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Feds Spend Nearly $500K To 'Combat Online Trolling' (freebeacon.com)
mi writes: Washington Free Beacon reports: "The National Science Foundation is spending roughly half a million dollars to combat 'online trolling.' A joint project by Northwestern and Northeastern universities is examining how to create 'trolling-free environments' on the internet. The researchers define online trolls as those who try to influence public opinion by boosting 'misleading' and 'inauthentic comments.'" Just how can the "misleading" and "inauthentic" speech be eliminated by the government without violating the First Amendment? "Today almost every browser click that users make is collected by numerous trackers associated with a variety of online services (e.g., advertising networks, online social networks, e-commerce platforms)," a grant for the project states. "Users have often expressed concern about the lack of privacy and control over their personal data. Nonetheless, despite a substantial effort to expose and control this prevalent behavior, the reality is that users keep accepting updated online privacy policies, which in turn grant the gathering of more personal data. This project explores re-using this extensive tracking infrastructure for the benefits of both the users themselves and web services, with a goal of preventing online trolling (scenarios in which various groups deploy tactics to influence public opinion on the internet, by leaving biased, false, misleading, and inauthentic comments, and then artificially amplifying their ratings). The project aims to show how the tracking infrastructure can be re-used as a user 'fingerprint,' allowing a lightweight and privacy-preserving form of identification for third-party web sites." The lead researchers on the project, Aleksander Kuzmanovic from Northwestern University, and Alan Mislove from Northeastern University, said: "Public opinion is of paramount importance in any society. It is thus not a surprise that many governments, political parties, and various other groups deploy tactics to influence public opinion on the internet, a practice commonly referred to as trolling." They say their work could help combat "troll armies" used by Russia and China.
Sometimes sharing valuable information can be trolling. But either way, on the internet, there are no such thing as safe spaces that trolls like myself cannot penetrate.
Actually taking into account the subject matter "public OPINION", in this case the National Science Foundation are categorically trolling. Opinion is not facts and should never be associated with facts, opinions are modified by opinions and all opinions have exactly equal weight, practically nothing. Now if they want to pursue truth, then they have to do that in a court of law, the place with facts are presented and challenged, where opinions have their proper weight ie not much at all.
Of course what this really stinks to high heaven of, is, they want to create forums where only the approved opinions pretending to be facts ie propaganda have weight and all other opinions are deleted, yet somehow retain those people whose opinions have been deleted and force them to read the propaganda (reality is censor people and they leave the forum and go to other forums where they do censor based upon their approved propaganda).
So want a government controlled forum, don't fuck around morons, create one controlled by the US congress, require full accurate details to register and allow anonymous user names (secretly tied to real names) because some people can be idiots, violent idiots (think of the consequences of vote history of individuals being made publicly accessible) and when you censor or kick people off be prepared to defend that in a court of law. As for the rest of the internet, yeah good luck trying to herd cats, censor them and they majority will go to other forums and your censored forums dies as they should (think of social networks like say Myspace censored to favour advertisers in much the same manner as main stream media is censored to favour advertisers, where is Myspace now).
Want to do, do it but don't expect people to go there, idiots. Don't like people's negative opinions, don't do things to piss them off and then lie about it or illegally try to keep it secret (using government funds to keep secret governments actions that would have an impact upon the vote, that is against electoral laws and a core requirement for democracy, citizens must have all the truth about the government to decide whether or not to replace them and it is a criminal act to deny them that).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Why isn't the source code for Slashdot open source again? That would settle this once and for all. It used to be open, and it makes sense for a site that posts a lot about open source. Hosting it on SourceForge would be a good gesture to start restoring trust in a name that was dragged through the mud for a long time.