled garden of controlled opinion with less options to consider, and a state that officially endorses and pushes weak minded opinions and fear. the west simply doesn't give a fuck. the opinions and lies of random morons on the internet is exactly that, and most people can see that for what it is. you have to live in a paranoid insecure state to give much credence to inflammatory bullshit from random whispers on the internet
in the end, it weakens these countries, because you are breeding people with weak, easily manipulated minds. people in the west simply have better and more healthy bullshit meters. simply because when you can say anything, people do
expose a socially and psychologically normal person to 4chan for a month, and what do you get? a crackpot? no, a jaded experienced mind that can see bullshit coming from a mile away
exposure to the kind of thinking and commentary that resembles mental illness, amongst the more rational choices of speech, gives one a more critical eye and healthy skepticism. the ability to see the difference between credible words and manipulated words
but in countries where paranoid schizophrenic theories are actually supported and endorsed by the government's official media agencies as a means of control, you breed people to live in panic and fear. weak minds. it's a shame to weaken people's minds like this. russia, china, iran, etc., reap a side effect of their manipulations: a general population more susceptible to idiocies most westerners (not all) would easily reject, simply because westerners (even though some choose to stay within ideological bubbles and never consider other sides out of prideful ignorance, some personality types are universal, but limited) can, and do, see other sources of narrative, good or bad
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Read Trust me, I'm Lying -- it is a book by a self-confessed media manipulator who got depressed and left the industry. He worked for an apparel company. One example tactic was to take sexually explicit photos of porn stars, and then complain about said photos to feminist groups. And then: OUTRAGE!!!
The story of ACORN is a perfect example of how media manipulators manufactured a scandal -- literally creating reality for movement conservatives -- in order to shut the group down. To this day, some GOP congress critters are unaware that ACORN is defunct. The interesting thing is, the more outraged a person is (politically), the easier they are to manipulate. It is all rather ironic.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Holy crap, that guy. Cold fjord shows up to every Snowden/Manning/Wikileaks story like an unwanted sex offender to a family Christmas dinner.
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.
Four years ago the article said: "The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda."
There is not a more recent update as to what has become of that software development effort. But we do know, that in 2011 — when the article you are linking to was talking about America's evil plans in future tense — Russian government's Internet-propaganda machine was already up and running:
Let me guess, USSR's Lavrenty Beria was a normal reaction to America's Joseph McCarthy in your opinion too?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Nyet, everything excellent in Russia, all American disasters real and American. Giant plume kill 1200 people in Louisiana city of New Orleans. Work of imperialists. American CIA responsible, deaths cover up. Real! Contact me at agent0@kremlin.gov for more big news.
it's a continuum. the west falls for plenty of bullshit. it's just that, on the average, the west falls for less
every single example of the west falling for shit you just gave me, can also be shown in countries with less free speech. and they fall for *more*
the perfect is not the enemy of the good. if you gauge all countries against an ideal perfection of a populace of everyone being perfectly rational critical minds, which does not exist and never will, then your criticisms are useless
the west simply edges out countries with less free speech because they train more critical minds. the west is not perfect and never will be. it's just that, until countries that now have very little free speech get more, the west will simply do better than them, not perfect
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it