3 ms·

love how the only facebook comment under the article is a fake "make money from home" bot

• mcadenhe 7y ago
  It's poetic really. I bet most of us saw that too but because of the all-too-familiar bot text didn't think twice about it. Kind of like banner blindness. It makes me wonder just how much damage these influence campaigns do. For instance, if Russia spent $100k in FB ads to reach ~140 million people[1](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/04/18/what-the-mueller-report-tells-us-about-russian-influence-operations/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/04/18/w...), how much of that "reach" translates into votes? I'd like to think people aren't as dumb as people think.
  • bluntfang 7y ago
    >I'd like to think people aren't as dumb as people think. It's not really about people being smart or dumb. There's evidence that marketing and advertisements create sentiment, even if you don't believe in what the ads say. It's just the way our human brains work. And these entities are, if I had to bet, putting a lot of money towards getting people to believe certain things and act in certain ways without them explicitly knowing that they're being influenced.
• ConsiderCrying 7y ago
  If only the political bots were as obvious, though. When you spot one of those "make money easy", you know it's a bot right away, not even two words in. With a political troll, you can't tell unless you know what to look for or can spot a pattern in their behavior.