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Dang, are you able to report statistics on how many accounts have been banned or considered suspicious? I don’t doubt that HN takes this issue very seriously. B
by afpx 8y ago
Dang, are you able to report statistics on how many accounts have been banned or considered suspicious? I don’t doubt that HN takes this issue very seriously. But, it would be useful to some of us to see how often astroturfing actually happens here (and from which countries it seems to come from).
- dang 8y agoI don't have anything exact, but we've banned perhaps a dozen networks of accounts for corporate astroturfing over the years. Cases where the issue was nationalistic are much rarer. I recall only one, and it was years ago. (That of course is not to claim we aren't missing some.) If we go by the data we actually see, the phenomenon itself is vanishingly rare. Why is there so much commentary then? I can think of two explanations: either the foreign spies are cleverer than we are, or there is something in how human nature meets the internet under current social conditions that is leading to mass projection. And of course it could be both—but how are any claims about the former falsifiable?