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The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

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Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#101

Post by tormeh »

bllguo wrote: post #84
bjourne wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you employ hundreds of forum trolls at minimum wage it tends to get out eventually. Of course the US does psyops. It’s the trolling part that’s the question.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#102

Post by somenameforme »

tormeh wrote: post #100
somenameforme wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We absolutely do. This is literally what psychological operations [1] are. In the US each branch of the military even has their own distinct psyop divisions with mottos like "Never Seen, Always Heard." Here's [2] a recruitment video from the Army's 4th Psyop Group [3], entitled "Ghosts in the Machine." It's really well done and, more importantly, not at all subtle about what they do. And now add LLMs into the picture…

Yes, but are they actually forum trolls of the kind Russia employs? Do American soldiers have keyword alerts on Twitter and crowd out certain topics with inane bullshit?

Yip. 'Psychological Operations' makes it all sound sophisticated and high brow, but in the end it's all just poo peddling parades. Recently there were a bunch of news stories about some US psyops accounts that were "discovered" and removed from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and then publicly analyzed. You can find that analysis here. [1] Here's a random media report on the accounts being removed. [2]

The report is very readable, entertaining, and includes pics of the memes, posts, and other things. It also provides some degree of insight into the messaging that the US military psyops teams believe are most effective on an array of topics, including Ukraine. In general though it also really emphasizes the hamfisted nature of propaganda and psyops.

The accounts averaged 2051 tweets per account, with an average of 0.49 likes, and 0.02 retweets. 19% had more than 1,000 followers. The accounts, regardless of where they were feigning to be from, primarily posted from 1200-1800GMT, or 8am-2pm EDT. They also tended to share US propaganda that was translated word-for-word into foreign languages. There were also amusing tells with things like the scripts they were using. The majority of posts were made within the first second of a new minute.

All those accounts also went into overdrive on March 2022.

[1] - https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:nj914nx9540/unheard-v...

[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/25/23322214/us-government-pr...

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#103

Post by realusername »

kaycey2022 wrote: post #44

As a non US citizen, I think this is perfectly justified. I am not convinced that democracy is a universally good form of government when there is little cultural acceptance and adaptation to it. American social media products are probably used as an instrument of propaganda by the US government, or at least have a great potential to be used as such. Foreign governments of any nature are justified in restricting thei…

>. I am not convinced that democracy is a universally good form of government when there is little cultural acceptance and adaptation to it

That's the lies the ruling class in those countries are trying to make you beleive. If it was cultural, they would not need such a tight grip on society to make sure the dictatorship continues, in reality, the power struggle is the same everywhere.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#104

Post by eunos »

NhanH wrote: post #16
eunos wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Prez in Vietname is more or less powerless position. Real power lies in the Central Military Commision and Party General Secretary just like China.

Party Secretary is #1 (always). Prime Minister and President is #2 and #3, with exact power ordering depends on the specific person in the role. Head of Congress is #4 with some distance with the other 3 roles. Supposedly, the top 3 role has almost the same power and that was how we keep dictator in check. All three positions are in the Central Military Commission. China uses a different system, they have a designate…

Nguyễn Phú Trọng was the President, General Secretary and Secretary of the Central Military Commission at the same time (2011-now, pres 2018-2021).

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#105

Post by NhanH »

eunos wrote: post #104
NhanH wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Party Secretary is #1 (always). Prime Minister and President is #2 and #3, with exact power ordering depends on the specific person in the role. Head of Congress is #4 with some distance with the other 3 roles. Supposedly, the top 3 role has almost the same power and that was how we keep dictator in check. All three positions are in the Central Military Commission. China uses a different system, they have a designate…

Nguyễn Phú Trọng was the President, General Secretary and Secretary of the Central Military Commission at the same time (2011-now, pres 2018-2021).

The President of that term died in office. Trọng gave it up the next term. There was questions at the time whether he would, but in the end, he did.

Why wasn't a new President nominated/ elected at the time? I'm pretty sure it was something as simple as dumb succession planning, unless you believe there is something more sinister with the death. Electing a new President in Vietnam is hard, there is a requirement of serving at least two terms in the Politburo before you can take one of the top three seats. Naturally, since it is a kind of up-or-out deal (you are old and very close to retirement age or exceeding it), the people who qualify are the one who are in the seats. And if one of them dies, you literally just runs out of candidates. Not to mention you need a party-wide electors meeting in addition to Congress meeting.

General Secretary is always the Secretary of the Central Military Commission, as the Vietnam People's Army swears absolute loyalty to the Communist party. That has nothing to do with the relative power between high ranking party official (it has obvious effect on the party's control of the military, but that is a different topic).

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#106

Post by kwere »

trasz4 wrote: post #93
mrtksn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It's quite wide spread. There were reports about Israel doing it, Russia doing it and now Vietnam. And of course leaving out USA doesn't make you a shill, right?

It is not cost effective or politically savy at least in the US Region to employ hordes of wumaos, but it could be done through bots or media campaigns, in what we call now the "culture war"

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#107

Post by trasz4 »

kwere wrote: post #106
trasz4 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's quite wide spread. There were reports about Israel doing it, Russia doing it and now Vietnam. And of course leaving out USA doesn't make you a shill, right?

It is not cost effective or politically savy at least in the US Region to employ hordes of wumaos, but it could be done through bots or media campaigns, in what we call now the "culture war"

The culture war was always there, you just see it now because your media can no longer be censored by capital like they used to.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#108

Post by raxxorraxor »

flangola7 wrote: post #99
CapstanRoller wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act

The US undoubtedly engages in widespread propaganda, but I think they use more "open" methods. They won't clandestinely pretend to be your local neighbor on a Facebook group, but they will gladly plaster enticing high production quality recruitment ads on every surface and openly foot the bill for the American tanks and fighter jets in the next action movie. The funny thing about propaganda is that it is still largel…

I think the main vehicle is closeness to journalists, who get certain benefits regarding their profession and who are groomed to report in a certain way.

You could really see it working before the Iraq war in the US. It was unpopular until media really hammered it in with weapons of mass destruction and the allegedly imminent danger.

Not exclusive to the US, but western countries tend to keep key figures in the media very close aside from the more naive reporters.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#109

Post by bjourne »

bllguo wrote: post #84
bjourne wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You put words in my mouth by changing the quantifier from "western governments" to "no western actors". And yes we do know a lot about how the US conducts espionage, yet we don't have evidence of state-backed troll armies.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#110

Post by eunos »

NhanH wrote: post #105
eunos wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nguyễn Phú Trọng was the President, General Secretary and Secretary of the Central Military Commission at the same time (2011-now, pres 2018-2021).

The President of that term died in office. Trọng gave it up the next term. There was questions at the time whether he would, but in the end, he did. Why wasn't a new President nominated/ elected at the time? I'm pretty sure it was something as simple as dumb succession planning, unless you believe there is something more sinister with the death. Electing a new President in Vietnam is hard, there is a requirement of s…

Well in CN as Zhao Ziyang learned, Chairman of Central Military Comission > General Secretary of Party.
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