8 ms·
The Agency
- verroq 11y agoThese aren't trolls, these are the shills, the wu-mao, the JIDF. Trolls agitate discussion for their own amusement, shills push an agenda for another.
- nickbauman 11y agoSounds like they're doing both.
- nickbauman 11y agoWow I'm being down voted did you actually read the article? Faking a disaster is like mega-trolling.
- mercurial 11y agoLudmila Savchuk sounds very brave. I hope that the next time we hear about her, it won't be some news about her body being found in a dumpster. That said, I'd be curious to know which countries do the same thing on a comparable scale. China is well-known to be one, but there were indications that the NSA/GCHQ were not above this sort of thing either.
- ino 11y agoIsrael does it, but maybe on a lesser scale.
- gargarplex 11y agoSources?
- okasaki 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force
- Mikhail_Edoshin 11y agoThis is a private organization and it clearly states its goals. I have doubts about this approach anyway, but still it's very different from a secret army of government-paid propaganda agents the very idea of which is to pretend it's a voice of ordinary citizens.
- mercurial 11y agoWhile I have specific information on this group, Air America [1] was a private company, but in reality owned by the CIA. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline)
- Mikhail_Edoshin 11y agoThere's no such information about JIDF and even if there were, it's still a group that clearly states what they are doing, not a covert joint pretending to be an "internet research agency". There's a saying: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist". The guys from the Agency are very concerned with this too. They don't exist, you know. These are just perfectly real people that happen to think Putin is not that bad and that Russia just wants to show its side of the story :)
- omeid2 11y agohttp://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-students-social-media/2651715/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-s...
- fit2rule 11y agoIndications? Sorry, but there is absolutely no question that the NSA/GCHQ and indeed all the others of the Anglo-intelligence sphere have groups just like this operating, daily, to manipulate opinion and influence group dynamics. No question about it: if your country has an Internet industry, it has government spy agencies involved in the Internet industry. Spy Agencies - people who give themselves more rights and privileges than the rest of us in general, in fact - are a hidden society within every civilization that ever attempted to defend its right to define itself. Without a spy agency, you'll never quite know if you turned Japanese, for how will you know what a Japanese is, until you've become one? Alas, this beautiful quandry seems to endear our species to its pitfalls, and we continue to allow classes in our societies to rule and dominate us by extending their privileges. Were we to be able to turn off the secrecy bit - for all, and not just a few privileged - we may just find that we don't need to keep killing each other over the same things, over and over again, just because we don't really truly understand each other. All secrecy is a degree of none-understanding, held in place with force, to rule you.
- tptacek 11y agoSo what you're saying is that there are US government-sponsored agencies putting fake people on Internet message boards inventing --- out of whole cloth --- disasters, industrial accidents, and misdeeds of foreign governments? Can you cite a source?
- dmpk2k 11y agoThe US has Operation Earnest Voice, and Britain has JTRIG. Whether they're inventing disasters is another matter. It's a sad reality that all major state actors have or will get involved in this, but not surprising. Warfare is changing in part due to massively increased connectivity, and the military and policy wonks have been aware of that for at least a decade. I personally recommend books by David Kilcullen if you're interested.
- tptacek 11y agoThe Russian propaganda is aimed principally at the Russian people. That's illegal in the US, and technically when the US spreads propaganda overseas they're required to make English-language copies available to the US press.
- B-Scan 11y agoThis Story was submitted few days ago. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9645369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9645369
- jackgavigan 11y agoLooks like the HN Submit script doesn't recognise the fact that $URL and $URL?$SPURIOUS_GARBAGE are actually the same URL...
- raverbashing 11y agoNo, this is by design.
- jackgavigan 11y agoWhy?
- pervycreeper 11y ago> $URL and $URL?$SPURIOUS_GARBAGE are actually the same URL They are not, in fact, even if you observe getting the same outcome from using both.
- reagency 11y agoYou are pedantically correct, the least useful kind of correct
- downandout 11y agoIf it didn't recognize them as distinct URLs, a significant percentage of links would be rejected as having already been submitted. Http://site.com/article.php?id=1234 and http://site.com/article.php?id=5678 http://site.com/article.php?id=5678 may be two legitimately unique articles.
- jackgavigan 11y ago
- custo15 11y ago"Well paid trolls", hmm... the monthly salary of Savhuk was 37,000 roubles monthly after taxes (by her words) what equals to ~$750. This is not a lot in St. Petersburg. And there's a lot of trolls around russian web resources (don't know, on salary or not), especially when some politic issues are being discussed. Actually, it is not possible to do a constructive discussion at any russian forum, no matter if this is pro-Russian or pro-West. So, I prefer to not visit any places where political issues are being discussed.
- jpatokal 11y agoAccording to the article, driving "normal" people off political forums is one of the explicit goals of The Agency.
- 1337biz 11y agoHow is that different form United States Military Central Command's Operation Earnest Voice? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
- GabrielF00 11y agoOne is an idea, the other is reality.
- bwilliams18 11y agoAnd Operation Earnest Voice wouldn't be targeting US Citizens. Yes I understand they would still end up being part of it, but that isn't the primary goal, it also isn't being used in the same expressly political manner.
- hugh4life 11y agoI was voted down for pointing out that what Russia does is not exactly unique(except they're not really good at what they do since they're easy to spot)... so here are some links. Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope... Israel to pay students to defend it online http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-students-social-media/2651715/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-s... HACKING ONLINE POLLS AND OTHER WAYS BRITISH SPIES SEEK TO CONTROL THE INTERNET https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o... [edit] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_sockpuppetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_sockpu...
- themodelplumber 11y agoReading your links, the known footprint between these governments seems quite different. Russia seems unique in its usage of these media. Faking a chemical disaster in the US, attempting to incite discord by faking a police shooting video, turning their own special LOIC on a NYT reporter...in comparison, the writeups on other nations' efforts (that we know about) leave a lot of room for this to be a false moral equivalence at this point. This NYT story is a pretty big deal in terms of providing evidence to that effect.
- tptacek 11y agoThe more important distinction is that Russia's sockpuppet propaganda is aimed primarily at its own people.
- onestone 11y agoYes, but I wouldn't underestimate their foreign propaganda. It's very obvious in some countries, for example mine (Bulgaria), where trolls affiliated with Russia regularly flood articles with anti-EU and anti-US comments.
- ianstallings 11y agoI'm pretty sure I can use this article to get funding in DC to make sure there is no troll gap. Being that we're America I'll of course go overboard and use machine learning, big data, and drones.
- keithpeter 11y agoIn the UK: I'd imagine some people from Cheltenham are having tea with some senior civil servants and a couple of dons in an Oxford college somewhere while chatting about the need to keep our end up. And so it goes...
- mercurial 11y agoTalking about machine learning... I'm not interested in western-sponsored sockpuppets fighting it out with Russian trolls, but surely a lot of these accounts could be flagged by fraud detection systems?
- dataker 11y agoThey're doing a terrible job misinforming about fake terrorist attacks and so on. However,Western media and forums end up becoming quite biased in their own PC. Different points of views are often ignored or nonexistent(strong herd mentality). If Russians limited their actions to showing another side of the story, I don't think it'd be a bad thing.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 11y agoWhat caught my eye in this article was this phrase: "Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester." Are there really such "right-wing agitators" out there or it's just a hypothetical case? Any investigations, perhaps? Or is it just a usual political struggle? I noticed that the most favored comment also was against the conservative party.
- reagency 11y agoFalse flag riot-inciting operations by police are extremely common at protests, at least. And police supremacy is a right-wing tenet, as far as the silly wing analogy goes.