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The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

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Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#41

Post by johnnyjeans »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #20

Just another ex-eastern block country cooking the same recipe. I still wonder, why all this state agent are allowed into the free net. They usually are not even allowed into the western internet, in china you cant even have a VPN without going to prison. So the normal citizen cant look at western internet, but the western internet allows those state agents to post undeclared content. Its like a trapdoor function rigg…

> in china you cant even have a VPN without going to prison

This isn't really the case. Technically that's the law, but like many others it isn't actually enforced. It comes into play when the party wants to make an example out of a VPN provider.

Viet Nam is generally more relaxed anyways. The policy has always just been to care about things written in the Vietnamese language. Even foreigners living in the country, posting mildly critical things in any other language tend to be ignored. The focus is more about keeping the average Viet living in the country from becoming openly politically nihilistic against the party. As more Viets learn English and the country becomes more global, we may see more inter-linguistic crackdowns, but honestly who can say. It's well known amongst everybody in the country except the extremely naive that the government is a lazy and corrupt do-nothing. The appearance of effort passes for a job well done for careerist party people in Viet Nam lmao

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#42

Post by mayormcmatt »

falcolas wrote: post #3

Or, to put it another way, average commenters are fighting against coordinated groups of state actors just to have genuine discussions. And it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space. It's like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.

That's UGLY bags of mostly water to you!

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#44

Post by kaycey2022 »

As a non US citizen, I think this is perfectly justified. I am not convinced that democracy is a universally good form of government when there is little cultural acceptance and adaptation to it. American social media products are probably used as an instrument of propaganda by the US government, or at least have a great potential to be used as such. Foreign governments of any nature are justified in restricting their citizens’ access to social media for this reason.

PS: Open source tools which enable unrestricted communication between parties are a much more benign alternative, to centrally controlled foreign social media, IMO.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#45

Post by JimDabell »

tormeh wrote: post #4
falcolas wrote: post #3

Or, to put it another way, average commenters are fighting against coordinated groups of state actors just to have genuine discussions. And it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space. It's like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.

Russia is known to have loads of trolls on the government payroll. I am under the impression that western governments don't do this but who knows...

The British government does this through the JTRIG unit of GCHQ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#46

Post by UberFly »

praxulus wrote: post #31
prox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I wonder what conversations of society would have looked like in an alternative universe without any distractors. I would assume a lot different. I once read is that if an activist movement rises they prop a flawed individual, find as much as info as they can, and at an opportune moment they ‘out’ the leader. Apparently this happened with the Occupy movement.

The occupy movement had a leader?

Probably several well-funded ones. We just never got to know them. That whole event wasn't even remotely spontaneous.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#47

Post by dirtyid »

falcolas wrote: post #3

Or, to put it another way, average commenters are fighting against coordinated groups of state actors just to have genuine discussions. And it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space. It's like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.

>average commenters

Average commenters hasn't been worth the effort, at least pre chatgpt.

Everytime one of these foreign (non English country) programs gets revealed, the underlying pattern is concentrated effort coordinated against visible voices on public platforms with high dissemination potential (not HN). There's a reason they're spamming reporting to silence instead of just drown out with counter content is because it takes a lot of effort, disproportionate amount, to disrupt even one voice. Especially by non English speaking countries where English fluency is much better allocated and rewarded for other sectors. Up until now, coordinated groups are limited / busy with a few dozen/hundred state enemies, not yhour average commenter, and even then they don't have time/energy/resources to "particpate" in discussions. Even PRC, with all their resources, coordiated campaigns was mostly limited to twitter size responses, most of the time splamming pro PRC platitudes instead of engaging in topic, because ROI of genuinely exchanging paragraphs of discussion with some nobody on HN or reddit is terrible.

Of course this is pre LLM.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#49

Post by olah_1 »

tehjoker wrote: post #5
tormeh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is known to have loads of trolls on the government payroll. I am under the impression that western governments don't do this but who knows...

From my experiences on Twitter with various anonymous accounts parroting the state department line, and US military doctrine for total domination of the battle space, I am absolutely sure they are doing this either via a contractor, ally, or inside cyber command or DIA etc. The 2012 NDAA removed the ban on US domestic influence operations. https://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-20... https://foreig…

> I am absolutely sure they are doing this either via a contractor, ally, or inside cyber command or DIA etc

Or they use AI. Would be very easy actually.

Re: The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

#50

Post by toomim »

stickfigure wrote: post #48

Taiwan and South Korea transitioned from military dictatorships to fairly robust democracies. Is there a similar future ahead for Vietnam? Why or why not?

Taiwan and South Korea were formed as the democratic resistance to Communist regimes, as their countries forked into two.

Vietnam is more like China and Russia: a country that was taken over by the communists, and has now become capitalist, but the power structures are still analogs of the old days.

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