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Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

theguardian.com

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Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#91

Post by wpietri »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #54
nkozyra wrote: post #43

This 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.

Google has largely solved the spam problem for end users. What I can't figure out is why platforms like Facebook and Twitter couldn't mark these sort of posts as, essentially, spam, by the same sort of rules and heuristics as email spam. Why can't they look at the metadata of verified troll-farm-generated clickbait/junk/spam/fake news, and make their own filters, and demote that content? Simple. Because they're makin…

In addition to the making-money thing, I think it's often a class-interest thing. As a recipient of the harms of paid disinformation, I'm perfectly happy to ban it all, and with stiff legal penalties. But if you're a billionaire (or work for one), then banning paid disinformation means you're giving up a tool of power, and taking power away from the people you regularly hobnob with.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#92

Post by Gibbon1 »

kop316 wrote: post #59
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #56

It is not just foreign governments using paid trolls. Apparently Hilary Clinton used paid trolls against Bernie Sanders in 2016. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-troll... >Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton…

Yep. That was really bad on Reddit during the election. If you even broached certain topics about Hillary, it was downvoted/flagged right away. Then the day after the election, Those topics actually came up.

The week after the election was interesting because the trolls didn't have new marching orders. So it was suddenly just random people.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#93

Post by Amezarak »

darth_skywalker wrote: post #79
lucideer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I see the effective difference between bad faith domestic interference in democratic process and foreign interference in democratic process. Both have the same end result.

On the other hand, politicians have been trying to manipulate voters for centuries - it seems like a new danger that foreign governments are now trying to manipulate voters.

It isn’t new at all. Foreign countries have been doing it since the invention of democracy.

You can see this very vividly demonstrated in any classical histories, like Thucydides, all the way up through history, with all types of elections, from actual every-single-citizen democracies to the just-the-Electors HRE.

This is also true in American history from the very beginning, when French interests, for example, worked against Adams. Or more famously, when the British strongly intervened to ensure the re-election of FDR.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/when-a-forei...

The Kennedy election was also famously the target of Russian interference.

https://time.com/4851449/trump-jr-russian-kennedy-history/

Simply put, there’s no foreign country in world history that wasn’t or isn’t interfering in domestic elections they have any kind of interest in. It would be very foolish not to. It’s a game that has gone on since the invention of democracy and will always go on, because every incentive is aligned with it and there are no norms against it.

In general, you have to be very careful when people claim something is new and unprecedented. Sometimes they just don’t know and lack the necessary context, but often they’re constructing a narrative that relies on historical innocence/ignorance of relatively mundane detail. This has been a major problem with our news media that has been getting worse for decades: they don’t do the very important job of putting things into historical or even a current cultural context. Instead, they create narratives that are easy, get people fired up and consuming more news, and often inadvertently (or sometimes advertently) serve a partisan purpose.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#94

Post by alexis_fr »

ineedasername wrote: post #65
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #56

It is not just foreign governments using paid trolls. Apparently Hilary Clinton used paid trolls against Bernie Sanders in 2016. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-troll... >Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton…

US campaigns doing it is, while still bad, is vastly different. One is an issue of sleazy election campaigns. The other is a matter of foreign interference with a country's fundamental sovereignty.

If a country’s citizen are so receptive to foreign influence, then those citizen are not at the required level to vote in a democracy, or the ideas are really good. We all know the flaws of democracy, but foreign interference through ideas is either a problem of the homeland having ideas that should be repelled, or really gullible people. Raising education levels is the solution, not asking other countries to « not interfere ».

Especially with the track record of the CIA.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#95

Post by [deleted] »

ineedasername wrote: post #89
lucideer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I see the effective difference between bad faith domestic interference in democratic process and foreign interference in democratic process. Both have the same end result.

Well, one of them is illegal. Also, the foreign variety advances the possibly incompatible goals of the foreign country while the domestic version tends to be between individuals with differing but legitimate visions of how the country should be run.

[deleted]

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#96

Post by inetknght »

ineedasername wrote: post #89
lucideer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I see the effective difference between bad faith domestic interference in democratic process and foreign interference in democratic process. Both have the same end result.

Well, one of them is illegal. Also, the foreign variety advances the possibly incompatible goals of the foreign country while the domestic version tends to be between individuals with differing but legitimate visions of how the country should be run.

> Well, one of them is illegal.

I would argue that both of them are illegal.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#98

Post by wpietri »

dpc_pw wrote: post #31

The solution is not regulate it. The solution is to stop pretending like social media have anything to do with reality.

The notion that the online world is deeply disconnected from the offline one strikes me as hopelessly ancient. It was certainly true for me when I was a kid calling BBSes from my basement. It's manifestly untrue for me now that I conduct most of my business and much of my recreation via video call, email, and social media tools.

It has been a gradual change, of course. But if I were to pick a date where your notion became wrong, it'd be June 29, 2007. With the launch of the iPhone, the internet forever stopped being the thing inside the big box on your desk. Once it was in our pockets (and very often right in our hands), it stopped being cyberspace and became everyday life.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#99

Post by philwelch »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #69
Twixes wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do nuclear power trolls look like? I support nuclear power (instead of fossil fuels and in addition to renewables) and, sadly, I haven't got a cent from the nuclear industry yet.

You will see "we need nuclear power because it's the greenest/most renewable/etc... energy" type posts dispersed all through social media almost anywhere there's a discussion about climate change, renewable energy, etc... Even if the original topic was only tangentially related it will get changed. A post with puppy photos can turn into a climate change discussion because "nuclear power is so green". It's so common n…

Climate change is an issue that people talk about a lot, and nuclear power is a carbon-neutral form of energy, so it might just be a relevant and popular argument around the circles you frequent.

If I had to guess at any motivation other than a lot of people actually liking nuclear power, it would probably be that nuclear power is one of the few controversies where a reasonably intelligent person can easily grasp a series of basic arguments and then virtue-signal about being more scientifically literate than the unwashed masses. It's basically the same social dynamic that used to motivate the type of people who argued with creationists and climate change deniers.

It's also the Generically Dumbest Conspiracy Theory On The Internet to say "everybody who disagrees with me is a paid shill". People on the internet tend to hold and express opinions because it's an emotionally compelling thing to do, not because they're being paid off by Westinghouse or George Soros or whoever. It's literally an accusation you're making without evidence--I could just as easily suggest that maybe YOU'RE a shill for the photovoltaic industry? ;)

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#100

Post by cortesoft »

9HZZRfNlpR wrote: post #24

Reminds me 18th century Paris where professional applauders and influencers were paid to influence the crowd. Or the retro seo trick where you ask a question on yahoo questions so you can answer it with another account to backlink "relevant" website. Literally nothing new, internet has of course changed the scale and took away the monopoly from newspapers and tv.

Sure, it is not a new problem, but we have to solve it again, and perhaps with a different solution given the new medium.
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