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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

#291

Post by raxxorrax »

madaxe_again wrote: post #287
raxxorrax wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismissing opinions because they are allegedly victims of trolls is a far greater problem in my perspective.

I visited an extraordinarily polluted steelworks city a few years ago. Even on a clear day, the air was orange, and as you entered the city you noticed the colour wash out of everything slightly, and the horizon over the estuary blurred out to a drab orange smear. I mention this, as when I mentioned it to the locals, none of them understood what I was talking about. You see, when your entire reality glows orange, tha…

Agreed. We just would need to figure out who is standing in the clouds.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#292

Post by anjc »

braindead_in wrote: post #158
nomel wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thee larger problem is factual accuracy. With all the propaganda going around, it is hard to find the truth. Any attempt to classify such opinions will inevitably further a propaganda. As someone said, we live in strange timeline where comedians are more trustworthy than politicians.

> With all the propaganda going around, it is hard to find the truth

If bot/organized posts are properly classified as spam then surely the factual accuracy of someone's postings don't really matter anymore, as anything "inaccurate" falls into the realm of "opinion" or just human error. Presumably it's ok to be wrong.

So I don't see any problem with a person believing that e.g. Epstein was killed, and posting online about this belief. I don't see a problem with grassroots communities arising around this belief. It only seems to me to be an issue when such postings are sponsored/encouraged because of e.g. some political aim, and proper spam detection would mitigate this.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#293

Post by jacquesm »

ajuc wrote: post #193
alkonaut wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In case of Poland the party increased social spending several times, paying people with 2 kids half the median salary every month and lowering retirement age. They could go on TV saying "we are corrupt and we are stealing from you" and they would still win these elections just because they paid for the votes. That's how populism works. Frankly I'm amazed they managed to lose the Senate and only won the Sejm (lower ho…

> radio was invented and democracy wasn't ready for it

I never for a second made that connection, thank you very much.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#294

Post by jacquesm »

madaxe_again wrote: post #287
raxxorrax wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismissing opinions because they are allegedly victims of trolls is a far greater problem in my perspective.

I visited an extraordinarily polluted steelworks city a few years ago. Even on a clear day, the air was orange, and as you entered the city you noticed the colour wash out of everything slightly, and the horizon over the estuary blurred out to a drab orange smear. I mention this, as when I mentioned it to the locals, none of them understood what I was talking about. You see, when your entire reality glows orange, tha…

That is one reason why I'd like the media to recognize the part they themselves play in all this. Just by repeating the words of the demagogues for critical reasons they still give them another platform.

For example:

'Today Trump repeated a debunked hoax as though it were true'

is one thing, to say

'Today Trump said "The FBI didn’t take Hillary Clinton's email server. It was taken by somebody that, I guess, it’s CrowdStrike — that’s what I’ve heard.", which has been debunked long ago'.

Is another. The second may be more sexy and may draw more eyeballs and therefore ad impressions but it still gives Trump a platform for his BS and plenty of people will believe the president over some reporter saying that this was already debunked as an afterthought.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#295

Post by jacquesm »

madaxe_again wrote: post #288
ajuc wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recognising the importance of radio in disseminating the Nazi message, Goebbels approved a scheme whereby millions of cheap radio sets (the Volksempfänger) were subsidised by the government. In the "Radio as the Eighth Great Power"[114] speech, Goebbels proclaimed: > It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio....It is no exaggeration to say that the Germa…

Newspapers were dynamite in their time. Before moveable type, printing anything was expensive and time consuming. It was typically done only by governments and the very wealthy. They controlled the message. Then, along comes the ability to move type, and re-use your castings. Luther prises the faultlines in religion wide open with handbills. The English and the French end up having revolutions, promulgated by samizda…

May you live in interesting times is generally not considered to be a blessing.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#296

Post by criley2 »

hos234 wrote: post #104
criley2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a classic example of whataboutism. 1. Governments using trolls is different than campaigns hiring people to discuss politics. Campaigns get volunteers all the time to affect public discourse by going door to door, sending mailers, and doing all kinds of things. 2. Trolls specifically have an antisocial goal. The trolls employed by Russian military intelligence engaged in a psy-ops campaign against America to…

I don't agree. All this activity whether its legitimate volunteers OR trolls has not generated any real sustainable outcomes. Both are just mindlessly trying to hit metrics(like/views/clicks/upvotes etc). And everyone is very satisfied hitting them. But nobody has yet proved in any country, in any part of the world all this mindless metric hitting activity (amplified robotically by the news media) is actually produci…

And I view this as false equivalence. Americans clicking like for American content is fundamentally different than an influence campaign by military intelligence to engage in psyops against us.

It's sad and shocking that folks treat a massive attack on the US homeland as "equivalent to Hillary fans posting comments on Reddit".

It really goes to show you how America is failing here: if no one will defend the homeland against attack, there won't be a homeland to defend.

You're welcome to cry about "clicks" and "likes" but we were attacked and are continuing to be attacked by sophisticated, and trained intelligence officers whose goal is to increase tension, increase terrorism, increase violence: and guess what -- they are succeeding. Terrorism is up. Violence is up. Tension is up.

Feels like a huge "wake up" moment, but of course the fake "both sides" propaganda paralyzes folks into such cynicism that they watch one-sided terroristic violence roil our communities and they shrug and complain about "views"

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#297

Post by jacquesm »

jellicle wrote: post #185
alkonaut wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I would very much doubt that. Though I'm sure the extremists wouldn't care how they won an election the main incumbents would be afraid that if it leaked they would be clobbered at the ballot box. If you don't give a damn about your reputation you tend to have more options than if you do.

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#298

Post by cygx »

philwelch wrote: post #216
olau wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regulatio…

Countries like Germany that are transitioning away from nuclear and towards renewables have actually increased their fossil fuel consumption in recent years

Please stop spreading misinformation: While we've failed our planned reduction goals, we did in fact reduce fossil fuel usage.

https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...

Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm

#300

Post by madaxe_again »

raxxorrax wrote: post #291
madaxe_again wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I visited an extraordinarily polluted steelworks city a few years ago. Even on a clear day, the air was orange, and as you entered the city you noticed the colour wash out of everything slightly, and the horizon over the estuary blurred out to a drab orange smear. I mention this, as when I mentioned it to the locals, none of them understood what I was talking about. You see, when your entire reality glows orange, tha…

Agreed. We just would need to figure out who is standing in the clouds.

We all are. Our entire human world comprises overlapping subjective realities built by group consensus. What is true and rational to me is anathema to another, and the inverse applies. From cradle to grave our realities are sculpted by our experiences and those surrounding us. Recognising this is the first step to understanding an awful lot of why people think and do what they do.
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