8 ms·
Undercover at a Troll Farm (2019)
- kazinator 5y agoNo parole for the trolling Poles.
- JasonFruit 5y agoIf they direct you to a fake login page, they're phishing Poles.
- ggm 5y agoIf half are catholic, and half are athiest, they're polar opposites.
- question000 5y agoI just want to say before you read any of these comments, they are being monitored, they are being manipulated. Don't take anything on the Internet at face value. There are no "concerned citizens" on the Internet only bored people and trolls trying to force action out of inquiry.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- heyitsguay 5y agoTo put it another way that's a little less accusatory but still encourages the right mindset - assume any comment on a service from a user without verified ID was written by a troll trying to provoke a reaction.
- Razengan 5y agoCould you get any more “verified” than a recent president or be any more of a troll?
- heyitsguay 5y agoI'd say anonymity is sufficient but not necessary :D
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoThis is how I approach the Internet as a whole. Treat unverified anything as if they are the enemy trying to hurt you. Be skeptical. It's a real shame too because the Internet is one of mankind's crowning achievements but it has this taint.
- anigbrowl 5y agoAnonymity is a poor heuristic. I rate people as trolls or not dependin gon whether they employ fallacious reasoning, and how they respond to being challenged. Not all fallacious arguments are trolling, as people can simply be wrong. But if a person is supplied with accurate information, or the form of an error explained and acknowledged, only to see them return the next day with the same schtick, then I regard that as posting in bad faith. There are plenty of anonymous truth-tellers and plenty overt hypocrites and liars. It's important to remember that not all lies are meant to be believed; some are merely intended to upset, to bait, or to signal.
- mistermann 5y ago> But if a person is supplied with accurate information Unfortunately, this is often a matter of opinion, but not perceived as such, often completely sincerely.
- ggm 5y ago> Not all fallacious arguments are trolling, as people can simply be wrong. There's factually wrong, there's logically fallacious argument, and there's "I don't agree with you, so I will say you're wrong, and be condescending to impute your reasoning, but actually, I'm not the teacher, or the font of wisdom" wrong. Yes, people can simply be wrong. Lincoln didn't write internet jokes online. But, oftentimes, "wrong" is actually "I don't agree with you, but saying you're wrong is more win" I tend to all three (factually, logical reasoning error, and opinion) wrongs. So I'm used to seeing all three flung back at me. There. Flung. thats emotive. Probably casts (ha) things in to a specific mode of reasoning...
- vintermann 5y agoThe problem isn't anonymity as such. I don't think there would be much problem with anonymous posts, provided we could be confident the anonymous poster actually was just one guy who spoke for himself, at a reasonable rate. But you have anonymous posters who speak under hundreds of names to give their opinions the illusion of popularity; argue with their own accounts to set up straw men and steer discussion away from things that threaten them, and post hundreds of times more than the average users. I think there must be solutions to this, I'm sad so few people seem to be working on it. Shouldn't there be a way for instance, using good old fashioned cryptography (I.e. NOT some tradeable token junk), to leverage a strong ID service to prevent sockpuppeting in a forum without revealing much to either the forum owner or the ID service? Once we had that - a basic safety that everyone you engaged with on a certain forum was a real person, and this person (whoever he was) didn't operate under other names on that forum (or if he had earlier names, that they were irreversibly retired) - a lot of sensible things would become possible which are largely pointless today, such as speaking limits and distributed/allotted moderation.
- dillondoyle 5y agoI'm with both you and OP. There are concerned citizens. I'm one of them. But there are also trolls and organized, paid government & industry shills. I think having verified IDs is an interesting idea on HN and other niche forums and would help parse out the intention. Could probably do it without doxing the public facing comments. Would put all the trust in YC though. Maybe that's an interesting product idea, a way to establish real identity trust without any chance of exposing personal data to any parties, even the verifier. I think it would help discussions. I have my opinion there are shills here, specifically China related content and I think it would be interesting to know comments are minimally form a single human. Coordination is still possible though.
- refenestrator 5y ago> specifically China related content But from which angle? Pro- or anti-? I don't think it's likely that most/any HN commenters are paid trolls, there are lots of Chinese and Americans in this industry that will naturally have different perspectives.
- dillondoyle 5y agoMy opinion, i obviously have no data. But every single thread on CCP in particular gets overloaded with pro-china comments which use classic troll tactics. Often taking stances like for instance on privacy that are 180 from almost every other non CCP thread. False comparisons, whataboutism, etc. I just have a hard time believing some of the more extreme stuff; like if someone really does have such a crazy opposite worldview where they think oppression and interment of millions is acceptable for whatever <excuse> among other stuff. Maybe my hard time believing is just a naive misunderstanding of the world but it rubs me wrong. And lots of downvotes - which seems to go against HN spirit it's not reddit to downvote what you disagree with.
- refenestrator 5y agoMaybe that says more about your bias. There's an anti-china thread on HNs front page like 3x a week. Imagine if you were an immigrant and you see that shit. Would it be infuriating? If a comment comes from outside your frame of reference, it might sound like bad faith to you while you sound bad faith to them. The country that spent the last 20 years killing millions of Muslims really cares about Xinjiang now? Really? And if they point that out, you cry whataboutism?
- drdaeman 5y agoConcerning oneself with poster's identity (honestly, feels like a form of ad hominem) can't be exactly the solution. It could be that relationship to the source matters - rather than author's identity. I mean, there is a subtle difference between "who wrote this?" and "do I trust this?". But the only implementation I can think of is some sort of web-of-trust and all attempts at implementing WoT I know about had utterly failed. Either way, I believe some form of memetic immunity - not getting provoked - rather than attempts to identify and shut down "troll farms" and "fake news" - is an ultimate solution.
- orwin 5y agoThis is great journalism. Good job, and tbh, it comfort my theory that the twitter crowd, especially the loud twitter crowd, is small.
- tclancy 5y ago"an activist for the conservative ruling party. . . He got the job – without even having a university diploma or a military background – thanks to his friends at the defence ministry." I realize it shows my biases, but I am waiting for the first major troll farm associated with the left and with, I dunno, PETA or whatever the opposite of the military industrial complex is. Do they exist? They must, but it seems (based perhaps on my echo chamber) that 95% of the effort is from vested interests who prefer the status quo over fact.
- joe_the_user 5y agoTroll farms are associated with those who have more money than committed activists. Whatever you may think of the left, it tends to have the opposite. - maybe the vague center left at the level of Jeff Bezos could that but even here, you have money proportionate to committed followers. the opposite of the military industrial complex There's no money in anti-militarism. antiwar.com is a libertarian (ie right) website but it has survive on donations. Troll farm pay for opinions, that's a pretty specific thing. Edit: Reading the article, this farm apparently supported some "left wing" causes. But basically it comes down to money.
- emergie 5y agoI have different experience. Soros & co are really operating a political engineering project in eastern europe. He is funding many NGOs here, to the point where regular people hearing "NGO" interprete it as shady-leftist-organisation. We have no rich enough capitalists, only foreign leftists care about installing their world view here.
- NumberCruncher 5y agoI used to work in a team where everyone except me had studied at the now closed Central European University. My current personal manager also sudied at the CUE. Very clever and open minded people. And what is "your experience" based on again?
- nsajko 5y ago
- ohmyzee 5y agoI really wish this kind of thing was more talked about, and better understood. Most people have no idea how these "bots" or "trolls" actually influence conversation online, and what impact their actions have. One thing that frustrates me most is that even if people do reach the point of understanding the power these people have, it still won't matter much. We still trust online media such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and even this website, as being the fountain of the mythical phenomenon known as "public opinion". I can see in real life that people are becoming fatigued by the uncertainty of our modern existence, but everyone is unsure of how to pinpoint and react to the source of their tension. My expectation/hope/fear is that the younger generation who grow up in this environment will eventually form a nu-luddite movement. My bigger expectation/fear is that they won't
- dragontamer 5y agoHistory always provides context. In the late 1700s, the "printing press" gave new freedoms to publishers never before seen in all of history. How did our lawmakers react? Yes, they passed the 1st Amendment, protecting the right to free press. But just a few years later, they also passed... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts > [The Sedition Act] criminalized making 'false statements' critical of the federal government And an example of prosecution of people through the Sedition Act is Mr. David Brown. Here's his story: > In November 1798, David Brown led a group in Dedham, Massachusetts, including Benjamin Fairbanks, in setting up a liberty pole with the words, "No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax, downfall to the Tyrants of America; peace and retirement to the President; Long Live the Vice President."[17][19][20] Brown was arrested in Andover, Massachusetts, but because he could not afford the $4,000 bail, he was taken to Salem for trial.[19] Brown was tried in June 1799.[17] Brown pleaded guilty, but Justice Samuel Chase asked him to name others who had assisted him.[17] Brown refused, was fined $480 (equivalent to $7,300 in 2020),[19][21] and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, the most severe sentence imposed under the Sedition Act.[17][19] ----------- Our 2rd President said at the time: > “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798” ---------- EDIT: It should be noted that Ben Franklin himself engaged in the creation of literal fake news, as a propaganda / negotiation tactic against the English Monarchy. Ben Franklin created a false story about Native Americans "Scalping" US Citizens on behalf of orders from the English Crown. Our founding fathers were no strangers to propaganda, fake-news, and other techniques to rile up populations and/or control the dialog. Indeed, they themselves took advantage of it to successfully launch the Revolution!
- r3trohack3r 5y agoI like to think, somewhere, there are rooms full of patriots who pursued years of education and intense training for a role at a 3 letter agency - believing they would travel the world doing super secret spy craft. Now they spend their days sitting in dark, windowless, rooms in front of a computer screen slinging dank memes on the web.
- spats1990 5y agoOr editing wikipedia, and arguing on talk pages.
- reidjs 5y agoI also believe there are some zealous patriots who joined the military, inspired by dreams of killing our enemies, only to be relegated to posting memes on The Army’s Instagram and TikTok pages to recruit other kids.
- MichaelMoser123 5y agoImagine Marvin, the paranoid android working at a troll factory; I guess his trolling would even be kind of interesting! Interesting, couldn't they use GPT-3 for the troll factory job? What is stopping them from using real bots, instead of humans?
- woodpanel 5y agoGood thing they shine a light on those evil troll farms. And not on the "internet activists" of political aligned NGOs in their own home countries. This month Germany elects a new Bundestag and almost every party recruits their own online activists. E.g. they form "discussion intervention groups" to dynamically flood any online discussion, to ensure their narratives are protected.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoOur current Mexican president has a very good grasp of social network manipulation. His critics were swiftly met with insults, profanity, or simply with offensive pictures, but now they have become more subtle. Their accounts got progressively harder to differentiate from common users because they appear to have other interests besides politics, even if pro-regime politics is the bulk of their content. People need to relearn that something being on the Internet doesn't mean it's true, or even that it comes from a real person.
- OneEyedRobot 5y agoSo how can you tell a troll from a typical twitter user?
- treesknees 5y agoI don't think you can, and therefore you shouldn't use Twitter (or Reddit or Facebook) as an honest or useful place to discuss politics or anything of that nature.