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I do this to determine if a person I'm talking to online is potentially a troll. I copy a big chunk of their comment and post history into an LLM and ask for a
by cainxinth 1y ago
I do this to determine if a person I'm talking to online is potentially a troll. I copy a big chunk of their comment and post history into an LLM and ask for a profile.
The last few years, I've noticed an uptick in "concern trolls" that pretend to support a group or cause while subtly working to undermine it.
LLMs can't make the ultimate judgement call very well, but they can quickly summarize enough information for me to.
- dimitri-vs 1y agoI would think you can get pretty accurate results by including the top 10 subreddits they are active in and their last 20 comments (and their score). Comments alone may not be enough, the reaction to them is more telling.
- cainxinth 1y agoI used to try taking different samples, top versus controversial (for redditors), but now that Gemini offers massive context windows, I just grab a huge swath of everything.
- tantalor 1y agoHonestly asking: Did you try it on yourself? What prompt do you use to avoid bias?
- cainxinth 1y agoSure I did. It was fairly accurate. The prompt is just “profile this user.”
- marknutter 1y ago"Concern troll" is usually just at term that people who want zero pushback lob at people who don't agree with them 100% of the time.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 1y agoThat's not at all been the case in my experience.
- mlekoszek 1y agoExplain this a bit. I'm interested, but I don't fully understand how you mean this.
- marknutter 1y agoIt's nearly impossible to determine whether or not someone is expressing a concern in good faith, so what ends up happening is people getting silenced for diverting even slightly from the dominant narrative because nobody is ever given the benefit of the doubt.
- pixl97 1y agoOne thing I've seen happen with some of these accounts is they remove a lot of their posts after some period of time. So they make somewhat consistent 'generic' posts that do not get remove, but do not really convey any signal on their actual views. Then in their last 24-48 hours there are more political style posts/concern posts that only stick around while the article/post is getting views. Then replies disappear like they've never happened so you can't tell it's an account that exists wholly to manipulate others that has been doing so for months. Then quite often after a month or two the accounts disappear totally.
- cainxinth 1y agoWhen I was a kid, internet trolls were just in it for the lulz. Today, it’s a global industry with nation states participating.
- sfink 1y agoPerhaps they're farming accounts? As in, the owner creates a whole bunch of accounts and has them build up a generic history. Then when the owner "deploys" some of them to pump up a specific issue. I don't know why they remove the posts, but perhaps it's a way of "recycling" an account by cleaning up the dirty work it did and throwing it back into the pool of available accounts? Come to think of it, I bet the original creator is selling these accounts to someone else who is weaponizing them. Or the creator is renting them: build up a supply, rent them out for a purpose, then scrub them and recycle. Work From Home! Make Money Fast! This is one part of why the internet has gone to hell. I don't have an explanation for why they'd delete the accounts.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoI've had similar concerns but my solution was to just stop using twitter and reddit.
- goopypoop 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- goopypoop 1y agoI asked my "human brain" to profile you but it threw a megalomania error and now everything's stripy and tinted