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The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
81–90 of 113 posts
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your source is pre-covid. I did a cursory search into their Covid activities and found an expansive report based on an alleged whistleblower[1] and a narrower admission by the Secretary of State for Defense that they > [use] publicly available data, including material shared on social media platforms, to assess UK disinformation trends. It is not to be involved in regulating, policing or even reporting opinion that i…
> Peter Hitchens is a loon Hitchens is certainly out there. But everybody knows that, and expects it. He's a controversialist, and whatever views you have, he'll have written a trenchant article denouncing at least a few of them.
You say that as though it's a good thing. But you could just as well be describing a random number generator.
(But to be explicit once again this does not at all justify using the military against him. But just because he's been wronged doesn't mean his ideas are worth anything)
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Dozens of former national security officials have gone to work for Facebook and Twitter after leaving government service, raising concerns about the influence of their onetime agencies over the social media giants. [0] At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psyc…
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One might consider that the FBI and CIA are the kind of organizations to have people on their payroll who are actually told to go to Facebook and lie to a hiring manager, saying, "I used to work for the CIA." Whose record is it that the person no longer works for the CIA? Only if I blindly trust the word of an organization which is opaque by design do I believe it to be as simple as you profess.
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very good point.
It's a crap argument. We have evidence that certain states -- China, Russia, Israel, Vietnamn, etc. -- employs state-sponsored troll groups. We don't have evidence that most countries use such strategies. It's like claiming that Japan has the worst ninjas since good ninjas don't expose themselves and we haven't heard anything about other countries' ninjas.
you literally just scrolled past several comments with evidence to make this reply. not to mention how naive one's priors must be to think no western actors engage in these activities, given everything else we know about the US espionage apparatus and foreign propaganda efforts
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#85Or, to put it another way, average commenters are fighting against coordinated groups of state actors just to have genuine discussions. And it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space. It's like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.
Russia is known to have loads of trolls on the government payroll. I am under the impression that western governments don't do this but who knows...
>I am under the impression that western governments don't do this but who knows...
Is this sarcasm?
We know the US absolutely does, and targets USAmericans as well.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
https://northwesternlawreview.org/issues/apple-pie-propagand...
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Dozens of former national security officials have gone to work for Facebook and Twitter after leaving government service, raising concerns about the influence of their onetime agencies over the social media giants. [0] At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psyc…
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You think feds & spies openly advertise their allegiances on LinkedIn or something?
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very good point.
It's a crap argument. We have evidence that certain states -- China, Russia, Israel, Vietnamn, etc. -- employs state-sponsored troll groups. We don't have evidence that most countries use such strategies. It's like claiming that Japan has the worst ninjas since good ninjas don't expose themselves and we haven't heard anything about other countries' ninjas.
>We don't have evidence
>we haven't heard anything
Who is "we"?
>Forced teaming: establishes premature trust by association. Examples: "We're some team." and "How are we going to handle this?"
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Peter Hitchens is a loon Hitchens is certainly out there. But everybody knows that, and expects it. He's a controversialist, and whatever views you have, he'll have written a trenchant article denouncing at least a few of them.
You say that as though it's a good thing. But you could just as well be describing a random number generator. (But to be explicit once again this does not at all justify using the military against him. But just because he's been wronged doesn't mean his ideas are worth anything)
> You say that as though it's a good thing. But you could just as well be describing a random number generator.
You're right; I was too elliptical and impersonal. In fact I disagree with nearly all of his opinions; but I enjoy reading his columns, because he's a good rhetorical writer, and because I enjoy him trying to defend the indefensible.
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#89Or, to put it another way, average commenters are fighting against coordinated groups of state actors just to have genuine discussions. And it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space. It's like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.
It's quite wide spread. There were reports about Israel doing it, Russia doing it and now Vietnam. I'm sure it's done by many many more. In Turkey Erdoğan's presidential communications office has budget of 100 million dollars and 30 story building. He has also 11 million registered members and the word on the street is that they are granting jobs based on social media trolling performance and pay for tweets. When Mus…
>Techies like to imagine that they are going to "defeat the government with tech" but they are wrong, the governments can have the tech because they have the money and the power to design the landscape.
IMO some of the most effective government propaganda is stuff that portrays government as inherently bumbling and clueless, unable to engage in effective repression due to sheer incompetence, and effortlessly bested by scrappy kids/activists/etc.
Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon
#90Or, to put it another way, average commenters are fighting against coordinated groups of state actors just to have genuine discussions. And it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space. It's like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.
Yeah, I wonder what conversations of society would have looked like in an alternative universe without any distractors. I would assume a lot different. I once read is that if an activist movement rises they prop a flawed individual, find as much as info as they can, and at an opportune moment they ‘out’ the leader. Apparently this happened with the Occupy movement.
>Apparently this happened with the Occupy movement.
So who ended up being propped up? Who became the leader? I cannot find any solid information about your claim, but I did find lots of vague essays mostly from right-wing blogs/outrage outlets.