Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
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Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#2I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it.
Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual messages. The payload so to say.
In particular, when Russian trolls promote both sides in some divisive foreign domestic issue, it's not to "spread chaos", but to gain a foot in the door to promote their actual messages, which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.
Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#3[flagged]
Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#4I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it. Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual mess…
There's a meme that most "nationalist" Twitter/X posters in the UK are actually from South Asia, and only doing it because for people in low-income countries the Twitter payments are a viable source of income.
I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being Indian people pretending to be British
Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#5I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it. Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual mess…
Who of credit has claimed otherwise, that dictators spread dissent as an end rather than as a means?
Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#6I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it. Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual mess…
> when Russian trolls promote both sides
Perhaps projection? It is perfectly valid to have different opinions. "Russian trolls" are not some sort of uniform centralized group, that gets directions what to "promote". Some people just have opinions, and do stuff out of conviction, not to get reward.
Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#7Canada may not have laws against this, but some countries might classify this as "subversive activity harmful to the nation". That is normally punished by imprisonment, losing the right to conduct business and hold public office.
Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#8I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it. Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual mess…
There's a meme that most "nationalist" Twitter/X posters in the UK are actually from South Asia, and only doing it because for people in low-income countries the Twitter payments are a viable source of income. I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being India…
X famously implemented a feature that revelaed where the posters were from. Sure you can use a VPN, but Musk changed the rules all of a sudden and exposed a lot of accounts posting about issues from other countries.
Twitter may have a lot of faults, but they're ahead of Facebook on this one.
Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#9[flagged]
Let’s put that to the test. Here’s an entire article accusing her of not being Albertan. Where’s the corresponding outrage about xenophobia against this person?
Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
#10I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it. Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual mess…
> when Russian trolls promote both sides Perhaps projection? It is perfectly valid to have different opinions. "Russian trolls" are not some sort of uniform centralized group, that gets directions what to "promote". Some people just have opinions, and do stuff out of conviction, not to get reward.
There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency