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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

#151

Post by pawelk »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #18

What 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…

It was definitely a case of leaking sensitive info to an on-line "troll", who then published it via Twitter and got this re-tweeted by shady followers, but in this particular case it was not a farm (as in trolling as a service), it was an individual with personal connections to some of the Ministry of Justice officials.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#152

Post by whamlastxmas »

mieseratte wrote: post #146
bduerst wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure when you're referencing, but Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites.

> but Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites. Weird, IMHO Hillary and the Democrat party really seemed to be the one's doing the dividing.

It's a tired argument. Like saying Jill Stein is a Russian asset because literally 1 post in 10,000 (from troll farms) mentioned her as a "redirection" effort. Yes, mentioning Sanders is also a way to redirect from voting for Hillary. Suggesting he's somehow accountable or responsible for this is ridiculous though.

The only person HRC has to blame for losing is herself. The amount of actual-fake-news where there was total bullshit made up about her was nearly non-existent, and especially so when compared to the bullshit made up about Trump (paying hookers to pee in a bed Obama slept in, which got REAL mainstream media coverage thousands of times).

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#153

Post by whamlastxmas »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #138
whamlastxmas wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also funny because one of the /r/politics rules was that you were not allowed to accuse someone of shilling. I just checked now and it's still one of the top rules. Given how pro-Hillary and anti-Sanders that sub became overnight, it seems that they were wanting to subdue the commentary on the proven paid influence HRC had.

> Given how pro-Hillary and anti-Sanders that sub became overnight I was there for that too. It literally was flip of a switch speed. One of the big turning points I saw regarding the election.

It was EXTREMELY pro-Sanders for a very long time. The entirety of reddit was extremely pro-Sanders. I have to believe reddit owners/admins were complicit in this shift because it was so overwhelming and even today, dissent is extremely difficult. The most notable pro-Sanders sub outside his boring official campaign one(chapotraphouse) is quarantined.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#154

Post by mieseratte »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #152
mieseratte wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites. Weird, IMHO Hillary and the Democrat party really seemed to be the one's doing the dividing.

It's a tired argument. Like saying Jill Stein is a Russian asset because literally 1 post in 10,000 (from troll farms) mentioned her as a "redirection" effort. Yes, mentioning Sanders is also a way to redirect from voting for Hillary. Suggesting he's somehow accountable or responsible for this is ridiculous though. The only person HRC has to blame for losing is herself. The amount of actual-fake-news where there was…

> Like saying Jill Stein is a Russian asset because literally 1 post in 10,000 (from troll farms) mentioned her as a "redirection" effort.

Therein lies a good point I routinely use to befuddle, is how do you know these trolls are working on behalf of someone for their benefit, or working on behalf of the opposition as a way to attempt to discredit?

Attribution is hard.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#155

Post by zajd »

mieseratte wrote: post #144
rexpop wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's easy to profess that it's "just a job," but one carries one's work into one's private life, and ideological discourse. It's well-understood by Marxists how the mode of production determines the cultural superstructure[1] (and vice-versa). 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure

> It's well-understood by Marxists how the mode of production determines the cultural superstructure[1] (and vice-versa). It's not "understood," it's a sociological theory. Hardly hard science.

Who said anything about hard science? Just because something is well-understood by a group of people doesn't mean it has to have some sort of scientific basis to have any validity.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#156

Post by plughs »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #58
Shivetya wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anyone with a vested interest on any side of an argument is a candidate for these types of services. we can all go pick the groups we don't like, paint with that broad brush, but in the end we need to realize that all sides do this and we need to be aware. with the internet comes a lot of freedom and this is part of the price of having it because you can bet there is a politician waiting in the wings who will ask you…

I disagree that all sides do this. Some sides simply have no money or resources to hire professional trolls. For example home owners that do not want a nuclear reactor in their backyard are not likely candidates for troll farms, but huge energy companies (or whomever) are.

Though one thing we learned from the last election is that troll farms can push extreme views on both sides of an issue just to encourage division.

If you believe all pro-nuclear-energy people are extremist environmental nuts, or all anti-nuclear-energy are anti-science luddites, then you've got a lot of people who are going to be easy to manipulate, since they won't ever entertain any argument from the other side.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#157

Post by mistermann »

bduerst wrote: post #140
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given how pro-Hillary and anti-Sanders that sub became overnight I was there for that too. It literally was flip of a switch speed. One of the big turning points I saw regarding the election.

I'm not sure when you're referencing, but Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites.

This is news to me, are you able to cite any specific evidence? (Not vague allegations or assertions of fact, but rather actual, specific, somewhat confirmable evidence.)

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#158

Post by braindead_in »

nomel wrote: post #61
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you’re trivializing the difficulty in categorizing the low quality, and extremely brief, comments of social media. Go look at a political subreddit, or some controversial tweet. There’s little conversation or context. Most users could be bots. Google often has the advantage of having hard (url) or soft (product/key word mention) links that point to something extremely rare and “unimportant”. Everyone is bitch…

Thee larger problem is factual accuracy. With all the propaganda going around, it is hard to find the truth. Any attempt to classify such opinions will inevitably further a propaganda.

As someone said, we live in strange timeline where comedians are more trustworthy than politicians.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#159

Post by bduerst »

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.

>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.

So, Quora?

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#160

Post by jtuente »

skybrian wrote: post #38
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.

This is sort of like saying the solution to gambling is not to gamble. I mean, on one level, that works for many people, but on another, Las Vegas isn't going anywhere.

I think it's more akin to "the solution to gambling is to understand that you won't win". On one level you have a small group of people who know precisely how gambling works and can exploit it in limited circumstances, but on the standard level, you have the general population that's just playing games with a chance of winning money.
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