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>I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is

>I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account. https://twitter.com/blackintheempir https://twitter.com/blackintheempir How do I know it's a troll account? Take a look at this: https://twitter.com/reshetz/status/1662112840554098688 https://twitter.com/reshetz/status/1662112840554098688 Just like "There is no panic in Balakliya", there are occasionally moments when whole networks of these accounts tweet clearly scripted messages all at the same time which kind of gives the game away. https://twitter.com/JoniPyysalo/status/1567799462751309826/photo/1 https://twitter.com/JoniPyysalo/status/1567799462751309826/p... It's quite interesting to read, honestly. They have a decent pulse on what narratives are effective, but present it in such an consistently hamfisted and exaggerated form that it makes it just a bit too obvious if you're taking in more than one or two tweets. But it's twitter, most people don't do that. We can argue about how effective this kind of stuff is, but that it's happening is pretty indisputable. You can say it's just a lie that everyone pretends to believe, but the documents leaked by Teixeira talk about this stuff in detail too. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russians-boasted-that-just-1-of-fake-social-profiles-are-caught-leak-shows/ar-AA19VJTd https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russians-boasted-tha... This document for example says that the Russian Main Scientific Computing Research Center internally reports that only 1% of their social media bot accounts get shut down. https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA19VJT8.img?w=1920&h=1080&q=60&m=2&f=jpg https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA19...

smcl 3y ago
There's so many of them and they're so hyperbolic and wrong. Take good old @witte_sergei, claiming here during the huge gains Ukraine had last year that the "scale of Ukraine’s defeat at Lyman will become clear in the coming days": https://twitter.com/witte_sergei/status/1575975278652043264 https://twitter.com/witte_sergei/status/1575975278652043264 Meanwhile Lyman remains under Ukrainian control: https://deepstatemap.live/en#11/48.9534/37.8129 https://deepstatemap.live/en#11/48.9534/37.8129 That's just one of them, this guy was on an absolute tear during this period. He deactivated his account to clean it up a little because it got a bit too obvious and hard to hide at one point. Their strategy seems to be to just flood every channel with all sorts of ridiculous things to make people think "I can't make sense of this stupid conflict, it's too complex" and tune out. It's not a bad approach within Russia and it certainly strikes a chord within a few people in the west. It's just that if they don't clear their tracks when they're wrong you can pretty easily identify them for as pro-Kremlin trolls
- poxrud 3y ago
  “Meanwhile Lyman remains under Kremlin control” Lyman is under Ukrainian control
  - smcl 3y ago
    I originally wrote something along the lines of "... is pretty far from under Kremlin control" and decided to simplify it before hitting send :) Oops, fixed now.
jancsika 3y ago
> I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account. Looks pretty recent and active. At this point, is there an employee behind that account or a LLM?
- willis936 3y ago
  I'm going to go on a limb and say the cheaper one: the human.

smcl 3y ago

There's so many of them and they're so hyperbolic and wrong. Take good old @witte_sergei, claiming here during the huge gains Ukraine had last year that the "scale of Ukraine’s defeat at Lyman will become clear in the coming days": https://twitter.com/witte_sergei/status/1575975278652043264 https://twitter.com/witte_sergei/status/1575975278652043264 Meanwhile Lyman remains under Ukrainian control: https://deepstatemap.live/en#11/48.9534/37.8129 https://deepstatemap.live/en#11/48.9534/37.8129 That's just one of them, this guy was on an absolute tear during this period. He deactivated his account to clean it up a little because it got a bit too obvious and hard to hide at one point. Their strategy seems to be to just flood every channel with all sorts of ridiculous things to make people think "I can't make sense of this stupid conflict, it's too complex" and tune out. It's not a bad approach within Russia and it certainly strikes a chord within a few people in the west. It's just that if they don't clear their tracks when they're wrong you can pretty easily identify them for as pro-Kremlin trolls

poxrud 3y ago
“Meanwhile Lyman remains under Kremlin control” Lyman is under Ukrainian control
- smcl 3y ago
  I originally wrote something along the lines of "... is pretty far from under Kremlin control" and decided to simplify it before hitting send :) Oops, fixed now.

jancsika 3y ago

> I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account. Looks pretty recent and active. At this point, is there an employee behind that account or a LLM?

willis936 3y ago
I'm going to go on a limb and say the cheaper one: the human.