Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 333 posts

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#201

Post by shubb »

nitwit005 wrote: post #175
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…

If you manually type up an email with false political claims and send it to a gmail/yahoo mail account, it'll likely go through. The spam blocking they do is designed to eliminate unwanted bulk mailings from automated systems, not some one off bit of content from an individual.

Yes and no.

If it is reported by a recipient using the report button most email providers have then your email host gets a black mark in various databases. With repeat reports over time, more and more of thier legitimate customers stuff gets filtered.

That means your email host is incentivised to find and shut down spam accounts, ideally before they start sending mail. Register a bunch of accounts from one computer or from a proxy? Closed.

You could get around this with your own smtp server buuut... If you send a lot of reported emails your home isp will chuck you. They don't want thier ip block blacklisted. Your cloud smtp spam server will be pulled by amazon and they won't let someone who seems to be you create a new account.

So yes, you can send a few manually written emails and send them to a couple people at a time, but anything with wider reach will be shut down rapidly at various levels.

Meanwhile, you can script create thousands of twitter bot accounts with obvious bot names and... If they are looking for them, they aren't looking harder than they are being made to.

I guess this is a strong argument for federated Internet infrastructure. Everyone is incentivised to play nice because thier partners can cut them off.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#202

Post by mistermann »

bduerst wrote: post #199
mistermann wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It comes from the federal indictment of the Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency in February 2016, in which the IRA would “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them.)” This has been confirmed with research by independent media analysts like Johnathan Albright. There's a good summary here: https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/what-we-know-about-th…

There is no evidence in there, only claims with a healthy peppering of qualification or misleadingly speculative terms like "alleged", "according to", "supports the idea", "believed to be", Russian-"linked", etc.

If you look carefully, you might even notice there's not even an attempt to provide any evidence. Like any other article on this topic, it just presents the claims as if evidence has been provided. But there is none, only allegations, and "believed to be" based on easily spoofable attributes.

I'm not denying all of this was the Russians, I'm just pointing out that I've never seen any actual evidence, or encountered anyone who was able to provide me anything that is more than narrative based allegations, completely devoid of evidence.

I in no way expect to change your mind, I am simply stating my understanding of what is actually known (and published) versus what is speculation.

I likely won't be able to reply again due to going against the grain, but if you can post any actual evidence I promise to read it and adjust my beliefs accordingly. If posting a link to a multi-hundred page document, please include some hint as to what page some actual evidence exists on as 100% of the people I've encountered online who have taken this approach have all for some reason decided to not reveal where these shocking proofs that they've certainly personally read can be found in the document, for some strange reason.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#203

Post by thinkcontext »

Twixes wrote: post #62
RobertRoberts wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Here's a documented example of Entergy paying people to pack a public hearing on building a power plant (not nuclear).

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nola.com/news/article_33443...

Astroturfing is incredibly common, it's part of many public relations firms standard services. In person actors are obviously more expensive than their online equivalent but it's all just viewed as a tool for a campaign.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#204

Post by beerandt »

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…

I think a big part of Google's solution has to do with the number of recipients of a message with a particular hash.

Whereas social media doesn't really have a to: list. By design it's broadcast. That puts a major limitation on using as similar solution.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#205

Post by olau »

jdsully wrote: post #190
RobertRoberts wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a discussion is about halloween costumes and then another person asks a pointed question about [material/structure/use/etc...] and then devolves into nearly perfect corporate speak supporting [sponsored industry]. No big deal. But if this happens frequently on a wide range of topics, on a regular basis it gets to a point where a rational person has to question the validity of the information source. Edit: clarity

Many people, myself included, see Nuclear as inseparable from climate change and green energy. We could dramatically cut our greenhouse emissions now, with technology we've had since the 1960s. It's really hard not to point out when people start talking about better solar and battery storage that we could be solving this problem right now with tech we already have. Instead our solution to climate change keeps being p…

Well, then wake up. We didn't solve it with nuclear tech, and we won't. It is too expensive because it is so complicated and not very popular to boot. It won't happen. And it prevents you (here I'm not talking about you personally) from recognizing the incredible strides PV and wind turbines have made in the past decades.

The IV generation plants people keep talking about didn't happen in time. With the current pace, we're at least ten years from commercial roll out, and at that point there's no market left for something that needs to run 24/7 to be competitive. Wind turbines and solar are falling in price YoY.

I'm afraid even your "We could dramatically cut ... now" is hyperbole. Nuclear power plants take many years to plan and build.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#207

Post by 2sk21 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #129
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.

Neal Stephenson's latest book sorta deals with this. One way the characters in the book got around the huge signal to noise problem was by using editors who were paid to filter it out. Different people could afford different qualities of editors and that had effects on society. It's a pretty small part of the book, but it's very interesting.

This was in the book Anathem and I agree that it was one of the most intriguing ideas (and there were many in Anathem!).

An earlier comment I made about this very point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554592

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#208

Post by starik36 »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #153
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.

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.

How it it quarantined? /r/OurPresident/ routinely shows up on /r/all and I never signed up for it or anything.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#209

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

yeahforsureman wrote: post #197
jellicle wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess that as of 2019 there is no political party of any size in the western world not using such services. If they have an annual revenue of $1,000,000, they're doing it. Many of them will be doing it through a PR firm to maintain deniability in the event of disclosure. But each and every party is doing it.

No way. Sadly, the sole existence of troll farms is enough to create and reinforce political paranoia. Your message (parent) here, for example, is exactly the kind of stuff I've come to associate with Russian and similar trolling (sowing distrust in institutions etc.)...

But you have to be extremely naive to not believe it. Work somewhere near marketing and you realize everything is shilled upon you. The politicians have used these tricks hundreds of years ago, things are just different with a new platform.

Have you thought about the idea that you yourself are a victim of a marketing department if you believe every criticism is related to Russian campaigns?

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#210

Post by RandallBrown »

2sk21 wrote: post #207
RandallBrown wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neal Stephenson's latest book sorta deals with this. One way the characters in the book got around the huge signal to noise problem was by using editors who were paid to filter it out. Different people could afford different qualities of editors and that had effects on society. It's a pretty small part of the book, but it's very interesting.

This was in the book Anathem and I agree that it was one of the most intriguing ideas (and there were many in Anathem!). An earlier comment I made about this very point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554592

I had totally forgotten about that part of Anathem!

Stephenson has done a pretty amazing job at extrapolating the near future. I'm not sure if the idea of a crypto currency existed before he wrote Cryptonomicon, but that was 10 years before Bitcoin launched.

Post reply on HN