16 ms·

Reddit Has Become a Battleground of Alleged Chinese Trolls

142 points by mzs 8y ago

mzs 8y ago
https://twitter.com/CraigSilverman/status/1106272764523151361 https://twitter.com/CraigSilverman/status/110627276452315136... » Moderators and users on Reddit say they've seen coordinated activity on the site by pro-China accounts. "The pro-CCP effort vastly overshadows any operation by the Russians,” one person with insight into moderation practices told us. China expert Bill Bishop said the activity fits with the Party leadership's emphasis on controlling the discourse about China outside of the country. He said said it’s hard to know which accounts are simply patriotic Chinese people, and which might be government actors. We obtained a list of accounts banned frm r/geopolitics for what was described as pro-China trolling or related behavior. Some were burner accounts created just for the purpose of weighing in on China threads. Others seemed to be genuine Chinese ex-pats studying or working abroad r/geopolitics mods implemented new rules as a result. "We've had to implement a rule that prohibits posts from accounts less than 20 days old. This has helped to an extent but these redditors seem to be very patient and disciplined, and can ‘wait out’ the 20-day requirement.”
- class4behavior 8y ago
  You don't need to be patient, you just prepare accounts in advance.
  - joering2 8y ago
    Or just buy them by thausands online at 20 cents per pop. Suprisingly I bought bunch of gmail and yahoo accounts for testing at $25 per hundred, and all been working fine some year later.
- dx87 8y ago
  It's simple to work around those time requirements. It's not uncommon to see accounts that are months old with 0 prior activity become super active as soon as a thread criticizing China shows up.
  - intended 8y ago
    Observe the saddening axiom - There is no such rule set that a dedicated troll or attacker would be unable to circumvent. Instead consider every rule as a evolutionary hint for attackers - eventually they reach a point that they can often pass for perfectly normal users. People are creating accounts now, filling them with karma and health comments in funny subreddits. Then a year later, they will bring it out and use them.
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      For everything that's wrong with cryptocurrencies and the /r/cryptocurrency subreddit, I really like their approach to tagging users. Main activity outside of this subreddit? You get tagged. A lot of activity in one specific coin subreddit? That's a tag. New account? Tag. Old account with little activity before? Tag. Longer time with no activity on CC? Tag. It feels weird at first, but it's actually a great way to recognize trolls.
      - intended 8y ago
        I expect this to become explicit in many other forums based on how I know internal mod tools behave. This is problematic, because it is effectively the same way as saying "this person is a foreigner", and tribal identities overwhelm the initial intention of a information granting doohickey - see the fate of the upvote and downvote button today.
        Semaphor 8y ago
        > the same way as saying "this person is a foreigner" I disagree. It gives you context for what the person wrote. Everyone has a tag (even if some are positive).
      - rellui 8y ago
        Ha, for once all of the coin shilling resulted in something productive.
    - pfranz 8y ago
908087 8y ago
Shills/trolls pretty much have the freedom to do whatever they want on Reddit. Vote manipulation and simulated conversations between groups trying to steer the discussion seem to be fully sanctioned by the mods and admins. If you look at the comment history of the accounts involved, there's often a pattern of accounts that used to only discuss US sports teams before going dormant for a year or more and coming back with a strong interest in defending some corporate or government entity 24/7.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
neaden 8y ago
I think right now there are three main kinds of internet trolls in things like this. First would be the government sponsored ones who tend to post in unison or have some theme. These seem to mainly be Chinese and Russian. Second are the freelance trolls, people in it to make money by building an audience for advertisements. A lot of these people are in Macedonia where they can make relatively good money spreading false blogs on Facebook or something. Finally are the home grown true believers who are just posting their honest views in an abrasive, hostile, or threatening manner. I think the majority of trolls belong to the last group, but the first two have an outsized impact at creating new stories and coordinating messaging that is amplified by the third.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  If you're going by the original meaning of troll you're missing the fourth category; the people who post something inflammatory because everyone freaking out and arguing at each other is amusing to them
  - JeremyBanks 8y ago
    Back in the day, we just called those people assholes.
    - ineedasername 8y ago
      I like it, it's catchy!
  - neaden 8y ago
    I think that type has mostly gone away/become the third. People "ironically" posting racism seem to all just be flat out racists now. As Kurt Vonnegut said “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
    - lohszvu 8y ago
      I strongly disagree. Look at the flatearth communities.
stcredzero 8y ago
Reddit has been rife with brigading and manipulation for years. At this point, it's been this way for longer than it was an idyllic place to discover cool nerdy stuff. This is precisely why there are so many very active and hyper-strict moderators now. Not all, of course. It depends on how much "heat" the community contains and how much the subject matter attracts. They have to act like police in bad neighborhoods, because that's just the reality of the place. Throughout the 20th century, the Eastern Bloc had to deal with western media eroding the narratives of their society. Now, it seems that the tables have turned through social media. But instead of creating images, stories, and music of the wealth and richness of life brought by self determination, it's far more effective to simply sow chaos and jam our society's means of information exchange. EDIT: We are in years numbered such that they appear widely in science fiction. In objective terms, we are doing better than we ever have in all of history. In 2019, we need to embrace the normal. We should be suspicious of the lurid and the outrageous. We should be skeptical of the accusation and the conspiracy theory. In 2019, these are all the viral pathway to easy money and influence. We need to start looking at these things like we now look at the products of medicine shows. Not all of these things are necessarily bad. However, we always need to be mindful of the incentives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  There are still some good ones, but they tend to be smaller and rarely political. For instance, r/homelab is still pleasant. (Though it might inspire negative effects on your credit cards)
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    r/selfhosted is pretty good also.
    - penagwin 8y ago
      And r/datahoarder . I mean they're cool subreddits if you remove the addiction therapy, loss of relationships, and eventual crippling depression. Totally worth it though! :D
AWildC182 8y ago
The timing of this is interesting as just about a ~month ago there was a mini protest because Reddit accepted significant investment from the Chinese company Tencent and users began pushing Tienanmen Square Massacre images to the front page.
prolepunk 8y ago
So in other words, it's an absolutely regular Friday on reddit. Elen Pao tried to toned down the toxicity of the place but was turfed. At the time I was just browsing my mechanic and programming subreddits, but the sheer amount of vitriol even on those subreddits against her made me reconsider my presence on the website. I also didn't like what was going on in /r/linux which was the grounds zero of all the trolls reacting to the adoption of CoC by Linux kernel. This time it's Chinese trolls do the job instead of misogynist or right wing trolls. Reddit is just the place where these things will keep happening. It's by design and it will never going to change.
zachguo 8y ago
The number of gov-backed trolls is overestimated. Majority of those are simply real people using VPNs. It may sound hard to believe, but think twice about the huge size of population and high rate of Internet penetration. Chinese population is largely nationalistic and conservative, and some hawkish groups are very active online. There is a joke that Great Firewall is not for controlling Chinese people but protecting Westerners from Chinese netizens.
- 908087 8y ago
  Your post history is pretty much exactly what I was expecting it to be after reading this.
  - ggggtez 8y ago
    Thanks for mentioning it. It's the kind of thing that everyone suspects, but reminding people that the history is right there is helpful. The above user (zackguo) comments seemingly exclusively on China, including ... "Results won't change even if [Uyghurs] are able to participate". Yikes!
    - zachguo 8y ago
      I'm bewildered that you are upset about the post, because I genuinely think it's a sound inference if you do the math...
      - ggggtez 8y ago
        In Germany, there is only about 212k Chinese people. Since that's less than 1% of the German population, I guess they should just throw them all in jail since their opinions don't matter (mathematically, of course).
        zachguo 8y ago
        "throw them all in jail" is your sensationalized interpretation, which BTW is what I hate to see on HN. I was just talking about the poll results would not change.
duxup 8y ago
I saw here a pretty good pattern of anytime a story about Uyghurs was posted there was a post or two about: "I just traveled through there and it's nothing like the article says, it's quite peaceful." There were even some hilariously worded posts about how: "At least unlike the US I don't have to wear my backpack on the front for fear of thieves." That almost seemed like the height of communist era type poster propaganda... That kinda came in went pretty quickly.
jimrhods23 8y ago
Chinese/political Trolls have been on Reddit forever. I noticed it in full force when Obama was running for president. But, it only seems to matter now because Trump. I still wonder if Hillary would have won the presidency, if all of this foreign meddling with our elections would have been swept under the carpet.
- nkkollaw 8y ago
  Foreign meddling happens every single time. It's normal in any election. This time, since Trump won he won not because of people voting for him, but because of Russian trolls. It's just that the other side doesn't want to admit defeat.
ProAm 8y ago
I wish people still lived by the idiom "Don't believe everything you read". It's like social media stopped all forms of critical thinking in society.
- ativzzz 8y ago
  > I wish people still lived by the idiom "Don't believe everything you read" When did they ever? > It's like social media stopped all forms of critical thinking in society. Human society as a whole is irrational and does not engage in critical thinking. Small groups of highly focused individuals, or individuals themselves sometimes can, but it takes too much effort most of the time.
  - seppin 8y ago
    We trust our friends and family, our tribe. Something shared on Facebook by an uncle is more trusted than a maliciously researched article on the New York Times.
    - ativzzz 8y ago
      Trust implies a lack of critical thinking. When we trust something we don't think about it deeply, we just accept it.
  - robertrobot 8y ago
    II remember as a youngster in the early 00's our teachers and librarians constantly reminded students, "Don't believe anything you read on the internet. Always check your references." This was an inherent precursor when using the early internet, and is even more relevant today.
- aiven 8y ago
  There are too much information these days. We literally don't have enough time to fact-check everything and therefor we pick the most believable version of a story and with that new info we shape our future selves. "But you don't have to pick a side, just ignore this information altogether." For most minor info this strategy works, but when the same piece of info appears repetitively over and over again you start to believe it subconsciously or it moves from "minor" to "major/important info" group which we can't simply ignore.
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
I’m not so sure Hacker News is free of the same group. Post an article critical of China sometime and watch the comments. People genuinely posting opposing viewpoints is fine and normal but there is something very uncanny valley about most of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
- MoronInAHurry 8y ago
  It definitely seems to be happening here too, I've noticed it as well. Articles about China get very strange activity, including a lot more green names (new users) than you'd see in any other posts.
  - naravara 8y ago
    Might this just be how ultra-nationalist types work? I’m less familiar with the dynamics in China, but with Indian politics any place where people are mildly critical of the Hindu Right can rapidly get brigaded. And it doesn’t usually seem all that organized or botlike. I think it’s just a country of a billion people with really bad liberal arts education and an extremely sensationalist media culture being unleashed on the web.
- chapium 8y ago
  Whether you post a nuanced view on China or criticize either side someone claims the other is a shill, a sympathizer, or a propagandist. By what mechanism can there be a real conversation online?
- ssnistfajen 8y ago
  The distinction is some of the anti-China submissions on HN are submitted for the sake of being anti-China, not because these posts "gratify one's intellectual curiosity". I do not consider geopolitical stories presented on the front page of mainstream media as something that "gratifies" my "intellectual curiosity" when I visit HN. I still read those off HN and I feel annoyed when I see them here, because they are not what I came here for. The gross generalizations and shill accusations (mostly thrown against users who actually post "genuinely opposing viewpoints") endemic to these China-related submissions are just icing on the cake.
duado 8y ago
The flip side is that every non approved opinion is now a “troll.” I responded to someone on Twitter saying that I didn’t think the Mueller investigation would amount to much and I got called a Russian troll. It’s a way of pretending that opinions you don’t like don’t actually exist.
ilamont 8y ago
That's the way the Chinese Communist Party rolls. If it can't control individuals, it controls the platforms, either directly or through proxies. It started with mass media (https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-complexity-and-thoroughness https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-comp...), social media, the Internet (https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china), and telecommunications in the PRC, expanded to "overseas Chinese" communities in Southeast Asia, Australia, and North America (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-03272018113611.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-0327201811...), global tech companies (https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-companies-restrictions/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-...), and now global social media communities (https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-china/#PGexFR6YsiqJ https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-china/#PGexF... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882). This forum may well be next.
mtw 8y ago
If you ever meet someone from mainland China, such as university students, they take criticism of China very seriously. For example, mentioning Taiwan as an independent country is an offence and will shock most Chinese mainlanders. But this is similar to foreigners criticizing the 2nd amendment or similar parts of American culture. It will create the same passionate response in most Americans. The more Chinese students learn about websites such as reddit, the more you will find these responses. You can't just expect them to just sit idle. The fact that English is not their native language will however make others qualify them as trolls/bots
- grigjd3 8y ago
  I work with a lot of people from mainland China and I have not once gotten the impression of any generic sensitivity to criticism of China.
  - gcb0 8y ago
    mainland china is pretty big. you two should be a little more specific.
  - tivert 8y ago
    > I work with a lot of people from mainland China and I have not once gotten the impression of any generic sensitivity to criticism of China. Those kind of reactions often, but not always, get muted the longer the person is exposed to more diverse perspectives outside of the mainland. There's also a cultural trait in China where you strongly defend your in-group against criticisms from an out-group, even if those criticisms are valid. I have a Chinese friend who considers his mom to be kind of lazy (and tells her so), but if someone from outside the family made the same criticism, he'd strongly defend her as a hard worker. The same thing is true of criticisms made by non-Chinese of China.
  - analyst74 8y ago
    Chinese people can have different opinions from each other. There are staunch defenders of CCP and China in general, there are people with more nuanced views, there are ones who are super critical of CCP, and there many who are apolitical. That being said, even as someone with mixed opinions of CCP, I definitely am careful at sharing pro-China ideas in non-Chinese spaces, due to the likelihood of causing arguments or inviting personal attacks; but I feel much safer expressing criticisms of China.
anigbrowl 8y ago
Is anyone aware of tools/research on instrumentation of such activity on social media? I don't mean text mining or semantic analysis of trolly content but the patterns of activity and interaction. At present I use directed graphs with k-means type clustering/community detection algorithms but that can lead to difficulty seeing the forest for the trees. Imagine, for example, that Hacker News members were grouped in different teams - red, greeen, yellow, and blue - and that the teams competed to dominate discussion threads and grow their own discussions as semantic 'territory'. Imagine further that you had to represent this without any text, using only the time, post size, and threading structure, but with prior knowledge or manual curation of team membership. I'm particularly interested in how a thread could be represented spatially, but not as a time series (ie viewing progress over time would require animation). It's easy to visualize the ebb and flow of territorial conflict on a geographic map, with armies crossing borders and territories expanding or shrinking over time, but how to do that for emergent 'territory' like the expanding and branching threads of a busy discussion topic? I sometimes imagine it like a growing plant or tree with different colored leaves to represent competing affiliations, but there are surely better approaches. tl;dr how can you visualize evolving discussion threads without using text?
darkhorn 8y ago
You should have a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/ it reminds me of a communist times I was living years ago.
- ativzzz 8y ago
  Fascinating. Almost every comment is either outrage or blaming Western media perception of China. Are these real? Professional trolls? Probably a bit of both? Can we even tell them apart? I guess we just to be skeptical of everything you read online, but damn is it exhausting. Easier to just cut off these data streams and just live life ignorant. "ignorance is bliss"
nkkollaw 8y ago
Can we really trust BuzzFeed with any kind of reporting? This might or might not be true, but the fact that reality mirrors what BuzzFeed says is purely coincidental.
- freehunter 8y ago
  You mean can we trust the Pulitzer Prize winning staff of Buzzfeed News or can we trust the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist organization Buzzfeed News? Because I don't know if you know this, but many members of the staff of Buzzfeed News have won Pulitzer Prizes and the organization was a finalist in both 2017 and 2018. The accuracy of their reporting is no more suspect than any other well-respected media organization.
  - nkkollaw 8y ago
    Yes. That actually makes me wonder about the Pulitzer Prize, if what you're saying is true. From https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/buzzfeed/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/buzzfeed/: "overall, we rate Buzzfeed Left-Center Biased due to story selection that tends to favor the left and Mixed for factual reporting based on poor sourcing and a few failed fact checks.". They're also selling their own brand of kitchenware if you're not aware of it (see https://www.buzzfeed.com/samanthawieder/tasty-kitchenware-walmart https://www.buzzfeed.com/samanthawieder/tasty-kitchenware-wa...), which is a perfect indication that not even them believe their journalism will get them anywhere. They're a biased, failing enterprise that spins news to cause outrage and get a few clicks. Someone at BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize..? That doesn't mean that BuzzFeed's journalists don't generally spend the whole day writing listicles or biased articles to try to avoid bankruptcy. The author--Jane Lytvynenko--has bright red hair and might identify herself with news reporter, but has no track record and not even a LinkedIn profile. Her tweets read like "Hello happy Thursday here's a selection of memes from a pro-Bernier channel plz enjoy". I mean, "plz"? Give me a break.
    - 24gttghh 8y ago
      >The author--Jane Lytvynenko--has bright red hair and might identify herself with news reporter, Is this some kind of ad-hominem attack? I don't see how it is necessary.
pessimizer 8y ago
This article is purely innuendo and quotes from reddit posts that insist that there is an army of Chinese trolls specifically arguing against things that they are personally opinionated about. This article contains no actual information or evidence about what people in China may or may not be actually doing. I don't mean to imply that there are any fewer than 50 people being paid by the Chinese government to post on English-language websites full time, but Reddit is a cesspool of paid posters. It's just a particularly US/Western neo-cold war paranoia that it's somehow mostly or even largely the Chinese and Russian governments. The evidence usually cited is that somebody is agreeing with the Chinese or Russian government, and since no one could possibly agree with the Russian or Chinese government Q.E.D.. For Russia, it doesn't even matter whether the poster agrees with the Russian government, because what the Russian government wants to do is foment strife and confusion in order to weaken the West, therefore both sides must be Russian. I also don't mean to imply that there any fewer than 50 people being paid by the Russian government to post on English-language websites full time. I'd just put those into perspective by trying to imagine the number of people employed by the governments of English-speaking countries to post on English-language websites full time; then add the number of full-time posting shills from private companies, including that person about 3 cubes down from you. China's published propaganda is improving, though; they're starting to get that Anglo-American reasonable liberal tone down. That sometimes make me think that a lot of posters who are pounced on for being Chinese shills are just Chinese people expressing Chinese opinions, but without the trained skill of wrapping them in some circular argument about practicality and respect.
ppeetteerr 8y ago
Somewhat silly question: can we build a firewall around china from the outside?
- ozzyman700 8y ago
  yes, geo ip ranges can accomplish close to this
  - aiven 8y ago
    But they already use VPN to hop over their own firewall. Double firewall will not change a thing.
  - nkkollaw 8y ago
    I can spoof my address in 1 second. Are you saying that Chinese hackers and trolls cannot do the same?
    - ozzyman700 8y ago
      "close to this"
yumraj 8y ago
Genuinely curios, since I believe Reddit is banned in China, so can't Reddit counter this by simply blocking traffic from China? Or, perhaps Reddit doesn't think this is a problem, or at least not a problem they want to tackle given their recent funding from Tencent.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  That's not really how the internet works, because of VPNs.
wnevets 8y ago
Post anything even remotely critical of the chinese government and your reddit post will be downvoted and spammed with whataboutism and FUD. I posted a comment about the forced labor camps of Muslims in china and the same username replied two different times arguing two different things. In one reply the Muslims in these camps were terrorist and had to be arrested for the protection of the chinese civilians and in the other reply saying they're not labor camps they're trade schools to help them get jobs.
logicallee 8y ago
I think this is an interesting subject, but I would remind everyone of Hacker News' excellent discussion policies on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jorblumesea 8y ago
I feel like this is one of those ideas that sounds good to Chinese, in China, but will inevitably produce backlash and the opposite reaction in the West.
- tivert 8y ago
  > I feel like this is one of those ideas that sounds good to Chinese, in China, but will inevitably produce backlash and the opposite reaction in the West. IIRC, in both China and Russia, state-actor trolling was perfected domestically control the local population before they started to export it.
- echaozh 8y ago
  The problem is,the ideas of the Chinese people are actually backlash against the Western hostility. Why do the Chinese people care about backlash when the Westerners don't care about it at all? Are the Chinese people less equal than the Westerners because their government is more dictating?
deft 8y ago
According to this article and comments here I should be getting paid simply for disagreeing with the pro-USA nonsense everywhere. Where do I apply?
throw2016 8y ago
This idea of a world with chinese and russian trolls with no mention of other state actors seems to be missing a rather big part of the picture.
fartcannon 8y ago
We need authorship attribution plugins for Firefox/Chrome. Identify propaganda and submarine advertisements/shilling.
tiredyam 8y ago
This may be a silly, but I have been kicking around this idea of creating a politics based lobste.rs of sorts; the users would need to go through a vetting process to be able to contribute. Possibly even crazier; users would need to go through some further vetting process to discuss a particular topic. Maybe this is already solve-able via Reddit, but i would prefer it to be off reddit. Any thoughts? There seems to be no place for very well informed and educated individuals to discuss politics that is publicly accessible imo and something like this could address that.
aphextron 8y ago
All upvote/downvote based social media is inherently toxic to public discourse and extremely manipulable. Something major was lost in the transistion from BBS and forums to this insanity we have now. It used to be that long form discussion and nuanced viewpoints were the norm. If someone had an opinion you disagreed with, you could either refute it or ignore it, not make it dissapear. Now everything thoughtful or balanced in any way is buried under a mountain of “gotcha” quips, and moral certitude, bot or not.
- notacoward 8y ago
  It's not just upvotes and downvotes. Twitter doesn't track karma, so people just compete on number of followers or retweets or other measures of "reach" instead. Upvotes are only one way to trigger that dopamine hit.
largehotcoffee 8y ago
derp
- dang 8y ago
  I responded to your other post about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. Please stop this now. It breaks several of the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
cmroanirgo 8y ago
Here I am in my nice and warm bed made by HN, where n00bs are marked green, and unless you're active you can't down vote. This, coupled with consistent moderation, HN means that we don't see this noise. It seems such a simple solution to vitriolic trolling. (Thanks guys!) It'd be interesting though, to see the metrics of signups and their origin to see if they even bother here...
saargrin 8y ago
its funny for buzzfeed to complain about trolls or really anything on the internet,them being a perfect example of internet cancer

142 points by mzs 8y ago

mzs 8y ago

https://twitter.com/CraigSilverman/status/1106272764523151361 https://twitter.com/CraigSilverman/status/110627276452315136... » Moderators and users on Reddit say they've seen coordinated activity on the site by pro-China accounts. "The pro-CCP effort vastly overshadows any operation by the Russians,” one person with insight into moderation practices told us. China expert Bill Bishop said the activity fits with the Party leadership's emphasis on controlling the discourse about China outside of the country. He said said it’s hard to know which accounts are simply patriotic Chinese people, and which might be government actors. We obtained a list of accounts banned frm r/geopolitics for what was described as pro-China trolling or related behavior. Some were burner accounts created just for the purpose of weighing in on China threads. Others seemed to be genuine Chinese ex-pats studying or working abroad r/geopolitics mods implemented new rules as a result. "We've had to implement a rule that prohibits posts from accounts less than 20 days old. This has helped to an extent but these redditors seem to be very patient and disciplined, and can ‘wait out’ the 20-day requirement.”

class4behavior 8y ago
You don't need to be patient, you just prepare accounts in advance.
- joering2 8y ago
  Or just buy them by thausands online at 20 cents per pop. Suprisingly I bought bunch of gmail and yahoo accounts for testing at $25 per hundred, and all been working fine some year later.
dx87 8y ago
It's simple to work around those time requirements. It's not uncommon to see accounts that are months old with 0 prior activity become super active as soon as a thread criticizing China shows up.
- intended 8y ago
  Observe the saddening axiom - There is no such rule set that a dedicated troll or attacker would be unable to circumvent. Instead consider every rule as a evolutionary hint for attackers - eventually they reach a point that they can often pass for perfectly normal users. People are creating accounts now, filling them with karma and health comments in funny subreddits. Then a year later, they will bring it out and use them.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    For everything that's wrong with cryptocurrencies and the /r/cryptocurrency subreddit, I really like their approach to tagging users. Main activity outside of this subreddit? You get tagged. A lot of activity in one specific coin subreddit? That's a tag. New account? Tag. Old account with little activity before? Tag. Longer time with no activity on CC? Tag. It feels weird at first, but it's actually a great way to recognize trolls.
    - intended 8y ago
      I expect this to become explicit in many other forums based on how I know internal mod tools behave. This is problematic, because it is effectively the same way as saying "this person is a foreigner", and tribal identities overwhelm the initial intention of a information granting doohickey - see the fate of the upvote and downvote button today.
      - Semaphor 8y ago
        > the same way as saying "this person is a foreigner" I disagree. It gives you context for what the person wrote. Everyone has a tag (even if some are positive).
    - rellui 8y ago
      Ha, for once all of the coin shilling resulted in something productive.
  - pfranz 8y ago

908087 8y ago

Shills/trolls pretty much have the freedom to do whatever they want on Reddit. Vote manipulation and simulated conversations between groups trying to steer the discussion seem to be fully sanctioned by the mods and admins. If you look at the comment history of the accounts involved, there's often a pattern of accounts that used to only discuss US sports teams before going dormant for a year or more and coming back with a strong interest in defending some corporate or government entity 24/7.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

neaden 8y ago

I think right now there are three main kinds of internet trolls in things like this. First would be the government sponsored ones who tend to post in unison or have some theme. These seem to mainly be Chinese and Russian. Second are the freelance trolls, people in it to make money by building an audience for advertisements. A lot of these people are in Macedonia where they can make relatively good money spreading false blogs on Facebook or something. Finally are the home grown true believers who are just posting their honest views in an abrasive, hostile, or threatening manner. I think the majority of trolls belong to the last group, but the first two have an outsized impact at creating new stories and coordinating messaging that is amplified by the third.

tomatotomato37 8y ago
If you're going by the original meaning of troll you're missing the fourth category; the people who post something inflammatory because everyone freaking out and arguing at each other is amusing to them
- JeremyBanks 8y ago
  Back in the day, we just called those people assholes.
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    I like it, it's catchy!
- neaden 8y ago
  I think that type has mostly gone away/become the third. People "ironically" posting racism seem to all just be flat out racists now. As Kurt Vonnegut said “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
  - lohszvu 8y ago
    I strongly disagree. Look at the flatearth communities.

stcredzero 8y ago

Reddit has been rife with brigading and manipulation for years. At this point, it's been this way for longer than it was an idyllic place to discover cool nerdy stuff. This is precisely why there are so many very active and hyper-strict moderators now. Not all, of course. It depends on how much "heat" the community contains and how much the subject matter attracts. They have to act like police in bad neighborhoods, because that's just the reality of the place. Throughout the 20th century, the Eastern Bloc had to deal with western media eroding the narratives of their society. Now, it seems that the tables have turned through social media. But instead of creating images, stories, and music of the wealth and richness of life brought by self determination, it's far more effective to simply sow chaos and jam our society's means of information exchange. EDIT: We are in years numbered such that they appear widely in science fiction. In objective terms, we are doing better than we ever have in all of history. In 2019, we need to embrace the normal. We should be suspicious of the lurid and the outrageous. We should be skeptical of the accusation and the conspiracy theory. In 2019, these are all the viral pathway to easy money and influence. We need to start looking at these things like we now look at the products of medicine shows. Not all of these things are necessarily bad. However, we always need to be mindful of the incentives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

52-6F-62 8y ago
There are still some good ones, but they tend to be smaller and rarely political. For instance, r/homelab is still pleasant. (Though it might inspire negative effects on your credit cards)
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  r/selfhosted is pretty good also.
  - penagwin 8y ago
    And r/datahoarder . I mean they're cool subreddits if you remove the addiction therapy, loss of relationships, and eventual crippling depression. Totally worth it though! :D

AWildC182 8y ago

The timing of this is interesting as just about a ~month ago there was a mini protest because Reddit accepted significant investment from the Chinese company Tencent and users began pushing Tienanmen Square Massacre images to the front page.

prolepunk 8y ago

So in other words, it's an absolutely regular Friday on reddit. Elen Pao tried to toned down the toxicity of the place but was turfed. At the time I was just browsing my mechanic and programming subreddits, but the sheer amount of vitriol even on those subreddits against her made me reconsider my presence on the website. I also didn't like what was going on in /r/linux which was the grounds zero of all the trolls reacting to the adoption of CoC by Linux kernel. This time it's Chinese trolls do the job instead of misogynist or right wing trolls. Reddit is just the place where these things will keep happening. It's by design and it will never going to change.

zachguo 8y ago

The number of gov-backed trolls is overestimated. Majority of those are simply real people using VPNs. It may sound hard to believe, but think twice about the huge size of population and high rate of Internet penetration. Chinese population is largely nationalistic and conservative, and some hawkish groups are very active online. There is a joke that Great Firewall is not for controlling Chinese people but protecting Westerners from Chinese netizens.

908087 8y ago
Your post history is pretty much exactly what I was expecting it to be after reading this.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  Thanks for mentioning it. It's the kind of thing that everyone suspects, but reminding people that the history is right there is helpful. The above user (zackguo) comments seemingly exclusively on China, including ... "Results won't change even if [Uyghurs] are able to participate". Yikes!
  - zachguo 8y ago
    I'm bewildered that you are upset about the post, because I genuinely think it's a sound inference if you do the math...
    - ggggtez 8y ago
      In Germany, there is only about 212k Chinese people. Since that's less than 1% of the German population, I guess they should just throw them all in jail since their opinions don't matter (mathematically, of course).
      - zachguo 8y ago
        "throw them all in jail" is your sensationalized interpretation, which BTW is what I hate to see on HN. I was just talking about the poll results would not change.

duxup 8y ago

I saw here a pretty good pattern of anytime a story about Uyghurs was posted there was a post or two about: "I just traveled through there and it's nothing like the article says, it's quite peaceful." There were even some hilariously worded posts about how: "At least unlike the US I don't have to wear my backpack on the front for fear of thieves." That almost seemed like the height of communist era type poster propaganda... That kinda came in went pretty quickly.

jimrhods23 8y ago

Chinese/political Trolls have been on Reddit forever. I noticed it in full force when Obama was running for president. But, it only seems to matter now because Trump. I still wonder if Hillary would have won the presidency, if all of this foreign meddling with our elections would have been swept under the carpet.

nkkollaw 8y ago
Foreign meddling happens every single time. It's normal in any election. This time, since Trump won he won not because of people voting for him, but because of Russian trolls. It's just that the other side doesn't want to admit defeat.

ProAm 8y ago

I wish people still lived by the idiom "Don't believe everything you read". It's like social media stopped all forms of critical thinking in society.

ativzzz 8y ago
> I wish people still lived by the idiom "Don't believe everything you read" When did they ever? > It's like social media stopped all forms of critical thinking in society. Human society as a whole is irrational and does not engage in critical thinking. Small groups of highly focused individuals, or individuals themselves sometimes can, but it takes too much effort most of the time.
- seppin 8y ago
  We trust our friends and family, our tribe. Something shared on Facebook by an uncle is more trusted than a maliciously researched article on the New York Times.
  - ativzzz 8y ago
    Trust implies a lack of critical thinking. When we trust something we don't think about it deeply, we just accept it.
- robertrobot 8y ago
  II remember as a youngster in the early 00's our teachers and librarians constantly reminded students, "Don't believe anything you read on the internet. Always check your references." This was an inherent precursor when using the early internet, and is even more relevant today.
aiven 8y ago
There are too much information these days. We literally don't have enough time to fact-check everything and therefor we pick the most believable version of a story and with that new info we shape our future selves. "But you don't have to pick a side, just ignore this information altogether." For most minor info this strategy works, but when the same piece of info appears repetitively over and over again you start to believe it subconsciously or it moves from "minor" to "major/important info" group which we can't simply ignore.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

I’m not so sure Hacker News is free of the same group. Post an article critical of China sometime and watch the comments. People genuinely posting opposing viewpoints is fine and normal but there is something very uncanny valley about most of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

MoronInAHurry 8y ago
It definitely seems to be happening here too, I've noticed it as well. Articles about China get very strange activity, including a lot more green names (new users) than you'd see in any other posts.
- naravara 8y ago
  Might this just be how ultra-nationalist types work? I’m less familiar with the dynamics in China, but with Indian politics any place where people are mildly critical of the Hindu Right can rapidly get brigaded. And it doesn’t usually seem all that organized or botlike. I think it’s just a country of a billion people with really bad liberal arts education and an extremely sensationalist media culture being unleashed on the web.
chapium 8y ago
Whether you post a nuanced view on China or criticize either side someone claims the other is a shill, a sympathizer, or a propagandist. By what mechanism can there be a real conversation online?
ssnistfajen 8y ago
The distinction is some of the anti-China submissions on HN are submitted for the sake of being anti-China, not because these posts "gratify one's intellectual curiosity". I do not consider geopolitical stories presented on the front page of mainstream media as something that "gratifies" my "intellectual curiosity" when I visit HN. I still read those off HN and I feel annoyed when I see them here, because they are not what I came here for. The gross generalizations and shill accusations (mostly thrown against users who actually post "genuinely opposing viewpoints") endemic to these China-related submissions are just icing on the cake.

duado 8y ago

The flip side is that every non approved opinion is now a “troll.” I responded to someone on Twitter saying that I didn’t think the Mueller investigation would amount to much and I got called a Russian troll. It’s a way of pretending that opinions you don’t like don’t actually exist.

ilamont 8y ago

That's the way the Chinese Communist Party rolls. If it can't control individuals, it controls the platforms, either directly or through proxies. It started with mass media (https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-complexity-and-thoroughness https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-comp...), social media, the Internet (https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china), and telecommunications in the PRC, expanded to "overseas Chinese" communities in Southeast Asia, Australia, and North America (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-03272018113611.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-0327201811...), global tech companies (https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-companies-restrictions/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-...), and now global social media communities (https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-china/#PGexFR6YsiqJ https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-china/#PGexF... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882). This forum may well be next.

mtw 8y ago

If you ever meet someone from mainland China, such as university students, they take criticism of China very seriously. For example, mentioning Taiwan as an independent country is an offence and will shock most Chinese mainlanders. But this is similar to foreigners criticizing the 2nd amendment or similar parts of American culture. It will create the same passionate response in most Americans. The more Chinese students learn about websites such as reddit, the more you will find these responses. You can't just expect them to just sit idle. The fact that English is not their native language will however make others qualify them as trolls/bots

grigjd3 8y ago
I work with a lot of people from mainland China and I have not once gotten the impression of any generic sensitivity to criticism of China.
- gcb0 8y ago
  mainland china is pretty big. you two should be a little more specific.
- tivert 8y ago
  > I work with a lot of people from mainland China and I have not once gotten the impression of any generic sensitivity to criticism of China. Those kind of reactions often, but not always, get muted the longer the person is exposed to more diverse perspectives outside of the mainland. There's also a cultural trait in China where you strongly defend your in-group against criticisms from an out-group, even if those criticisms are valid. I have a Chinese friend who considers his mom to be kind of lazy (and tells her so), but if someone from outside the family made the same criticism, he'd strongly defend her as a hard worker. The same thing is true of criticisms made by non-Chinese of China.
- analyst74 8y ago
  Chinese people can have different opinions from each other. There are staunch defenders of CCP and China in general, there are people with more nuanced views, there are ones who are super critical of CCP, and there many who are apolitical. That being said, even as someone with mixed opinions of CCP, I definitely am careful at sharing pro-China ideas in non-Chinese spaces, due to the likelihood of causing arguments or inviting personal attacks; but I feel much safer expressing criticisms of China.

anigbrowl 8y ago

Is anyone aware of tools/research on instrumentation of such activity on social media? I don't mean text mining or semantic analysis of trolly content but the patterns of activity and interaction. At present I use directed graphs with k-means type clustering/community detection algorithms but that can lead to difficulty seeing the forest for the trees. Imagine, for example, that Hacker News members were grouped in different teams - red, greeen, yellow, and blue - and that the teams competed to dominate discussion threads and grow their own discussions as semantic 'territory'. Imagine further that you had to represent this without any text, using only the time, post size, and threading structure, but with prior knowledge or manual curation of team membership. I'm particularly interested in how a thread could be represented spatially, but not as a time series (ie viewing progress over time would require animation). It's easy to visualize the ebb and flow of territorial conflict on a geographic map, with armies crossing borders and territories expanding or shrinking over time, but how to do that for emergent 'territory' like the expanding and branching threads of a busy discussion topic? I sometimes imagine it like a growing plant or tree with different colored leaves to represent competing affiliations, but there are surely better approaches. tl;dr how can you visualize evolving discussion threads without using text?

darkhorn 8y ago

You should have a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/ it reminds me of a communist times I was living years ago.

ativzzz 8y ago
Fascinating. Almost every comment is either outrage or blaming Western media perception of China. Are these real? Professional trolls? Probably a bit of both? Can we even tell them apart? I guess we just to be skeptical of everything you read online, but damn is it exhausting. Easier to just cut off these data streams and just live life ignorant. "ignorance is bliss"

nkkollaw 8y ago

Can we really trust BuzzFeed with any kind of reporting? This might or might not be true, but the fact that reality mirrors what BuzzFeed says is purely coincidental.

freehunter 8y ago
You mean can we trust the Pulitzer Prize winning staff of Buzzfeed News or can we trust the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist organization Buzzfeed News? Because I don't know if you know this, but many members of the staff of Buzzfeed News have won Pulitzer Prizes and the organization was a finalist in both 2017 and 2018. The accuracy of their reporting is no more suspect than any other well-respected media organization.
- nkkollaw 8y ago
  Yes. That actually makes me wonder about the Pulitzer Prize, if what you're saying is true. From https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/buzzfeed/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/buzzfeed/: "overall, we rate Buzzfeed Left-Center Biased due to story selection that tends to favor the left and Mixed for factual reporting based on poor sourcing and a few failed fact checks.". They're also selling their own brand of kitchenware if you're not aware of it (see https://www.buzzfeed.com/samanthawieder/tasty-kitchenware-walmart https://www.buzzfeed.com/samanthawieder/tasty-kitchenware-wa...), which is a perfect indication that not even them believe their journalism will get them anywhere. They're a biased, failing enterprise that spins news to cause outrage and get a few clicks. Someone at BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize..? That doesn't mean that BuzzFeed's journalists don't generally spend the whole day writing listicles or biased articles to try to avoid bankruptcy. The author--Jane Lytvynenko--has bright red hair and might identify herself with news reporter, but has no track record and not even a LinkedIn profile. Her tweets read like "Hello happy Thursday here's a selection of memes from a pro-Bernier channel plz enjoy". I mean, "plz"? Give me a break.
  - 24gttghh 8y ago
    >The author--Jane Lytvynenko--has bright red hair and might identify herself with news reporter, Is this some kind of ad-hominem attack? I don't see how it is necessary.

pessimizer 8y ago

This article is purely innuendo and quotes from reddit posts that insist that there is an army of Chinese trolls specifically arguing against things that they are personally opinionated about. This article contains no actual information or evidence about what people in China may or may not be actually doing. I don't mean to imply that there are any fewer than 50 people being paid by the Chinese government to post on English-language websites full time, but Reddit is a cesspool of paid posters. It's just a particularly US/Western neo-cold war paranoia that it's somehow mostly or even largely the Chinese and Russian governments. The evidence usually cited is that somebody is agreeing with the Chinese or Russian government, and since no one could possibly agree with the Russian or Chinese government Q.E.D.. For Russia, it doesn't even matter whether the poster agrees with the Russian government, because what the Russian government wants to do is foment strife and confusion in order to weaken the West, therefore both sides must be Russian. I also don't mean to imply that there any fewer than 50 people being paid by the Russian government to post on English-language websites full time. I'd just put those into perspective by trying to imagine the number of people employed by the governments of English-speaking countries to post on English-language websites full time; then add the number of full-time posting shills from private companies, including that person about 3 cubes down from you. China's published propaganda is improving, though; they're starting to get that Anglo-American reasonable liberal tone down. That sometimes make me think that a lot of posters who are pounced on for being Chinese shills are just Chinese people expressing Chinese opinions, but without the trained skill of wrapping them in some circular argument about practicality and respect.

ppeetteerr 8y ago

Somewhat silly question: can we build a firewall around china from the outside?

ozzyman700 8y ago
yes, geo ip ranges can accomplish close to this
- aiven 8y ago
  But they already use VPN to hop over their own firewall. Double firewall will not change a thing.
- nkkollaw 8y ago
  I can spoof my address in 1 second. Are you saying that Chinese hackers and trolls cannot do the same?
  - ozzyman700 8y ago
    "close to this"

yumraj 8y ago

Genuinely curios, since I believe Reddit is banned in China, so can't Reddit counter this by simply blocking traffic from China? Or, perhaps Reddit doesn't think this is a problem, or at least not a problem they want to tackle given their recent funding from Tencent.

ggggtez 8y ago
That's not really how the internet works, because of VPNs.

wnevets 8y ago

Post anything even remotely critical of the chinese government and your reddit post will be downvoted and spammed with whataboutism and FUD. I posted a comment about the forced labor camps of Muslims in china and the same username replied two different times arguing two different things. In one reply the Muslims in these camps were terrorist and had to be arrested for the protection of the chinese civilians and in the other reply saying they're not labor camps they're trade schools to help them get jobs.

logicallee 8y ago

I think this is an interesting subject, but I would remind everyone of Hacker News' excellent discussion policies on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jorblumesea 8y ago

I feel like this is one of those ideas that sounds good to Chinese, in China, but will inevitably produce backlash and the opposite reaction in the West.

tivert 8y ago
> I feel like this is one of those ideas that sounds good to Chinese, in China, but will inevitably produce backlash and the opposite reaction in the West. IIRC, in both China and Russia, state-actor trolling was perfected domestically control the local population before they started to export it.
echaozh 8y ago
The problem is,the ideas of the Chinese people are actually backlash against the Western hostility. Why do the Chinese people care about backlash when the Westerners don't care about it at all? Are the Chinese people less equal than the Westerners because their government is more dictating?

deft 8y ago

According to this article and comments here I should be getting paid simply for disagreeing with the pro-USA nonsense everywhere. Where do I apply?

throw2016 8y ago

This idea of a world with chinese and russian trolls with no mention of other state actors seems to be missing a rather big part of the picture.

fartcannon 8y ago

We need authorship attribution plugins for Firefox/Chrome. Identify propaganda and submarine advertisements/shilling.

tiredyam 8y ago

This may be a silly, but I have been kicking around this idea of creating a politics based lobste.rs of sorts; the users would need to go through a vetting process to be able to contribute. Possibly even crazier; users would need to go through some further vetting process to discuss a particular topic. Maybe this is already solve-able via Reddit, but i would prefer it to be off reddit. Any thoughts? There seems to be no place for very well informed and educated individuals to discuss politics that is publicly accessible imo and something like this could address that.

aphextron 8y ago

All upvote/downvote based social media is inherently toxic to public discourse and extremely manipulable. Something major was lost in the transistion from BBS and forums to this insanity we have now. It used to be that long form discussion and nuanced viewpoints were the norm. If someone had an opinion you disagreed with, you could either refute it or ignore it, not make it dissapear. Now everything thoughtful or balanced in any way is buried under a mountain of “gotcha” quips, and moral certitude, bot or not.

notacoward 8y ago
It's not just upvotes and downvotes. Twitter doesn't track karma, so people just compete on number of followers or retweets or other measures of "reach" instead. Upvotes are only one way to trigger that dopamine hit.

largehotcoffee 8y ago

derp

dang 8y ago
I responded to your other post about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. Please stop this now. It breaks several of the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cmroanirgo 8y ago

Here I am in my nice and warm bed made by HN, where n00bs are marked green, and unless you're active you can't down vote. This, coupled with consistent moderation, HN means that we don't see this noise. It seems such a simple solution to vitriolic trolling. (Thanks guys!) It'd be interesting though, to see the metrics of signups and their origin to see if they even bother here...

saargrin 8y ago

its funny for buzzfeed to complain about trolls or really anything on the internet,them being a perfect example of internet cancer