Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal take: any government that can selectively silence speech is too powerful. Troll farms are a problem, but government is a horrible solution to that problem. What we need is a mechanism for digital proof-of-human. Ideally this would be decentralised, but there's no obvious way to do this well (I consider the web of trust model easily exploitable if used at scale). Estonia has a system for verifying humans that…
Not Estonia, but Lithuania has a process to combat "fake news". Per last week's Economist [0] : "Demaskuok, which means “debunk” in Lithuanian, is a piece of software that searches for the patient zeros of fake news. It was developed by Delfi, a media group headquartered in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, in conjunction with Google, a large American information-technology company. It works by sifting through reams of o…
Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
41–50 of 333 posts
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#42What this article fails to mention: there was recently a case discovered where one of the clients of these troll farms was... Ministry of Justice. They used to slander judges who were not in the political line of thought of the previous / current leading party. The knowledge of this was as high up as Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the man who appears to be driving the whole country from the back seat. One of many, many articles…
I can't say it surprises me. But I think by now every government is using such farms. I find it difficult to believe otherwise based on recent FCC issues ( https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-f... ). Yes, sadly, I am invoking everyone is doin' it.
I don't think it's just government, but also likely industries as well. I've seen what could only be trolling for support of nuclear power and the medical industry.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#43This really is a critical juncture for the internet; the moment wherein the democratization of information has empowered those with the resources to overwhelm the signal with noise.
I wish I saw a way out.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it pretty interesting that this comment is on HN. A few years ago, I think it was pretty widely accepted in SV that the last method you mention was just part of the grind. Maybe not the most straight-shooting approach, but still accepted. We even had a title for it: growth hacking. People hired growth hackers! I'm going to refrain from asserting a value judgement; I just thought it was interesting
I've seen the job ads, but never knew that this was what it meant. Thanks.
Are you talking about job ads on HN? I don't know what you have in mind but from the context it sounds like it must be wrong. If you clarify, I can clarify.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like the key (obvious?) difference between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" is the speaker's transparency about the source of the message. Disclosing who you are and your relationship to the topic: Acceptable. Hiding or obfuscating who you are or pretending to be someone else: Unacceptable.
Being ten or fifty fake personas - pretend people who don't exist - is poisoning the limited capacity information channel that we all have available to interpret the outside world. Bad information drives out good, to paraphrase a classic.
I agree. It also fractures the human capacity for relationship, which already struggles in a forum like this.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#46Does anybody have any recommended marketing firms for these campaigns, aside from Cat@Net mentioned in this article? It has been incredibly hard for me to google, and any PR agency I've worked with isn't equipped to do it. Software firms have been decent but are still developing everything from scratch. They don't have automated ways to manage many profiles at once, so you end up paying for that and then still having…
> Does anybody have any recommended marketing firms for these campaigns, aside from Cat@Net mentioned in this article?
What products are you looking to market?
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#47> she was given access to the company’s internal communications channels
Did she publicize logs from these channels?
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#48This is CRAZY. How the fuck do you explain this level of trolling to your parents! That this is why they shouldn’t repeat neo-Nazi Facebook garbage.
Walk them through the history of Propaganda.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's acceptable depends entirely on the terms of service for each specific social media platform. It's not reasonable to discuss all of social media in aggregate.
What you say is true if I'm running a FaceBook/Twitter/whatever, but I believe the issue here is a bit broader: What do we as a global society believe is an acceptable level of disclosure when voicing opinions that are not our own? Individual platforms can self-regulate (hah!) if they feel the need, but I think many people will have strong feelings on what are and are not acceptable ways of influencing public opinion…
With this stuff there's no such thing as a global society. Any regulations will be imposed by individual countries, or maybe the EU.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#50The solution is not regulate it. The solution is to stop pretending like social media have anything to do with reality.
This. Social Media should be avoided its worse for you than cancer.