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Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

theguardian.com

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Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#211

Post by celeritascelery »

robryan wrote: post #187
celeritascelery wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to see when a new email account tries to send thousands of emails to people they don’t know. But how do you tell the difference between a political activist who just joined Twitter and a troll account? You seem to think this is a trivial problem so I am curious to see your answer.

The number of political activists that are just joining Twitter now and want to start by posting my times a day about the one issue must be small compared to the troll accounts. It even should be relatively easy to come up with a model to predict if someone is an experienced user based on the actions they take on the platform.

Once you come up with this “relatively easy” model I am sure any company would love to pay you good money for it. It’s a pity they never thought of that before.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#212

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

mieseratte wrote: post #146
bduerst wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's weird that the fact Russians targeted also heavily BLM doesn't get attention. They ran the biggest FB page, tons of other on other platform. Mueller pdf is s fascinating read, I suggest everyone to read it. It's not dry at all and has everything for every side in it.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#213

Post by klyrs »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #152
mieseratte wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a tired argument. Like saying Jill Stein is a Russian asset because literally 1 post in 10,000 (from troll farms) mentioned her as a "redirection" effort. Yes, mentioning Sanders is also a way to redirect from voting for Hillary. Suggesting he's somehow accountable or responsible for this is ridiculous though. The only person HRC has to blame for losing is herself. The amount of actual-fake-news where there was…

> compared to the bullshit made up about Trump (paying hookers to pee in a bed Obama slept in, which got REAL mainstream media coverage thousands of times).

This is so absurd. Given the quantity of bullshit, self-incrimination and self-contradiction coming out of his mouth, it's really hard to imagine feeling a need to make up more...

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#214

Post by dragonwriter »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #152
mieseratte wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a tired argument. Like saying Jill Stein is a Russian asset because literally 1 post in 10,000 (from troll farms) mentioned her as a "redirection" effort. Yes, mentioning Sanders is also a way to redirect from voting for Hillary. Suggesting he's somehow accountable or responsible for this is ridiculous though. The only person HRC has to blame for losing is herself. The amount of actual-fake-news where there was…

> Like saying Jill Stein is a Russian asset because literally 1 post in 10,000 (from troll farms) mentioned her as a "redirection" effort.

That's not why Stein is called a Russian asset; they did the same with Sanders, who acknowledged and rejected what they were doing when it was discovered, and wasn't nearly as often labeled that way. Aside from the difference in each candidates response there's other behavioral differences including, well, things like this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/guess-who-came-dinner-fly...

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#215

Post by elboulangero »

stef25 wrote: post #178
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

Apparently FB now prevents certain posts from spreading, making them only visible to the author. An example is one containing "Alex Jones". It's like a shadow ban, except FB will notify the user. Naval Ravikant made a very good point on Joe Rogan where he said that as soon as social media platforms decided to censor content they started a war they can't win because they end up having to chose sides. He said their pos…

> "we're a publishing platform not responsible for the content that's being published"

Can't help but notice that this kind of argument never really worked for torrent platforms.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#216

Post by philwelch »

olau wrote: post #205
jdsully wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people, myself included, see Nuclear as inseparable from climate change and green energy. We could dramatically cut our greenhouse emissions now, with technology we've had since the 1960s. It's really hard not to point out when people start talking about better solar and battery storage that we could be solving this problem right now with tech we already have. Instead our solution to climate change keeps being p…

Well, then wake up. We didn't solve it with nuclear tech, and we won't. It is too expensive because it is so complicated and not very popular to boot. It won't happen. And it prevents you (here I'm not talking about you personally) from recognizing the incredible strides PV and wind turbines have made in the past decades. The IV generation plants people keep talking about didn't happen in time. With the current pace,…

If nuclear isn't happening in time, neither are renewables. Countries like Germany that are transitioning away from nuclear and towards renewables have actually increased their fossil fuel consumption in recent years because renewables just aren't keeping up.

Not to mention that many of the delays and drawbacks of nuclear power are precisely due to the antinuclear movement itself, which imposes barriers and regulations instead of the subsidies that renewables have received.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#217

Post by anigbrowl »

alkonaut wrote: post #148
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Let's hope you're right https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/us/politics/impeachment-r...

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#218

Post by anigbrowl »

yeahforsureman wrote: post #197
jellicle wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess that as of 2019 there is no political party of any size in the western world not using such services. If they have an annual revenue of $1,000,000, they're doing it. Many of them will be doing it through a PR firm to maintain deniability in the event of disclosure. But each and every party is doing it.

No way. Sadly, the sole existence of troll farms is enough to create and reinforce political paranoia. Your message (parent) here, for example, is exactly the kind of stuff I've come to associate with Russian and similar trolling (sowing distrust in institutions etc.)...

I think Jellicle is correct to some degree, which is not to say 'they're all the same'.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#219

Post by AngryData »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #69
Twixes wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

I mean, some people like myself view nuclear power as the only currently known feasible way of satisfying all our power needs into the future, not just to produce clean electrical energy, but to also fuel carbon sequestration efforts and clean chemical and material synthesis. So anytime climate change, green technology, or anything related to such topics come up it is only natural for nuclear power to eventually pop up also.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#220

Post by donw »

momokoko wrote: post #194
president wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're absolutely right. It's frightening that there are so many wrongs happening in society today yet nobody seems to be able to stop them from happening. I'm not sure what has gone wrong here but I suspect it all stems from deep-rooted corruption in our leaders and institutions.

One of the unfortunate side effects of significantly reducing the power of democratically elected governments is that while the government has less power to do damage, it also less power to correct wrongs.

I think it's a pretty far stretch to say that the power of the Federal government has been "significantly reduced" in the past hundred years or so.

Happy to hear a good counter-argument, though...?

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