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Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

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Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#81
post #49

I'm not sure how alarmed I am by this. I certainly have seen this in action on Wikipedia at least, if not on the scale described, but I have little doubt it occurs and I can think of a couple events whose online conversations show evidence of this sort of manipulation. To some degree I admit, when I see the overwhelming online conversation swaying in one direction, it does influence. On the other hand, partially beca…

US gov. actually admitted that it has a trolling network - it used to be called "viral peace". They claim it operates on "terrorist websites". And of course they give no definition of "terrorist websites" - But I think it's safe to assume reddit, twitter, facebook are terrorist websites.

They also have some openly governmental accounts called "Think Again Turn Away", like

https://twitter.com/ThinkAgain_DOS https://www.facebook.com/ThinkAgainTurnAway

They used to directly engage in debate with people more, while now they seem to have switched to a more posting-only style.

Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#82
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his comment also may have sailed right over your head. That or you're playing dumb. Either way, it's not working.

No, your face is a mashed potatoes.

Still not working... And that grammar...

Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#83
post #65
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to detect a machine, astroturfing now is mostly a manual process. Recognizing the same topics repeated is enough, even if it happens over time. The longer the time between posts, the less effective the campaign. The less cohesive the topic, the less effective the campaign. This already exists somewhat, machine or human is almost irrelevant.

I had an anti-Obamacare Republican canvasser show up at my door during election season, and ended up debating for about an hour on the front porch. Though it was an enjoyable and intelligent discussion (far from the stereotype of the Tea Party), I couldn't help but realize that I effected a 1-to-1 "time attack" that drained his ability to canvass voters who actually had a snowball's chance of voting for his candidate…

This is one of the major goals of trolling -- trying to get someone to waste a lot of time trying to convince someone who isn't actually interested goes side by side with trying to get someone to waste a lot of emotion on someone who doesn't actually care. Part of what makes it so effective is that it can be hard to distinguish from genuine concern (ie, you found it an enjoyable and intelligent discussion, but a troll might act the same as you did purely to waste the canvasser's time and not actually care about the topic at hand.)

One of my rules is that, if someone seems to be trying to get me to invest considerably more time or energy than they're investing, I'll only engage if I find the process of researching/writing about a given topic valuable in and of itself.

Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#84
post #73

I've made this point before about search engine ranking. Most of the popularity signals used by search engines can be, and are, faked. I have two papers on this: "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" (2012), or how Google's use of social signals backfired, badly. http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf How Google's use of social signals backfired, badly. "'Places' spam - the new fro…

> the gay agenda

I'm not sure if you know about this, but this is typically a term of derision and a strawman by anti-gay and homophobic groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_agenda

Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#85
post #84
post #73

I've made this point before about search engine ranking. Most of the popularity signals used by search engines can be, and are, faked. I have two papers on this: "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" (2012), or how Google's use of social signals backfired, badly. http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf How Google's use of social signals backfired, badly. "'Places' spam - the new fro…

> the gay agenda I'm not sure if you know about this, but this is typically a term of derision and a strawman by anti-gay and homophobic groups. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_agenda

+1; there are also lots of other marginalized groups of people who stand to lose something if aliases cannot be used.

Edit: for example: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/faceboo...

Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#86
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.

I use the word "dodge" and that is one of a number of things people do to avoid having to deal with information they find difficult to process. A while back, I decided to compile a list of these behaviors seen on a smaller, guilty pleasure type of site I enjoy. Here are the major ones seen very frequently: 1. Subject change 2. False comparison 3. Claim of too many opponents 4. Silence 5. Claim to either be a member o…

> "What actually happened was the behaviors intensified!"

I've seen it work both ways. Sometimes, being direct about labeling and pointing out bad behavior shames the worst actors, and educates people who had been doing it accidentally. Other times, it simply becomes another tool for the worst actors to use -- just another way to attack. (See also: the fallacy fallacy.)

In my experience, the biggest factors in whether things seem to go uphill or downhill after pointing out versions of rhetorical dodging/avoidance are:

(1) does the community have good examples of people doing it right? Shaming bad behavior only works in conjunction with modeling good behavior. (This is one reason I dislike HN's hiding comment scores -- there's a visual indicator for what makes a bad comment, but no visual indicator for what makes an excellent comment. "Top comment on a post" is a fairly weak signal as it misses excellent child/grandchild/deeper comments.)

(2) do the moderators have "soft power" to go with their "hard power" -- that is, are they respected enough that they can successfully ask people to change their behavior without needing to threaten a ban?

(3) when the moderators (or downvotes or flags) come in, are they fair? Do they tend to target bad actors from all sides, or do they let Green Team's jerks get away with behavior that Purple Team's jerks get banned for?

(4) is the community as a whole already burned out? It can be much harder to change behaviors when people stopped caring long ago.

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If I may add more labels to your list:

- "Rapid Deadline". Asking a question, making an argument, or posting a source/article and then making character attacks on opponents for having not answered even though not enough time has passed to reasonably expect answers. Or pretending like your point is agreed upon simply because it didn't get any responses in the first few minutes, and then arguing as if that point is now unassailable. This is particularly dangerous when one makes an argument that can take some time/thought/patience to respond to. (The only person I have blocked on FaceBook is an old friend who resorted to this tactic one too many times -- he'd post an article and then follow it up with insults about how I hadn't answered 3 minutes later, when the article took a good 10 minutes to read. Then he'd send private messages asking why I hadn't responded, and accusing me of cowardice.)

- "Not the real position". Using reasons you don't actually believe to advocate for something, such that even if all of those reasons are shot down, there's no possibility of changing your mind because your other, secret reasons haven't been answered.

- "Secret knowledge" (this might relate to your #5). Basically, you can't understand this unless you're of a particular race, gender, economic class, educational background, religion, etc. so I won't even attempt to explain it. (Often comes with statements like "check your privilege" or "alternate reality".)

- "I read your post backwards." (I had someone actually say this to me once!) Really, any sort of response that treats an opposing position as meaning something completely unrelated to what it was intended to mean. The classic line-by-line response sometimes has this property -- every sentence gets responded to, but somehow all of the really important points end up getting ignored.

Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#87
post #7

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…

One can't also tell the difference between subterfuge trolling and plain up trolling. It would be nice to use machine learning in a multidimensional conversation scoring system so that tired hollow techniques at conversation manipulation would fade in to the background noise.

Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#88
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good influence won't simply be support for/against, but deflecting each viewpoint into a framework that upholds the status quo (making it impotent) and causing infighting between people who would otherwise find common ground. The NSA doesn't influence standards by sockpuppeting "no crypto". They concern troll to add endless complexity, making implementations buggier and rarer. In the HN NSA threads, the easiest examp…

So, you should be able to provide an example of an NSA thread on HN where a sockpuppet diverted the conversation to infighting between people otherwise sharing common ground. I don't think standards groups need a lot of help concern-trolling complexity into standards. The exact same force is exerted on more benign standards; watch HTML for example. Here's a rebuttal framework: select a NIST crypto standard and show a…

I often think your elequonce with the keyboard and Spock like logical argumentation sets people off by dropping 'cite bombs like debate star.

Re: Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

#90
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.

I use the word "dodge" and that is one of a number of things people do to avoid having to deal with information they find difficult to process. A while back, I decided to compile a list of these behaviors seen on a smaller, guilty pleasure type of site I enjoy. Here are the major ones seen very frequently: 1. Subject change 2. False comparison 3. Claim of too many opponents 4. Silence 5. Claim to either be a member o…

Competitive debate is oration and rhetoric. It isn't necessarily pure logical argument, one employs theatrics and logical fallacy where they can get away with it. It is about winning, not shedding more light on the truth.
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