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Google has thousands of employees and sock puppets on all social media discussions. It's especially blatant on Reddit.
Google is a charity and everything they do is perfect and for the good of humanity. They've never been involved in massive spying and with monopolistic practices concerning their spammy ads and search engine preference for ebay, amazon, trip advisor and others.
Then you can censor their view very effectively.
Seems like it would be an important public service to game as much online discussion as possible, persistently. Right now, the vulnerability of these discussion media is not detrimental to those running them. Make gameability of discussion media something that is actually visible, and the vulnerabilities will be patched.
Are the sock puppets that frequent HN simply much harder to detect? It often surprises me that HN is not a target for these kinds of people; I like to think that I have a good sense of when this kind of thing is going on, but probably I'm less sophisticated than I think I am.
HN is definitely a target for these kind of people. It has gone so far as high level contacts between the bosses of these kind of people and the stewards to sort things out. That doesn't mean that it has stopped nor does it mean there won't be repetitions. Astroturfing, burying, and derailing all happen. The scariest aspect to me is not those that are paid to do this sort of thing, because I can see their motivation…
Of course, this place isn't immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies. One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for…
Of course, this place isn't immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies. One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for…
> but more visibly with the employees of certain companies. I'm amazed how obvious this is on Reddit now, and always laugh when I bring it up and get down voted to oblivion :) I'm no expert, but it's clear NetFlix has a few thousand users in /r/movies for example.
A very good example of this is the post JFK assassination issue. It's pretty clear to any intellectually honest person that there are some very large issues that were never addressed regarding the assassination, because the CIA purposeful put into action an operation to discredit any alternative theory's as "conspiracy theory" and anyone who talked in that manner was labeled as a crackpot "conspiracy theorist" and then a large campaign to undermine any logical discussion of "conspiracy theory", essentially by putting it, as Chomsky would say, "outside the accepted range of debate".
Wonder why the fourth estate, aka journalism is in such a sad state of affairs? It's because the state has reached (quietly) so far into it that even the handful of real journalist are having a hard time.
They have keep up technologically to keep sources safe, which proves almost impossible these days. They have to deal with pushback from the editors bosses of a glarily political nature, they have to deal with being cut off from sources if they happen to piss off the wrong people with a too-strong story.
This is another reason the surveillance society is so insidious. I have said it before and I will say it again, surveillance, censorship, subtle covert influence of public discourse, are not about security.
It's about control.
A lot of people argue about 1984 vs Brave New World. What I say is that it's a Brave New World, unless you attempt to resist, then it's 1984. This is the state we live in, the real question is "Are the people going to let this happen?"
I'm no longer so reliant on the "long arc of justice", and am getting pretty pessimistic.
Of course, this place isn't immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies. One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for…
If you doubt this, then just criticize Google on HN or Reddit... Google has thousands of employees and sock puppets on all social media discussions. It's especially blatant on Reddit. Google is a charity and everything they do is perfect and for the good of humanity. They've never been involved in massive spying and with monopolistic practices concerning their spammy ads and search engine preference for ebay, amazon,…
If you doubt this, then just criticize Google on HN or Reddit... Google has thousands of employees and sock puppets on all social media discussions. It's especially blatant on Reddit. Google is a charity and everything they do is perfect and for the good of humanity. They've never been involved in massive spying and with monopolistic practices concerning their spammy ads and search engine preference for ebay, amazon,…