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Automated Crowdturfing Attacks and Defenses in Online Review Systems

socceroos 9y ago
This one is close to my heart. Having the internet become a place where the 'best positioned' can influence and direct opinion collapses the freedom of discussion we've had on the internet back down to the old days of big news corps and/or states controlling public opinion. Recent history shows that this is occurring frequently on major social sites, and I see this infiltration happening more and more on smaller sites and communities. It's an incredibly difficult problem to tackle. How do you create a hammer of justice without it crushing the freedom of discussion itself?
- QAPereo 9y ago
  You need to accept that something as big as a Facebook or Google is pure poison, inimical to anything like the freedom you're describing. You don't create a hammer, you just break everything and leave it in pieces, because at least when it's in pieces you can find something that roughly suits you and none of the pieces will crush any of the others. Of course over time some pieces will naturally band together, and eventually you'll be right back where you started, but that's just human nature and another reason why they call it "revolution" after all. As far as anyone can tell there is nothing static in nature, and nothing in human history indicates the ability for us to avoid constant change or the need for constant change, and get our history is essentially a story of trying to resist change. As a result we get frontiers like the Internet, but those frontiers always close if they turn out to be valuable. You can either except that, you can try and open and exploit new frontiers, try to change the way we operate as a species, or just give up.
- losteric 9y ago
  Better public education. Virtually every societal problem in America can be traced back to our sub-par and falling public education. It's a hard problem to fix - deep reforms take decades to reflect in society, and the vast majority of voters will always be ones that went through older (broken?) versions of the education system... but fixing it is the only path forward. We can't regulate or police away bad ideas. This is a problem where we need to manage demand - the answer to flat-earth theorists, Nazis, and anti-democratic propaganda is to make sure the general public is equipped to dismiss those concepts.
  - nerpderp83 9y ago
    This is by design. The Republican party knows that attacks on education invariably end up creating more Republicans.
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      This is the type comment they're talking about trying to detect. It adds little/nothing of substance to the discussion and even if you were to provide sources it pulls discussion toward a poo flinging match about whether the political bias of any particular source is relevant.
      - nerpderp83 9y ago
        Comments about substance and quality of discussion are always the same in the same ways. One would need to have automatic classifiers and lines of discussion that can travel across hyperplanes.
        dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        Yes. Logic and reasoning don't work well for evaluating statements about complex subjects that eventually boil down to subjective assessments of things and opinions about things. Most societal problems are NP or contain NP sub-problems.
- MarkPNeyer 9y ago
  Look are github.com/neyer/respect Or s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf The solution is to do reputation on a pairwise basis. Recursively Expand the network of people you trust.
  - socceroos 9y ago
    Thank you for these links.
Animats 9y ago
It's not so much about influencing as it is about disrupting. Putin's goal is to make democracy stop working. First in the countries of the former Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, and Georgia, then outward.
- losteric 9y ago
  What's the difference between influencing and anarchic disruption? Disruption increases noise, influencing manipulates the signals that gets through. Putin is not the only actor here. The Clinton campaign publicly employed crowdturfing, and I would be extremely surprised if conservative forces aren't doing the same. Not to mention corporate policy astroturfing (eg climate change). America's foundation has been crumbling for decades... and I predict we're going to keep sliding downwards for a couple decades at minimum. Effective democracy requires an educated electorate that can publicly manage law, economics, and culture. We're failing because the public is literally no longer equipped with the skills to govern themselves anymore. Our public education system is stuck in the 1900's, the world has gotten more complicated while our standards fell to the lowest common denominator - turning K-12 into a degree-mill crossed with a day-care for minors.
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    Effective democracy requires Byzantine fault tolerance. 2/3 majority seems impossible though.
  - learc83 9y ago
    The electorate is much better educated today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. It was common to drop out in 8th grade when my grandparents were kids. In their parents time dropping out at 5th grade was common. Do you think farming better prepares you to elect competent candidates than public education? Average performance on IQ tests has steadily increased since we've measured it. There is no objective measurement that would lead to the conclusion that we are less educated today.
    - sokoloff 9y ago
rawnlq 9y ago
People in this thread are worried about using this for generic commenting/discussion systems. But how would that work? The RNN would need to understand the contents of the original comment to reply. It's not as simple as paraphrasing the marketing spiel of the product to confirm or deny that it works well (which is what I mostly use reviews for).

This one is close to my heart. Having the internet become a place where the 'best positioned' can influence and direct opinion collapses the freedom of discussion we've had on the internet back down to the old days of big news corps and/or states controlling public opinion. Recent history shows that this is occurring frequently on major social sites, and I see this infiltration happening more and more on smaller sites and communities. It's an incredibly difficult problem to tackle. How do you create a hammer of justice without it crushing the freedom of discussion itself?

QAPereo 9y ago
You need to accept that something as big as a Facebook or Google is pure poison, inimical to anything like the freedom you're describing. You don't create a hammer, you just break everything and leave it in pieces, because at least when it's in pieces you can find something that roughly suits you and none of the pieces will crush any of the others. Of course over time some pieces will naturally band together, and eventually you'll be right back where you started, but that's just human nature and another reason why they call it "revolution" after all. As far as anyone can tell there is nothing static in nature, and nothing in human history indicates the ability for us to avoid constant change or the need for constant change, and get our history is essentially a story of trying to resist change. As a result we get frontiers like the Internet, but those frontiers always close if they turn out to be valuable. You can either except that, you can try and open and exploit new frontiers, try to change the way we operate as a species, or just give up.
losteric 9y ago
Better public education. Virtually every societal problem in America can be traced back to our sub-par and falling public education. It's a hard problem to fix - deep reforms take decades to reflect in society, and the vast majority of voters will always be ones that went through older (broken?) versions of the education system... but fixing it is the only path forward. We can't regulate or police away bad ideas. This is a problem where we need to manage demand - the answer to flat-earth theorists, Nazis, and anti-democratic propaganda is to make sure the general public is equipped to dismiss those concepts.
- nerpderp83 9y ago
  This is by design. The Republican party knows that attacks on education invariably end up creating more Republicans.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    This is the type comment they're talking about trying to detect. It adds little/nothing of substance to the discussion and even if you were to provide sources it pulls discussion toward a poo flinging match about whether the political bias of any particular source is relevant.
    - nerpderp83 9y ago
      Comments about substance and quality of discussion are always the same in the same ways. One would need to have automatic classifiers and lines of discussion that can travel across hyperplanes.
      - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        Yes. Logic and reasoning don't work well for evaluating statements about complex subjects that eventually boil down to subjective assessments of things and opinions about things. Most societal problems are NP or contain NP sub-problems.
MarkPNeyer 9y ago
Look are github.com/neyer/respect Or s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf The solution is to do reputation on a pairwise basis. Recursively Expand the network of people you trust.
- socceroos 9y ago
  Thank you for these links.

Animats 9y ago

It's not so much about influencing as it is about disrupting. Putin's goal is to make democracy stop working. First in the countries of the former Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, and Georgia, then outward.

losteric 9y ago
What's the difference between influencing and anarchic disruption? Disruption increases noise, influencing manipulates the signals that gets through. Putin is not the only actor here. The Clinton campaign publicly employed crowdturfing, and I would be extremely surprised if conservative forces aren't doing the same. Not to mention corporate policy astroturfing (eg climate change). America's foundation has been crumbling for decades... and I predict we're going to keep sliding downwards for a couple decades at minimum. Effective democracy requires an educated electorate that can publicly manage law, economics, and culture. We're failing because the public is literally no longer equipped with the skills to govern themselves anymore. Our public education system is stuck in the 1900's, the world has gotten more complicated while our standards fell to the lowest common denominator - turning K-12 into a degree-mill crossed with a day-care for minors.
- jfoutz 9y ago
  Effective democracy requires Byzantine fault tolerance. 2/3 majority seems impossible though.
- learc83 9y ago
  The electorate is much better educated today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. It was common to drop out in 8th grade when my grandparents were kids. In their parents time dropping out at 5th grade was common. Do you think farming better prepares you to elect competent candidates than public education? Average performance on IQ tests has steadily increased since we've measured it. There is no objective measurement that would lead to the conclusion that we are less educated today.
  - sokoloff 9y ago

rawnlq 9y ago

People in this thread are worried about using this for generic commenting/discussion systems. But how would that work? The RNN would need to understand the contents of the original comment to reply. It's not as simple as paraphrasing the marketing spiel of the product to confirm or deny that it works well (which is what I mostly use reviews for).