The solution is not regulate it. The solution is to stop pretending like social media have anything to do with reality.
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Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
141–150 of 333 posts
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do nuclear power trolls look like? I support nuclear power (instead of fossil fuels and in addition to renewables) and, sadly, I haven't got a cent from the nuclear industry yet.
You will see "we need nuclear power because it's the greenest/most renewable/etc... energy" type posts dispersed all through social media almost anywhere there's a discussion about climate change, renewable energy, etc... Even if the original topic was only tangentially related it will get changed. A post with puppy photos can turn into a climate change discussion because "nuclear power is so green". It's so common n…
Let's run with your idea and let's say that there are clandestine efforts to promote the idea of nuclear power generation in the public -- cui bono?
Who benefits? Are there any major initiatives in the nuclear industry? Are any new plants starting to be built?
All I've seen is a bunch of plants that have horrible cost overruns and no fixed time line for being finished.
That doesn't sound like something that you'd want to raise public awareness about if you were in the nuclear industry.
So who does this kind of campaign benefit if not the nuclear industry? It doesn't seem to benefit the oil and gas industry who are without a doubt the masters and originators of propaganda in this market. It doesn't benefit solar and wind generators -- so who?
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Given how pro-Hillary and anti-Sanders that sub became overnight I was there for that too. It literally was flip of a switch speed. One of the big turning points I saw regarding the election.
I'm not sure when you're referencing, but Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites.
He was referring to just how pro-Sanders/Anti-Hillary Reddit was up until the electron primaries. Right after Hillary got the nomination in 2016, it turned to Pro-Hillary. /r/politics was particularly bad on all of that. The first day after the election was the first time any news about the private email server was even allowed on /r/politics.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#144> “For them it was just work and that’s it.” Is it? If someone's job is spewing cleverly provocative, disruptive, toxic, and intentionally negative messages all day ... does that edgy skill and behaviour not leak into their home or personal life? I understand, these workers need jobs and I'm sure some get quite proficient at trolling. But my gut says there will be personal side effects from reinforcing and working yo…
Yeah, it's easy to profess that it's "just a job," but one carries one's work into one's private life, and ideological discourse. It's well-understood by Marxists how the mode of production determines the cultural superstructure[1] (and vice-versa). 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
> It's well-understood by Marxists how the mode of production determines the cultural superstructure[1] (and vice-versa).
It's not "understood," it's a sociological theory. Hardly hard science.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once went to a meeting of an actual full-blown cult. It was a very curious evening. The first thing they did was reassure everyone - slightly nervously - that they weren't a cult. "You'll see us called a cult online, but we're not a cult. Ha ha. Definitely not a cult. Certainly not. Oh no." This denial sounds rather similar.
Reminds me of when my friend took me to a MLM get together (aka Sales Pitch)
It's not a pyramid, it's an upward funnel!
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Given how pro-Hillary and anti-Sanders that sub became overnight I was there for that too. It literally was flip of a switch speed. One of the big turning points I saw regarding the election.
I'm not sure when you're referencing, but Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites.
> but Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites.
Weird, IMHO Hillary and the Democrat party really seemed to be the one's doing the dividing.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The week after the election was interesting because the trolls didn't have new marching orders. So it was suddenly just random people.
Exactly. It was weird, a stark contrast to the months up before it. All of a sudden the political subs were... reasonable. I’d love to see a little more research into pre/post event stats.
> All of a sudden the political subs were... reasonable.
Yeah... no. It went full "Not My President" overnight.
Hell, not even overnight. It went full "Not My President" that very night.
And if you think that's bad, had to deal with brass at work (fintech) proclaiming that we needed to spend an insane amount of capital in preparation for the record trade volume we would need to process because the markets were going to collapse.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#148What this article fails to mention: there was recently a case discovered where one of the clients of these troll farms was... Ministry of Justice. They used to slander judges who were not in the political line of thought of the previous / current leading party. The knowledge of this was as high up as Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the man who appears to be driving the whole country from the back seat. One of many, many articles…
I can't say it surprises me. But I think by now every government is using such farms. I find it difficult to believe otherwise based on recent FCC issues ( https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-f... ). Yes, sadly, I am invoking everyone is doin' it.
If a party did that in a country where voters respond appropriately to this kind of thing, that political party would be wiped out for a generation.
If a party manages to dupe people into thinking their populist cause is important enough to see past the use of troll factories for message control, then that I think says a lot about the health of a democracy. I can imagine this happening in Poland, Hungary or perhaps even Italy, but not in that many places in the EU apart from those.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has largely solved the spam problem for end users. What I can't figure out is why platforms like Facebook and Twitter couldn't mark these sort of posts as, essentially, spam, by the same sort of rules and heuristics as email spam. Why can't they look at the metadata of verified troll-farm-generated clickbait/junk/spam/fake news, and make their own filters, and demote that content? Simple. Because they're makin…
I think you’re trivializing the difficulty in categorizing the low quality, and extremely brief, comments of social media. Go look at a political subreddit, or some controversial tweet. There’s little conversation or context. Most users could be bots. Google often has the advantage of having hard (url) or soft (product/key word mention) links that point to something extremely rare and “unimportant”. Everyone is bitch…
> I think you’re trivializing the difficulty in categorizing the low quality, and extremely brief, comments of social media. Go look at a political subreddit, or some controversial tweet. There’s little conversation or context. Most users could be bots.
Never mind Google, most people are unable to recognize when they are behaving in a bot-like manner themselves...and if you point it out to them, in my experience 90%+ of the time they will become hostile and double down on their clearly not correct statements.
EDIT: Which is often reflected in willingness to entertain or debate ideas, as well as voting patterns. But alas, it seems I am done on HN for the day, due to "posting too fast".
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#150The Russian troll factory meme must not be playing very well anymore!