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To make a modest proposal, there is a business idea here. Putin's junta has the Swedish (and other minority languages) comment fields filled up with propaganda

To make a modest proposal, there is a business idea here. Putin's junta has the Swedish (and other minority languages) comment fields filled up with propaganda. The Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions (even the left wing extremists in Sweden are upset by 1930s style destabilisation and overtaking of areas in Europe). But at least half the problem is the obviously bad language idioms etc. You can't just translate arguments and use them in all cultural environments. Also, the fake upvotes for the media which accept them are clunky and obvious. It is just not competently done astroturf. All this goes for Chinese and Iranian political astroturfing etc as well. To sell high quality astroturf as a service in different countries should be worth lots of money. Even big countries like Russia struggle to organize the service competently, then they have part time employees which aren't specialized. Edit: I assume that e.g. China, if they don't go democratic, later will add a minority language/culture as work requirement for their armies -- note plural -- of censors. So there is a window of opportunity before some junta implement this and sell the service to other dictators and equally moral companies. (For anyone missing the "modest proposal", this is tongue in cheek. At least mostly.) Edit: Fixed clarity etc.

rjsw 12y ago
Israel seems to do astroturfing in english pretty well.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  That was a not particularly subtle example the other way? :-) Not that it really is relevant, but the other side in that conflict gets a very good showing in Swedish. (E.g. Pallywood or torture between Palestinian groups were straight out censored in Swedish media. Swedes in general have no clue that more Jews were kicked out from the moslem world -- just for their religion, not in a civil war -- than the number of Palestinians which fled/was kicked out. And so on. You can fall off your chair laughing if you follow the Swedish news re Mideast in parallel with BBC/NY Times, which is the main reason I know anything about the subject.)
- sitkack 12y ago
  Well about half of all Jews speak english better than you or I.
frozenport 12y ago
Russia Today did a pretty good job impressing kids.
msane 12y ago
I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people. Honestly though astroturfing is pretty deplorable. A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  >> I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people. Always nice to find a kindred soul. :-) But I really prefer people I don't agree with, arguing teaches me more. >> A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it. There was a story on HN recently about CIA (NSA? Some TLA) wanting an irony/sarcasm detector. C Stross had lots of fun with it. I guess such a detector would need a full damn General AI -- and probably not even that is enough. Some form of accredited user accounts (HN/slashdot style) could vote for if something should be flagged. I can't see anything better, really. Re the Russian subject, I saw these on FB some time ago: http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052 http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-russia-trolls-ukraine-guardian-online http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-rus... Edit: On consideration, re a detector: This is a type of spam, the comments seem to be written and then translated. The problem is that detectors need to recognize new comments/angles at least every week, maybe more than once a day. And quite quickly it would be rewritten to fool the detectors. I don't believe in automation here, but please prove me wrong.
tehwebguy 12y ago
> Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions Really? It seems difficult to know without some sort of proof, otherwise there is no telling if you are marking false positives. I don't think this is the same as spam. Spam is low quality and my guess why is to target those that will fall for whatever scam they are selling. My guess is that any actual state sponsored propaganda on website comments would be pretty damn good.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  OK, some more specifics... For the strange opinions you just don't find -- e.g. conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media. Then there were claims about Ukrainian right wing extremists (which got really few votes in the last election) and other strange things you only see in Putin's media. Arguments were often just not relevant for Sweden. Like "but what about USA in Iraq" -- that only works in USA (and maybe Britain), if that. Even the Swedes that condemn the Iraq invasion, not so few, of course have no problems ALSO condemning that Russia starts to treat Europe like Hitler in the 1930s; military threats, destabilisation, annexations etc. The Russians avoids all questions about where they were writing from and none claimed to not be Russian. If it was proved where they came from (e.g. logs from the proxies they use, or something), it would automatically be news in Sweden. Then we have the obvious bad Swedish, the first month a lot seemed to be from Google Translate. The bad voting scraping (one comment posted a bit down in a comment tree -- 10-15 top votes in seconds; never happened otherwise). I also posted a couple of links here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214 And so on... Edit: And about a state's trolling/astroturfing being high quality: First, note the low quality of conspiracy theories from Putin's junta. The personal envoy of Putin, Sergej Markov, yesterday claimed that Sweden, Poland, Finland and the Baltics had Russophobia -- and threatened with a new World War if the countries joined NATO!! And other crazy stuff. That was worse than before 1991 -- and note that it wasn't for internal consumption by Russians only reading Putin's media! Also, see that about starting with Google Translate. There are lots of quite small languages in Western Europe. How do you to a reasonable cost quickly find enough people that know Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, etc, etc? Then you have to train them (or give them stuff to translate and post). Edit 2: I hope the above is readable. Ask otherwise, I might have the energy to continue. Edit 3: The main difference compared to spam is that spam has much less resources, it is much less work intensive. There are maybe one message per 100K receivers. With astroturfing in the end, most (probably not all) comments will be at least partly written individually. If the same comment is posted in many places, e.g. something like Disqus can detect them directly (or Google, for that matter).
sitkack 12y ago
I think astroturfing would work best if you did something like a targeted Onion like site, where the cynical members of the population of the people you are trying to turn wrote the propaganda themselves in a "Mother Night" [0] sorta way. The turfers would think they are writing satire when the are really the steel cut gears of vertically integrated oppression. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night

rjsw 12y ago

Israel seems to do astroturfing in english pretty well.

BugBrother 12y ago
That was a not particularly subtle example the other way? :-) Not that it really is relevant, but the other side in that conflict gets a very good showing in Swedish. (E.g. Pallywood or torture between Palestinian groups were straight out censored in Swedish media. Swedes in general have no clue that more Jews were kicked out from the moslem world -- just for their religion, not in a civil war -- than the number of Palestinians which fled/was kicked out. And so on. You can fall off your chair laughing if you follow the Swedish news re Mideast in parallel with BBC/NY Times, which is the main reason I know anything about the subject.)
sitkack 12y ago
Well about half of all Jews speak english better than you or I.

frozenport 12y ago

Russia Today did a pretty good job impressing kids.

msane 12y ago

I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people. Honestly though astroturfing is pretty deplorable. A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it.

BugBrother 12y ago
>> I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people. Always nice to find a kindred soul. :-) But I really prefer people I don't agree with, arguing teaches me more. >> A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it. There was a story on HN recently about CIA (NSA? Some TLA) wanting an irony/sarcasm detector. C Stross had lots of fun with it. I guess such a detector would need a full damn General AI -- and probably not even that is enough. Some form of accredited user accounts (HN/slashdot style) could vote for if something should be flagged. I can't see anything better, really. Re the Russian subject, I saw these on FB some time ago: http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052 http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-russia-trolls-ukraine-guardian-online http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-rus... Edit: On consideration, re a detector: This is a type of spam, the comments seem to be written and then translated. The problem is that detectors need to recognize new comments/angles at least every week, maybe more than once a day. And quite quickly it would be rewritten to fool the detectors. I don't believe in automation here, but please prove me wrong.

tehwebguy 12y ago

> Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions Really? It seems difficult to know without some sort of proof, otherwise there is no telling if you are marking false positives. I don't think this is the same as spam. Spam is low quality and my guess why is to target those that will fall for whatever scam they are selling. My guess is that any actual state sponsored propaganda on website comments would be pretty damn good.

BugBrother 12y ago
OK, some more specifics... For the strange opinions you just don't find -- e.g. conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media. Then there were claims about Ukrainian right wing extremists (which got really few votes in the last election) and other strange things you only see in Putin's media. Arguments were often just not relevant for Sweden. Like "but what about USA in Iraq" -- that only works in USA (and maybe Britain), if that. Even the Swedes that condemn the Iraq invasion, not so few, of course have no problems ALSO condemning that Russia starts to treat Europe like Hitler in the 1930s; military threats, destabilisation, annexations etc. The Russians avoids all questions about where they were writing from and none claimed to not be Russian. If it was proved where they came from (e.g. logs from the proxies they use, or something), it would automatically be news in Sweden. Then we have the obvious bad Swedish, the first month a lot seemed to be from Google Translate. The bad voting scraping (one comment posted a bit down in a comment tree -- 10-15 top votes in seconds; never happened otherwise). I also posted a couple of links here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214 And so on... Edit: And about a state's trolling/astroturfing being high quality: First, note the low quality of conspiracy theories from Putin's junta. The personal envoy of Putin, Sergej Markov, yesterday claimed that Sweden, Poland, Finland and the Baltics had Russophobia -- and threatened with a new World War if the countries joined NATO!! And other crazy stuff. That was worse than before 1991 -- and note that it wasn't for internal consumption by Russians only reading Putin's media! Also, see that about starting with Google Translate. There are lots of quite small languages in Western Europe. How do you to a reasonable cost quickly find enough people that know Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, etc, etc? Then you have to train them (or give them stuff to translate and post). Edit 2: I hope the above is readable. Ask otherwise, I might have the energy to continue. Edit 3: The main difference compared to spam is that spam has much less resources, it is much less work intensive. There are maybe one message per 100K receivers. With astroturfing in the end, most (probably not all) comments will be at least partly written individually. If the same comment is posted in many places, e.g. something like Disqus can detect them directly (or Google, for that matter).

sitkack 12y ago

I think astroturfing would work best if you did something like a targeted Onion like site, where the cynical members of the population of the people you are trying to turn wrote the propaganda themselves in a "Mother Night" [0] sorta way. The turfers would think they are writing satire when the are really the steel cut gears of vertically integrated oppression. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night