4 ms·

Just to be clear, you are almost never engaging with a paid operative. Push that out of your mind, it's paranoia.

braythwayt 8y ago
“Almost never,” except when you are. For example, Milo. All over social media for a good long while, along with staffers, until the money behind him dried up.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Indeed. Perhaps people aren't arguing with paid operatives directly, but there are a lot of people repeating positions that were injected into the dialogue by paid operatives.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    This is definitely the case. Most of the repeaters are incapable of following through or supporting the argument (in most cases, not even the original promulgator could follow through in a rational discussion), and they have exactly one response: change the subject with another non-sequitur. It is a mistake to follow them into the change of subject, and the charity principle doesn't ask you to do so, as they have by then revealed their true intentions.
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > Indeed. Perhaps people aren't arguing with paid operatives directly, but there are a lot of people repeating positions that were injected into the dialogue by paid operatives. The term for them is "useful idiots." But you definitely shouldn't engage with them like they are bad-faith actors, because often they're good-faith actors who've been mislead.
- diminoten 8y ago
  Yeah, much in the same way that you're "almost never" actually being followed...
- jerf 8y ago
  That's not really what we tend to mean by "paid operatives". Every side's got people clearly being paid to advance some goal, and that's not news, not going away, and not even necessarily a particular problem. It's the commentary that isn't clear that it's paid, the 300 anonymous comments from different accounts on some news story all expressing some opinion that turn out to be from the same source, that's the real problem. Whether on average you're dealing with paid operatives is hard to tell. Whether they exist is not; they definitely do. (Honestly, the alternative is just absurd. "There's billions of dollars worth of value sloshing around in Internet forums in setting the opinion and the flow of conversation, but everyone in the world is so very honest that the very idea of forging the signals simply never occurs to anyone, and nobody ever has a reason to try to slant things and is willing and able to pay." Come on. Seriously.) It's the scale that's at issue.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
paganel 8y ago
I'm not the OP but I just wanted to say that it's not paranoia, as I've known of media agencies in my country (EU and NATO member) which had been hired to post favorable online comments on specific political candidates. That was happening about 5 or 6 years ago. I'm pretty sure that phenomenon has only gained momentum in the meantime.
- brazzy 8y ago
  I think those typically go for quantity though, and won't engange in actual prolonged discussion.
  - paganel 8y ago
    Citation needed. I also used to have a photo of a Financial Times article back from 2011 (I think) of a NATO higher-up acknowledging the fact that Israel and Russia were already ahead of the game at that point in terms of online influencing, with the NATO official explicitly saying that both Israel and Russia have dedicated units for this. From personal experience I can testify that Israel was actually the first in the game, as I remember engaging against very persuasive pro-Israel posters on reddit during the summer of 2006 (meaning during Israel's war against Hezbollah), at a time when that site was almost totally politics-free. That was a lesson for me and I've since given up on any Israel-related discussions online. The Russian shill accounts started showing up two summers later, in 2008, during Russia's war with Georgia. Somewhere in the reddit server logs there's all this information stored and ready to be analyzed but I suspect no-one has any real incentive in doing this.
ardy42 8y ago
> Just to be clear, you are almost never engaging with a paid operative. Push that out of your mind, it's paranoia. While that may be true on the English web, I don't think that works as a general principle. There are definitely some contexts where it's much more likely than you estimate, e.g. https://gking.harvard.edu/50c https://gking.harvard.edu/50c.

“Almost never,” except when you are. For example, Milo. All over social media for a good long while, along with staffers, until the money behind him dried up.

pjc50 8y ago
Indeed. Perhaps people aren't arguing with paid operatives directly, but there are a lot of people repeating positions that were injected into the dialogue by paid operatives.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  This is definitely the case. Most of the repeaters are incapable of following through or supporting the argument (in most cases, not even the original promulgator could follow through in a rational discussion), and they have exactly one response: change the subject with another non-sequitur. It is a mistake to follow them into the change of subject, and the charity principle doesn't ask you to do so, as they have by then revealed their true intentions.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > Indeed. Perhaps people aren't arguing with paid operatives directly, but there are a lot of people repeating positions that were injected into the dialogue by paid operatives. The term for them is "useful idiots." But you definitely shouldn't engage with them like they are bad-faith actors, because often they're good-faith actors who've been mislead.
diminoten 8y ago
Yeah, much in the same way that you're "almost never" actually being followed...
jerf 8y ago
That's not really what we tend to mean by "paid operatives". Every side's got people clearly being paid to advance some goal, and that's not news, not going away, and not even necessarily a particular problem. It's the commentary that isn't clear that it's paid, the 300 anonymous comments from different accounts on some news story all expressing some opinion that turn out to be from the same source, that's the real problem. Whether on average you're dealing with paid operatives is hard to tell. Whether they exist is not; they definitely do. (Honestly, the alternative is just absurd. "There's billions of dollars worth of value sloshing around in Internet forums in setting the opinion and the flow of conversation, but everyone in the world is so very honest that the very idea of forging the signals simply never occurs to anyone, and nobody ever has a reason to try to slant things and is willing and able to pay." Come on. Seriously.) It's the scale that's at issue.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

paganel 8y ago

I'm not the OP but I just wanted to say that it's not paranoia, as I've known of media agencies in my country (EU and NATO member) which had been hired to post favorable online comments on specific political candidates. That was happening about 5 or 6 years ago. I'm pretty sure that phenomenon has only gained momentum in the meantime.

brazzy 8y ago
I think those typically go for quantity though, and won't engange in actual prolonged discussion.
- paganel 8y ago
  Citation needed. I also used to have a photo of a Financial Times article back from 2011 (I think) of a NATO higher-up acknowledging the fact that Israel and Russia were already ahead of the game at that point in terms of online influencing, with the NATO official explicitly saying that both Israel and Russia have dedicated units for this. From personal experience I can testify that Israel was actually the first in the game, as I remember engaging against very persuasive pro-Israel posters on reddit during the summer of 2006 (meaning during Israel's war against Hezbollah), at a time when that site was almost totally politics-free. That was a lesson for me and I've since given up on any Israel-related discussions online. The Russian shill accounts started showing up two summers later, in 2008, during Russia's war with Georgia. Somewhere in the reddit server logs there's all this information stored and ready to be analyzed but I suspect no-one has any real incentive in doing this.

ardy42 8y ago

> Just to be clear, you are almost never engaging with a paid operative. Push that out of your mind, it's paranoia. While that may be true on the English web, I don't think that works as a general principle. There are definitely some contexts where it's much more likely than you estimate, e.g. https://gking.harvard.edu/50c https://gking.harvard.edu/50c.