4 ms·
> the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled
by chickenfries 9y ago
> the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks.
This is the most disillusioning thing about being a web developer, for me. I remember it was so recently that during the Arab Spring I thought Twitter was a meaningfully democratizing force. Now I just see it as a vehicle for brands, a source for lazy journalists to find poorly worded quotes for any sort of viewpoint they want to write about. And of course we know that Twitter is full of sock puppets, paid trolls and bots. We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors.
And honestly we should've seen it coming the whole time. People like Richard Stallman did. I've been a naive apologist. No more.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago>We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors. US based corporations are definitely guilty of astroturfing as well.
- falcolas 9y agoAnd some of those astroturfers are probably working for the tech industry as well. See: positive review bombing of metacritic for Star Wars: Battlefront for one single example.
- 3131s 9y agoYes, and the US government. The US military contracted out the development of "online persona management" software to Ntrepid, as revealed by the HBGary hack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid HBGary was not awarded that particular contract, but does create its own astroturfing software anyway. I have no doubt it's common among US companies and I find it incredibly grating when Americans call this a Russian or Chinese phenomenon. From an attachment in an email by then HBGary CEO Aaron Barr: > "Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use. > To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile (satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc). These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts." > Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas" https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails//fileid/2142/726 https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails//fileid/2142/726
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]