31–40 of 61 posts
Hmm, I guess I come from an older generation where mention of the "IRA" was a whole different genre of terrorism...
Yeah, I always thought IRA was the main acronym for the "Irish Republican Army". Weird that they used IRA in this article to mean something else. Has the main association changed?
IRA = Internet Research Agency for those confused by the title, i.e. the russian "troll" company.
Hmm, I guess I come from an older generation where mention of the "IRA" was a whole different genre of terrorism...
Do you mean the individual retirement accounts? /s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not how it works. The goal of these accounts was to build a following to be able to influence more people. A page with a couple of hundreds likes or followers will have much more impact than a million accounts with no followers. Building audiences to influence people is hard and takes time. It is much more probable that there are around 70 accounts than millions. Sorry to be that blunt but do you know anythin…
Do you know anything about this matter? The scope of this is still largely unknown, unless you have some information the rest of us don't. Influence can be local. Generic-looking pages (i.e. not locale specific in the content they post) or accounts are often followed by people only from a specific small city and surrounding areas (10^4 people, say). Is it so hard to believe that accounts such as these were used by th…
Removing the big accounts (probably) isn't going to remove the IRA's presence on Facebook. It's going to take a big chunk out of their influence, though. (Unless they have other accounts with big followings that weren't removed.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean the individual retirement accounts? /s
Good point. Similar age group I am guessing, but this is also a US-centric interpretation. The Irish Republican Army was probably more recognisable by their TLA worldwide back in the 70's and 80's.
Hmm, I guess I come from an older generation where mention of the "IRA" was a whole different genre of terrorism...
Yeah, I always thought IRA was the main acronym for the "Irish Republican Army". Weird that they used IRA in this article to mean something else. Has the main association changed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know anything about this matter? The scope of this is still largely unknown, unless you have some information the rest of us don't. Influence can be local. Generic-looking pages (i.e. not locale specific in the content they post) or accounts are often followed by people only from a specific small city and surrounding areas (10^4 people, say). Is it so hard to believe that accounts such as these were used by th…
It seems to me intuitively obvious that an account with 10^4 followers has less influence than an account with 10^7 followers. (Sure, if you have 1000 accounts with 10^4 followers, it adds up...) Removing the big accounts (probably) isn't going to remove the IRA's presence on Facebook. It's going to take a big chunk out of their influence, though. (Unless they have other accounts with big followings that weren't remo…
They could have had tiers of accounts, all for different purposes. They could have used a ton of low accounts to simulate a grassroots response, to openly troll and be banned, and all kinds of things. They’d have cultivated more and less popular, and obvious accounts as well. If they were smart they’d have a whole layer of accounts designed just to be caught, and give a misleading impression of their competence and methodology.
Is Facebook notifying the affected people that they had viewed fabricated news, or just releasing press releases?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know anything about this matter? The scope of this is still largely unknown, unless you have some information the rest of us don't. Influence can be local. Generic-looking pages (i.e. not locale specific in the content they post) or accounts are often followed by people only from a specific small city and surrounding areas (10^4 people, say). Is it so hard to believe that accounts such as these were used by th…
It seems to me intuitively obvious that an account with 10^4 followers has less influence than an account with 10^7 followers. (Sure, if you have 1000 accounts with 10^4 followers, it adds up...) Removing the big accounts (probably) isn't going to remove the IRA's presence on Facebook. It's going to take a big chunk out of their influence, though. (Unless they have other accounts with big followings that weren't remo…
I'd expect the 10^7 follower account to indeed have more influence, but not necessarily be able to effectively use that influence as well as the 10^4 follower account.
The big follower accounts would probably tend to be more general, with more diversity among their followers. For example they might have followers spread throughout the nation. Much of their influence will be wasted influencing people in areas where changing a few opinions is not enough to make a difference.
The smaller accounts might be able to be more focused on one particular region and one particular group of potential voters in that region. They will align with that group better than the big, national account will, and so might be more likely to change positions of their followers, and they can be focused on a region where things are close.
So what you do is use your big accounts as sources, and use your small accounts to post things from the big accounts. The link to the big accounts lends credibility to the material in the eyes of your followers on the smaller accounts.