Slashdot Mirror
Russian Online Trolls Resist The Light
Rick Zeman writes: Since the beginning of the public Internet on Usenet and now following on comment boards worldwide, live the trolls, the online creatures dedicated to stirring up trouble with their versions of online flaming, fact-twisting, and overall being a menace to online society. Russia, by paying state-sponsored trolls, has elevated the troll to the level of professional propagandists spewing the party line. In neighboring Finland, a country again precariously balanced between Europe and the Russian bear, Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro's investigations have opened a new front in the (dis)information war (Warning: source may be paywalled) where "'There are so many layers of fakery you get lost,' said Ms. Aro, who was awarded the Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in March," reports the NYT. All because "A member of the European Union with an 830-mile-long border with Russia, Finland has stayed outside the United States-led military alliance but, unnerved by Russian military actions in Ukraine and its saber-rattling in the Baltic Sea, has expanded cooperation with NATO and debated whether to apply for full membership." The NYT article explores many of the actions that the Russian propagandists use to keep Finland out of NATO, and some of the more indefensible ones directed personally at Aro. She says, "They get inside your head, and you start thinking: If I do this, what will the trolls do next?"
Thank you.
Trolling is supposed to be a(n) art, not just being an asshole.
But I fear this is a lost battle. The common folk have appropriated the word and now their definition of it is inevitably going to be the primary one. We're just going to have to come up with a new word for intentional artful tongue-in-cheek inflammatory speech.
We get them on slashdot too, but they're very obvious. That's what mod points are for, and any forum that is disrupted, needs to consider Slashdot's mod and meta-mod as an option.
EU is probably doing more harm by highlighting the troll to public figures, where those public figures otherwise would never read the troll or give it credance, they're hyped into tackling a threat of free speech, best handled by ignoring it.
A lot of this is not about Ukraine, its about Putin. If Putin was popular he wouldn't be invading neighboring countries, so the best way forward is to continue to expose Putin's corruption / the rigged election, fix TOR to protect the free speech of Russians etc.
Trolls are by definition people who enjoy causing strife by broaching subjects that cause friction. They're not political propagandists. Trolling isn't a good tool of propaganda because heart of trolling isn't creating falsehood but uncovering unpleasant truth. And such truth seeking does never serve a particular political need. So in my mind calling potential Kremlin propagandists trolls implies that they bring up unpleasant truth. While generally actual propagandists work by highlighting truths that further political goals while downplaying unpleasant truths that doesn't. So basically accusing propagandists in trolling is tantamount to complaining that there's too much truth in propaganda..
Could you point to some of the propaganda that we're "still indoctrinated" by, or are you a Russian troll?
Just another day in Paradise
Worse yet - there are people who honestly believe that the western countries and corporations aren't doing the exact same thing.
This isn't a problem coming out of Russia or China, it's a problem coming out of every authority group or special interest. FFS Slashdot has used the terms FUD and astroturfing in reference to Microsoft (and others) doing this exact shit for YEARS.
Pointing the finger at Russia/China is a nice way of deflecting the same criticisms leveled at the US government and corporations.
Can't shut the internet down, can't easily censor speech, next best alternative is to fill it with noise and propaganda so that no meaningful discussion can take place, and this problem is only going to get worse as chatbots and AI become better adapted at faking human communication. These groups have a strong understanding of human psychology and they will use every possible trick in the book to manipulate the public at large.
Frankly, I don't think Russia or China hold a candle to what the US is able to do.
Not a big scale? The Pentagon propaganda budget is a quarter of the NASA budget FFS
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Agreed.
However, at the same time this rhetoric itself is at the core of the Russian propaganda: essentially the message is 'since the US does it, we can too"
As a Finn I've engaged in a lot of discussions with both Russians and my fellow countrymen about the situation in Russia ever since Crimea, and this comes up quite frequently from the pro-Russian side. If you try to talk about the annexation of Crimea and how it's worrysome they throw 'Iraq'-card in your face. Nevermind that we had nothing to do with Iraq, and that despite the fuck-up and unjustified nature of the war in Iraq and for all their incompetence, the US still did not add Iraq as a new state.
From this, it's not a long way to the idea presented by some in the Kremlin that countries simply cannot want to be in NATO for the sake of their own security. Like, if an unallied country at the border of Russia looks at the recent actions of Russia towards other unallied border states (first Georgia in 2008, then later in Ukraine/Crimea) and concludes that it's safer by allying itself with someone other than Russia, then it obviously must because of Washington and the corporate illuminati controlling the popular opinion and seeking to threaten Russia, despite the fact that the risen interest in military co-operation is a direct result of their own actions. This is of course intentional. All authoritarian regimes need enemies, and to Russia it's 'western values' (ie. gays and sexual deviance primarily) from within and NATO from without. To help achieve this they treat the whole of Europe as a unified block ('the west') that's nothing but an extension of the US when it suits them, basically telling us Finns (and Ukrainians) here that we cannot have an opinion of our own, unless we agree with them.
They want to keep and even increase the tension because that's a convenient trick to distract people from the failings of their domestic policies and the rather dismal state of their economy, pretty much fascism 101 stuff. And the fact that in some sense the US is doing the same with the war on terror, war on drugs etc does not make it okay, or justifiable.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Found the Russian troll.
As has been repeatedly stated, but you Russian trolls repeatedly ignore because it exposes your lies, the U.S. does not have an army of paid trolls spewing nonsense on social media like Russia does. We know Russia pays people, its citizens, to put out lies because one woman sued the Russian government over the practice.
But as always from Russian trolls there will be an excuse or an attempt at deflecting the truth just like when it is pointed out Russia has lost over 2,000 soldiers during its invasion of Ukraine, that Russian soldiers "on vacation" keep getting captured in Ukraine, that Russia funds the terrorists in Eastern Ukraine, that the takeover of Crimea has cost Russia untold amounts of money because supporting a peninsula isn't as easy as Putin said it would be, that Russia has stolen businesses from the people in Crimea and given them over to oligarchs aligned with Putin, that the Tartars of Crimea are forbidden from speaking their own language or having their own schools, that Tartar newspapers have been shut down because they don't post what Putin tells them to do.
All this, and much, much more, is the truth but Russian trolls always find an excuse to deny the truth. Because that is what they are paid to do.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
These guys are way beyond mere shills though. They don't just post in support of their government, they actively harass anyone who disagrees with them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Could you point to some of the propaganda that we're "still indoctrinated" by [...]?
Sure - one of the biggest examples is the pervasive (and perverse) idea that the United States is a 'Christian' nation. During the Cold War, Eisenhower injected references to God in paper currency and our own Pledge of Allegiance, specifically to "unite" the country against the much-overstated Communist 'threat'. This has resulted in several generations of state and federal laws that illegally reflect 'Christian' doctrine, and several generations of people who support it and believe that's the only way it should be.
Only recently has society been able to start loosening that grip and begin the path to becoming the nation we were intended to be.
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]
An American here. Also studied American and World History on a college level and as a hobby. I also find Russian history fascinating.
Russia is very dysfunctional. On a totally different level than the rest of Europe, half of Asia, and the West. It's a miracle they haven't started WWIII yet.
There's a good, not malicious, reason why people on Slashdot are anti-Russia and anti-China. Russia is run by a kleptocrat thug who poisons dissidents on the streets of London (round the corner from my frigging office, so I remain quite indignant). China is run by an autocrat who is tightening power and clamping down on all dissent. Both states routinely forbid the mass of their citizenry from doing things that those of us in the West take for granted. The restrictions on freedom of speech, of belief, of religious practice, of sexual identity and behaviour, etc, are orders of magnitude greater than anything we in the West have to contemplate. There is no Great Firewall of the US. The one in China is all too real. This stuff matters, and ought not to be downplayed.
Most of what Europe is seeing is the long term effects of the marshal plan.
That plan had several interesting long term goals.
First was to stand Europe back up after WW2. Many people do not quite realize the scope of WW2. This was to give Europeans the ability to rebuild and create more jobs. People with jobs do not want to goto war usually.
The second was to give Americans a say in what was going on. Up until WW1 the US pretty much stayed out of it. This meant the US got to decide what happened military wise. They did this by making some European countries dependent on US aid and loans. So if a particular country decided to start getting rowdy the funding 'went away'. Many in the US were tired of getting dragged into whatever mess the French, English, Germans, or Spanish had come up with this time.
The Third was to blunt the expansion of the USSR. The Americans might show up in suits and bully a bit of policy but for the most part let the countries do whatever within the guidelines of peace. This included things like getting rid of guns. The Russians had a much different idea. They show up in tank divisions and execute the leaders in a town including any religious faction leaders. They then put a group of locals who are happy for the change in status quo in charge and back it up with force. Take for example the recent expansion they did. It was pretty much standard USSR expansion 101. Tanks, soldiers under the flag of a 'rebel' group. Then execute anyone who defies them either by 'accident' or overtly.
The 'hidden' fourth thing was to gut the military of all those countries. The US took care of it. If someone is taking care of it for free you can use that money for other things. It is why the US has one of the largest military budgets in the world. The bases in many countries turned into large sources of taxes and money for the areas where they were built. Many countries say 'get out' then turn around and say 'wait a second we dont want you to go' once they realize what that base meant for the area.
That was just the European theater. The Pacific theater is similar. Notice the way the US neutered Japan. Japan was as big of a fighting force as German and the Americans.
Economic prosperity blunts the reasons for war. Harry Truman and George Marshal saw that and put it into effect.
The Marshal plan is one of the best pieces of legislation and government procedure ever created to promote peace through prosperity.
And yet, you would not refute even one of them...
You, anti-americans, are so funny... Please, don't hate...
Honest, huh? Sending special forces into Crimea without insignia was honest, huh? Lying to the world about Georgia's, Moldova's, or Ukraine's "nationalists" planning "massacres" was honest?
America dominated both, because we won the war. USSR dominated its part of the "spoils" on the same justification. I posit, that the countries dominated by Americans did much better — the point, which alone makes America a better, rather than "equal", party in this comparison.
Both remain independent countries with very different laws, customs, and values from America's. America's long-term goal was and remains to prop them up (the way we propped up Germany and Japan), rather than annex or keep in perpetual dependence.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.