I've found that in the last couple of years, I keep expecting the internet to be one way and it keeps being another.
So for instance, they say if you want people to read your work, concentrate on quality. But that's bullshit, what you need to concentrate on is popularity. On any given day, boards all over the place are full of high-ranking articles that are crap that people vote on simply because the author is popular.
Then they say that the wisdom of the crowds will help pick clear winners. But the wisdom part begins to look like mob rule and crowds can be easily gamed, as this article shows.
I could go on, but I think I'm not alone in realizing that the cool interconnected internet that I wanted and the one we're actually getting are two completely different things.
So on one hand I congratulate this author -- we critically need to get this information out and emphasize it. But on the other hand, it's just another in a long series of "So, you thought it worked this way? Boy were you wrong." kind of things.
So I'm left wondering: do we all just sit around and whine about how things aren't turning out the right way? Go out and "fight the system" Adapt? Make the most of it? What? While you can fight the system if it's the local town government putting up a stoplight, fighting the system effectively and honorably where the system is billions of people of hundreds of cultures all interacting randomly is a bit too much to fit in my head.
Apologies for the rant. Just seemed like a pattern I've noticed of late.
That doesn't count as any record that Gandhi said it, especially if the phrase doesn't appear till 2001.
He's most likely paraphrasing his grandfather, which is fine, but also an example of how famous people get smarter and their words pithier as generations go by.
The grandson claims his grandfather said it. While I agree he was never recorded saying that, I am inclined to believe someone who was probably there when he said it.
I don't think this helps much with the problem outlined in the original post. All you need is one guy running this "persona management" software to offset lots of guys refusing to use it.
RyanMcGreal hit the nail on the head with his comment. I made a comment in a different thread about Apples subscription along the lines of how the Internet tends to route round things, which I think may apply here too.
Bear in mind the history of PGP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in...) as a prime example of this. When Egypt had it's Internet cut off, the Egyptians routed around it. They became the change they wanted to see and Mubarak had to step down.
Given that semi-automated astroturfing is a popular pastime for corporations, having the government astroturfing offers relatively little by way of difference except in certain circumstances where resources become an issue for corporations (e.g. identification). Much of what's proposed already exists elsewhere in the blackhat market anyway.
So how do you fight it? If you care enough about it, any way you can. Disinformation is as old as the hills. Exposing it is one way, discrediting the source is another, counterdisinformation yet another still. Not participating in places where known or suspected personas exist is probably best. For the truly organised group of today (and for the casual group of tomorrow) there's darknets and offline means of communication.
How? Let's say the change you want to see is a thoughtful, reasoning approach to communication. Your actions are posting on this website, or some like-minded friend's communication channels.
Your actions result in a thoughtful community that has spent a lot of time analyzing itself- which means people know each other and have meaningful interactions.
Now, when a jerk tries to artificially influence the group, he isn't playing the same game, because your personal actions have created a buffer to it.
Being the change you want to see goes beyond not doing something you find abhorrent. It also entails actively resisting what you find abhorrent - drawing attention to it, organizing against it, providing positive alternatives to it, and so on.
The internet is really many superimposed communities. Expecting the internet, or pretty much anything else to be a certain way is setting yourself up for unfulfilled expectation.
The internet is a rapidly changing place and filled with enormous diversity of people, views and interests.
don't whine or fight. create the world you want to live in.
the internet doesn't work one way or another. people on the internet work one way or another. you don't like how some groups are working, don't work with them. work another way. everyone has a choice. i know it can seem overwhelming when a lot of people choose to work one way that doesn't seem right, but don't let it get you down. you have a choice too, and you don't have to work the same way they do. work a different way.
Honestly, it works fine for me, and although I find the actions described in this story to be a hilarious and unethical waste of resources, they certainly aren't making my Internet any worse in a general sense.
What do I give a crap about some sockpuppet content ghostwritten by a Fed -- since when am I reading the comments on Daily Kos, or some random dude's Twitter? Who cares what articles people vote on? I spend most of my online time reading an incrementally updated newsmagazine of my personal favorite writers on the planet via RSS.
Are you concerned about undue influence on public opinion? The only people being swayed or convinced by some sockpuppet campaign are those whose opinion is already made of shit. Do you really think that J. Random Congressman or Alfred E. Media Representative would be likely to have a sane, rational opinion on the issues of the day anyway? A couple dozen or hundred automated propaganda-bots are not likely to make his decisions even worse.
There's no reason to care about how the winners are picked. The cool thing about the Internet is that there's room for everyone, and that doesn't seem to be changing at all. That is the right system, and we're already there.
> The only people being swayed or convinced by some sockpuppet campaign are those whose opinion is already made of shit.
Social proof is a studied, verified effect, where people's opinions are shaped by the opinions of others at a subconscious level.
Do you hate laugh tracks? Me too. But research shows that people think shows are funnier with the laugh track than without, even if they say they hated the laugh track.
Are you annoyed by every brand saying they're "The Leading X" or "The Number 1 Y"? Me too. But marketing which includes these claims leads to higher sales than marketing without.
When I was a sales puke, I applied this principle to selling add-on insurance for car rentals. I identified a point in my pitch where I could add the words, "almost everybody takes the package". That's all, that's it. In the week when I first applied it, it added almost 10% to my rate of sale and the improvement persisted when I retained those words.
And I was dealing with all walks of life. Holiday makers of all kinds. From backpackers, to CEOs of german industrial giants, to law-school professors from leading US universities, they were all affected by the truthful claim that almost everybody bought the package from me.
> And I was dealing with all walks of life. Holiday makers of all kinds. From backpackers, to ... they were all affected by the truthful claim that almost everybody bought the package from me.
Wow, everybody falls for the pitch? Gee, I guess I'm convinced that social proof works.
Do you hate laugh tracks? Me too. But research shows that people think shows are funnier with the laugh track than without, even if they say they hated the laugh track.
Why is "more funny" the goal? What's wrong with just "funny"?
The social proof may be true, but so what. I would enjoy my life more if all I ate was candy and ice cream every day. For a few months, anyway...
The sad fact in the U.S. is that it isn't the people with thoughtful consistent opinions on important issues that have real impact on the politicians that get sent to Washington to tackle current problems. It is instead the easily swayed fickle "undecideds" that determine the powers that be.
This state of affairs makes the tools in this article extremely disturbing in the context of government contractors.
iuguy's Gandhi quote may be the best response, but I have something more verbose to say.
Popularity is powerful. Anything that matters is going to be dominated by popularity in some form. Politics, fast food, movies, etc, are all in the state they are due to winning popularity contests. The internet is just late to the party. The cool internet that agreed with your values just happened to be visible for the first few decades of its existence because you were the right demographic. However it was inevitable that sooner or later the public at large would get a whiff of how cool the net was, and pretty soon money comes into the equation, and it's all downhill.
But in reality the cool internet is bigger today than it ever was before, it's just obscured by all the spammy, sock-puppetry, pointless-celebrity-tweeting bullshit that you've come to expect. It's easy to fall into the trap that you need to compete with that, but you don't. Popularity is good for business, but it doesn't feed your soul. If you do really great work, the people who pay attention it will appreciate it immensely. There are bloggers who I believe contribute more to the world (at least my world) than Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Williams even though I use Facebook and Twitter every day.
Everything is on the internet. What is the internet? I think we are talking of specific views we take of the internet. Like if we mostly visit sites through HN, we have the HN view of the internet.
So if anything, we can say the views are failing us.
Ironic that you express this viewpoint here - online, in a small community with extremely high signal-to-noise, where sockpuppetry could easily be discovered.
The people who care about quality conversation will find places like this - and the rest of the people never mattered anyway.
"But the wisdom part begins to look like mob rule and crowds can be easily gamed, as this article shows."
How does this article show that? I'm not arguing that they cannot be, I'm merely pointing out that the article doesn't 'show' that. Its not the subject.
Without a 50kiloword post it's difficult to fully respond to your complaints.
However, I will say this, which I hope will help. Often times it is difficult to get a cohesive understanding of the changes caused by technological change without the distance of history or an external perspective. Change is chaotic in the short term, and it can be difficult for any individual human who is compromised by biases, limited knowledge, and an undue focus on the very immediate past and very immediate proximity to extract meaningful information about long term change from that muddle. More so when those long term changes are rather subtle (as they often are). More so when only an observer from the future who has had the benefit of immersive familiarity with what in the present are novel paradigms would be able to look at our time and pick out the teeniest inklings of those changes. To us those new things are still new things, and not even fully formed yet, and thus all the more difficult to define, understand, and recognize.
Moreover we have a natural desire for change to manifest rapidly and completely. We want everything to be resolved utterly in the 5th act of a 2 hour play. But that's not how things work in the real world. In the real world it's always 2 steps forward, 1 step back, and then 1 forward and 2 back, and then 2 forward and 1 back again. Slow, incremental, subtle progress, often too slow, incremental, and subtle to be very satisfying. Worse yet, advances such as the present one (exposing previously secret underhanded schemes to the public at large) may seem like setbacks, because even though the result is greater transparency (forcefully made) in the process something bad was exposed.
In short, I don't think it's possible for anyone to fully understand the changes that are going on in the world (or even in the US) right now, let alone to forecast how those and other changes will manifest years and decades down the road.
I do think we are at a turning point in history at the moment. I think we will either tip into a period of greater individual liberty, richer freedoms of expression, greater individual autonomy, etc. on the one hand or we will tip into a period of diminished individual liberty, more authority in the hands of the state and big organizations (corporations, unions, NGOs, etc.), and a de facto division of hierarchy of rights between a new effective aristocracy and commoners. However, I think it is far, far too early to say which way the scales will tip, and there are promising signs that it will tip in the direction of liberty.
Consider this story in and of itself. Sure, there were nefarious plans for "sock puppet management", but not only do we have no clue how well such things would have worked in practice (I'm skeptical) but the plans have been spilled all over the internet for the world to gawk at, which will likely cause a huge backlash against anyone attempting to do this sort of thing as well as keep people on the lookout for instances of the phenomenon.
a de facto division of hierarchy of rights between a new effective aristocracy and commoners
Y'know, that has to be the only outcome that can be an object of fear - and yet, I just can't help thinking that there is so much in our cultural history that would subvert that as soon as it became at all overt.
The only reason they haven't sparked significant backlash is that people can still imagine they're not commoners under a jackboot. What will happen when that state change comes about? What happens when the sleeping people wake up?
The Chinese government has the "50 cent army" which is a 300,000 strong persona ops set. Many are Chinese students in the US who are required to post pro-China posts while in school and pretend to be a random western sympathizer. This is the largest and most organized, but there are tons of these and you see them on all the major boards. Can identify them when there is something really indefensible and they are in defending it with statements like "Well, as far as I know, none of the Wall Street companies broke any laws. So if you are concerned, maybe you should blame the government for deregulating." Their accounts are full of certain themes that enable you to identify them.
At first I typed up here techniques on how to recognize them but on second thought I don't want to give them ideas on how to correct.
Of interest to me right now is whether this propaganda war can be widely unveiled. It's hard since there are likely thousands of different PR ops posting stuff so there's no single pattern, and it's subtle to distinguish between this and zealous and sincere advocates of things. It would also be pretty easy to dismiss zealous advocates as PR ops as an attack strategy against advocates. Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously.
Prosionist groups have been making this in Europe, blogs and comenting in newspapers every time they think there are anti Israel news or comments. And it's the same as you say , it's easy to identify them when they try to defend some thing impossible to defend. And sometimes is sad because even when they have a point the things they say discredit what they are defending, they do more harm to Israel than help. That began if i can recall after the operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
It would also be pretty easy to dismiss zealous advocates as PR ops as an attack strategy against advocates. Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously.
Anonymous is basically a nebulously distributed, decentralized, persona ops group. They manage to be taken seriously without revealing real identities because they can successfully prosecute actions against high media value targets.
EDIT: They also continually try to convince the Internet at large that they shouldn't be taken seriously.
"Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously."
Isn't this exactly what "they" are after? Once that happens, there won't be any need for such armies. The end of anonymity means the end of free speech.
Yeah it's kind of a different topic, I probably shouldn't have been extemporanializing (sp?) at the end of my comment and kept it more focused.
I agree with that about anonymity. People will be more tempered in what they say. Only today there is a story that a blog (http://natalieshandbasket.blogspot.com/) I had been following by a teacher was "outted". The teacher was suspended and is going to be fired because she told the truth about her students, who she didn't name. (http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/news_details/article/28/2011...) The students have since commented that although everything she said was true, she shouldn't have been allowed to say it and they want her to be fired as punishment, and that looks like it will happen. The blog was extremely useful because it showed what is really going on in schools. She had thought only her friends knew about it though and that obviously wasn't true since I had no idea who she really was until today, but I knew about her secret blog since it had been linked to from some site previously, and then I bookmarked and followed it. No doubt a lot of other people did this as well. Her mistake was to even let her friends know who she was because one of them outted her. Also she had a small thumbnail of herself sitting in the distance, which may have confirmed to someone who she was.
Without this anonymity, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that she would not have been able to say the things she did. We can see exactly what happened as soon as her identity was known.
A persona such as an anonymous blog can have as much credibility as someone whose birth certificate you have seen and held. The key is that it's an established and consistent persona with a personality. So some are sincere and promote free speech and honesty, others are manipulative lies paid for by governments and corporations. Which is which you can tell (I sure hope) by looking at their history of posting. One may post unpopular ideas and be worth listening to and you know they are real because there is a human je ne sais quois (sp?) that identifies them as real, something that is not present in 50 cent army posts.
There has never been a guarantee of no repercussions from utilizing free speech, anon or not. Many pay a high price for speaking their mind. And not just from government. The first front that keeps people in line is their peers, community, and jobs. Its sad, but that's how things have always been, China and U.S.
The fact that free speech has always carried risks doesn't mean that it always should.
By reducing the risks and increasing anonymity, people will be able to say things that would've been too risky before. In some cases that's a bad thing, but in general I expect it to be beneficial to democracy and society.
IMO what is wrong was that the student was able to fire a teacher for complaining against the student when the teacher is the boss. Yes of course some students will try, but it should not be allowed to actually happen.
What I find the weirdest is that schools can strip search students without a warrant or consulting the parents (if I remember the SC decision correctly), but will give in to pressure like this. I'd rather have the reverse be true.
Wait, but they weren't identified, right? (I don't know of the blog, so I'm just going on what bugsy says above.) How should they have the right to fire her?
Oh, well, sure, then by definition they have the right to fire her for wearing the wrong color shirt or something - and I'm not sure how that answers the question of how they're justified in firing her for exposing ... nothing at all about her students.
Now imagine it - students all knowing that it doesn't freaking matter that they don't amount to squat; they'll never have to face it.
But my point is a lot weaker than I thought it was - I had the impression (not having read the freaking original blog) that her blog was also anonymous. If it was plain who she was and where she taught, then yeah, that's a serious problem that requires disciplinary action.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Anonymity has something to do with free speech but far from everything.
If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases.
Anonymity should obviously still be possible but the decreased trustworthiness of anonymous statements is just something that inevitably comes with anonymity.
> If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases.
I think you overestimate the practical value of these constitutional protections. Yes, US law allows US citizens to criticize their government in a way that would be unimaginable in China. But not everyone who prefers anonymity is trying to hide from an oppressive government. Most people are understandably reluctant to offend their employer, neighbors, friends and family, etc. even if they have a legitimate concern. These personal concerns are much more pressing for the majority of citizens than the possibility of FBI agents knocking on your door.
If you work for BP, You don't want to be caught arguing that offshore drilling should be heavily regulated, especially if you work in a state with at-will employment. Similarly, you don't want that city official to take revenge on you for blogging about his unprofessional treatment of you. You don't want your mom to find out that you run a blog about your life as a lesbian. You don't want your neighbor to find out that you complained on Reddit about his annoying behavior.
Little things like these add up and serve to discourage free speech even in mostly-free societies. Constitutional protections are not enough. Custom can be just as oppressing as evil communist regimes. You need to turn the goddamn society upside down before you can expect most people to blog with their real names, and that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
Well, all I’m pointing out is the basic truism that non-anonymous speech can and will in general be more trusted and that in many cases anonymity is not necessary for free speech.
Anonymity is sometimes necessary or desired but what it is definitely not is the beginning and end of free speech as was implied in the comment I was responding to.
As for "anonymity is not the beginning and end of free speech", I don't think the comment you were responding to said anything to that effect. It only said that taking away anonymity would also take away free speech. By admitting that "anonymity is sometimes necessary", you're basically agreeing with that comment. Anonymity surely isn't all there is to free speech, but without it, free speech would be severely hampered.
Ideally anonymity should not be required for free speech but I know currently in the real world it often does. I want to push for this to be fixed though. For example, I once thought of collecting things like Reddit AMAs and turning them into an Acid test that see if an organization can tolerate it when made non-anonymous.
>If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases.
Tell that To Glen Greenwald, a journalist, who is finding that Bank of American is actively "scheming" to discredit her because of her support of WikiLeaks.
Tell that to Helen Thomas, a former White House correspondent, who criticized America's Pro-Israel stance and how it impacts on peace in the middle east.
The larger point that I'm trying to make is there are certain debates in this country that are one-sided. By that, I mean one-side controls the debate. It is not interested in honest discourse and the free exchange of ideas. It is interested in the status quo. It has found out that it is easier to discredit its critics (AIPAC has labeled most of its critics as 'anti-semetic', even if they are of Jewish Heritage.) than engage them.
In these instances, it might be easier to lay out the facts in sourced, cited, verifiable articles while remaining anonymous.
"If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases."
Sorry, but my irony detector is broken apparently. Do you truly believe this? Care to expand? Not trolling FYI.
As for "they", well, no one really knows who they are. But "they" are the pillars of every good conspiracy. (Slightly tongue-in-cheek).
You can’t be thrown into prison or fined for saying the wrong thing in the US. That’s what I mean. You might argue that this is not true for some things but it is true for the vast majority of things you could say. Being anonymous matters a great deal more when freedom of speech is not protected.
"You can’t be thrown into prison or fined for saying the wrong thing in the US."
I'm not so sure that's true.
First, many people have found themselves at the receiving end of lawsuits and harassment because they wrote a bad review of a restaurant or said that someone was a skank. This is civil not criminal, but the results are the same, you can lose your house, your money and have years taken up in courts assuming you have the money to finance a defense.
On the criminal side you can get tossed in jail. How that works is you point out on your blog that the local police chief is taking bribes from drug dealers. Then, if you are not anonymous, the police raid your house and find rubber gloves, plastic sandwich bags, carburetor cleaner, ammonia, fish tank tubing, cold tablets, and aluminum foil. You say "What's the big deal I have all those things in my house." That's right, we all do. They are also proof you are a meth manufacturer and possession of them is proof your are guilty, the possession itself of "precursors" is criminal. Since everyone has these things, anyone can be legitimately convicted of running a meth lab, which is a useful tool for silencing dissent.
Or let's talk Julian Assange for example. His identity is known as is who those he critiques. He is up for "rape by surprise" charges and leaders in the US have called for the death penalty against him. This is free speech?
Constitutional protection of the freedom of speech is all fine and dandy in theory. You might not end up in jail, but you can find yourself in court, which, for most, is an excellent deterrent of voicing their opinion. Aside that, once people, real people, know who you are, your controversial opinions might very well give rise to real threats. Remember the whole Jyllands-Posten fiasco?
I agree with your last sentence 100%, but, at least for me, complete anonymity is a necessity. You can relate (f.i.) to my online persona, which is consistent and available for discussion. There is no need to know my real name.
Hey, I’m commenting anonymous on HN, too. I have obviously nothing against anonymity. All I’m saying is that to imply that free speech is somehow meaningless without anonymity sounds very wrong to me.
It's not meaningless - just a lot more fragile. Clearly anonymous speech isn't as trusted as non-anonymous speech, but there is a tradeoff that leaves anonymity very valuable in many situations.
The problem with freedom of speech is that it just guarantees a legal right to say something. It doesn't free you from the consequences of saying it. When you want to speak out against an majority belief, without anonymity you risk repercussions that aren't necessarily related to legal implications. Anonymity protects free speech participants from the opposing majority mob.
Thinking about this some more. Anonymity is required for democracy to work properly. Citizens of a society need to be able to speak candidly without fear of reprisal. That's just the way it is because power attracts the corrupt and the corrupt will use their power to silence dissent. Egypt could not figure out all of who was posting things against the government, so they just shut down the whole internet to try to stop anonymous speech. In the US there seems to be more control of networks and Palintir is a defense contractor that sells software to figure out who is talking to who and what their real identity is. I am sure Palintir will be making lots of sales to governments right now that don't want to see the middle east revolutions that are occurring right now happen in their own tyrannical dictatorships and corporatocracies.
The HBGary scandal involves multiple companies, not just the token one (HBGary) which has been "thrown under the bus" as a sacrifice and distraction. This is going on right now in other companies as well, so punishing HBGary doesn't slay the dragon.
Corporations and governments are gaming the anonymous free speech system by astroturfing, persona management, sock puppetry etc. There are armies of people posting fake opinions in an effort to manipulate public opinion and steer it towards agendas which are not sincerely held by the people posting them. They are posting only because it is their job and they are being paid. This activity is very destructive to democracy because it alters things from being the true will of the people. It is tantamount to election tampering.
It is critical that the public develop a response to this in the form of tools for identifying this activity.
One excellent tool is Anonymous's randomly discovering and the publishing incriminating emails. This activity is beneficial to democracy. However, its success is highly dependent on random chance and luck. It is also very illegal. Right now law enforcement is doing everything they can to track down the people who uncovered the wide spread and insidious wrongdoing. Punish the whistleblower is probably not going away.
The public also needs tools which are legal to use.
There are efforts right now to "build a new internet" that preserves anonymity and thus free speech. That is good but more is necessary.
Another thing which is needed is for Palintir-like systems which can peek behind the scenes, uncover connections between posts, patterns of posting and patterns of speech, to be written and open sourced. These systems can be used to identify sock puppets. They can also be used as a weapon to unmask the anonymous and attack free speech, but they are already being done to do that. We need these tools on both sides now to level the playing field.
Another thing which is needed is for Palintir-like systems which can peek behind the scenes, uncover connections between posts, patterns of posting and patterns of speech, to be written and open sourced.
How about translation tools that convert writing by one person into the style of another? I suppose it would just be another escalation in the arms race...
It's hard to believe in any conspiracy theory that uses as evidence things that would be expected even if the theory were false (e.g. foreign nationals speaking out in favor of their native system when they feel it's unfairly represented).
I do find your account credible. I just don't actually care enough about whether it's true to evaluate the evidence in depth.
However, as you imply, these sockpuppets are easy to recognize and are not taken seriously, because they don't make sense. Sheer volume can't make up for that. In other words: I don't believe they are capable of succesfully pulling it off. Responding sensibly in a conversation requires skills far above those of Watson, Deep Blue and the latest and greatest incarnation of Elisa.
Examples: YouTube, any random news site, most blogs, deviantArt
Real life tends to be this way. I have avoided a number of political discussions lately because it's obvious the people around me have no clue what they are talking about but they completely sure that they are right and that anyone that disagrees is wrong.
> Sounds to me like you're completely sure of your own correctness and of their wrongness.
Yeah, it's kind of heard to make claims like that without sounding like a hypocrite. I love logic and philosophy and a good debate or political discussion. This issue I have is a number of people I run across consistently refuse make more than emotional statements or parroting phrases from their selected media source.
If you can't have a logical debate it's pointless to bother talking.
> If you can't have a logical debate it's pointless to bother talking.
Well, there's a huge gap between conversations and debates, and you can have one without the other. Even on the internet.
And, much as it goes against your love of logic, if you ever wish to change someone's mind or beliefs, conversing with them is the way to go -- not debating.
Social/crowdsourced companies do this all the time, they just don't have such sophisticated software. But that's hardly an inconceivable jump - I would certainly not be surprised to see a number of in-house versions of this at work all over the internet.
I worked with an early stage company that relied on user-generated content that essentially did this but didn't tell the new CMs, so we spent the first couple weeks trying to get increased activity out of the clones.
Bonus example, there was an interview with the founder of thathigh.com on here not too long ago where he talked about doing exactly this.
The game isn't new, only the players - and you can always spot a newb, even if he has really nice equipment.
[Edit, appending part of my reddit comment on the sme article]: Here in Chicago, elections are (or at least were for a long time) considered to be basically a running joke. It's a city of horriffic corruption, and everyone's pretty much gotten used to it. This should be far more unsettling than gov contractors manufacturing an echo chamber. At least when they're sneaky about it you know they're scared.
tl;dr Contractor develops psyops backend for the cloud. Creates fake persona pool. Uses anonymizer/chameleon for IP obfuscation, vmware/virtualbox instances for each persona, enables deploying to vps around the world. Uses system to age personas via social/email accounts and salt with rss, social & checkin data.
I've got to believe that the social networks and Google have been thinking about way to combat this problem too. I wonder what kind of impact Google's open-source two-step authentication [1] (and other types of mobile device verification systems [2]) will have on efforts to develop meaningful persona management software. If implemented properly, mobile device verification would surely inhibit such efforts.
that'd be where they'd observe it from, or whatever other neutral ops outside of the theater of war is; not that they intend to use it against florida.
I understand it is not to be used in Florida, but it's CENTCOM from what I understand. That would seem to indicate a more overarching and widespread intent.
I used to see sock puppets on yahoo finance message boards for small energy companies. The sock puppet would repeat the same five or six canned messages several times a day under multiple aliases. They would never reply to criticism or anyone responding to their posts. I would come back weeks later and the same sock puppets would still be there with the same repetitive slightly varying messages posted in enormous quantities.
my suspicion is that this was some bigger energy companies paying some black PR to pay people (probably in a business process outsourcing sweat shop somewhere in a developing country) to repetitively post these things, or write scripts to do so, in order to drive down the price of these small energy companies so they could be acquired.
The hallmark of a sockpuppet is not responding with anything but a canned ad-hominem response, and posting the same set of talking points in enormous volume.
> The hallmark of a sockpuppet is not responding with anything but a canned ad-hominem response, and posting the same set of talking points in enormous volume.
That's a good list for that style of Persona. Here's an example:
Ha ha! The leak that blows the sockpuppets/trolls wide open! We knew this day would arrive, and it finally did.
But the bigger question: why didn't dailykos.com link to the Aaron Barr email in question? I ask for two reasons. First, it seems kind of Mainstream Media of them to not link to it. Trying to keep us on your site, Kos, or is this one of those "sensitive" things that must be kept out of the common man's hands, a gatekeeper function that newspapers used to exercize? Second, I want to find out more about the Persona Management Software. It seems like an opportunity for an open source project.
Elaborate on this? Certainly. Visit a website that allows comments, and posts articles on controlversial topics. Say, techdirt.com or groklaw.net. Read all the comments for 10 articles. You'll quickly come to the realization that a number of the differently-named identities repeat a large number of the same ideas, concepts and talking points.
But all these differently-named identities have different habits of usage. Maybe one of them can't be bothered to use the shift-key, like e e cummings. One of them is named "Darryl" and posts rather rambling comments. A few of them are anonymous cowards. But over the course of a few weeks diligent followers of the comments in a blog see that all the trolls start using the same talking points at the same time. Maybe a phrase like "rich user experience" shows up in all troll comments one day. A few weeks later, any number of people chime in with "I love linux as much as the next guy, but Microsoft has a great product this time."
What I mean by "blows the sockpuppets/trolls wide open" is that this revelation finally explains how a site like Groklaw.net or techdirt.com can attract such a large number of persistent detractors. Sockpuppet/Persona Management explains how a single person can create a large number of different trolls with different writing characteristics, different vocabularies, but all with the same point of view.
This is just an alternative explanation for an observed phenomenon. Actual human beings are entirely capable of reduction to repeatable talking points and strangely fanatical persistence given the right framing and environment.
This is the first time that I've heard about "Persona Management Software", and I think it raises some serious questions. Taken to its logical conclusion systems like this could be used to influence the outcomes of elections and other kinds of collective decision making, so there's a debate to be had over whether use of this kind of software should be legal or to what extent it should be regulated if it's used by companies or government agencies.
Of course with the Internet everything can be bigger/badder/etc. Looking at is from the perspective of algorithmic search (my current interest) its fascinating to see software which creates an entire "fake community" using things like markov-chain spam on hastily concocted php forum sites to simulate an organic community of interest.
Literally, there is no way to know. Maybe we'll know that AI is here when it devlops sentience and then posts something witty on our facebook wall. New trust models, not 'friending' anyone you haven't met in person, alternative communities for verbal interaction.
It just reminds me of the adage that demand creates products to fill that demand as soon as the economics favor creation.
It surprises me that this hasn't been done already. In fact, I would be willing to bet that somewhere, this type of software exists in some form. I'm fairly sure (although cannot prove, of course) that I watched this happen to a blog critical of a large publishing company here in the U.S.:
Probably didn't use fancy software, but there certainly appeared to be a concerted attack effort against the blogger for an extended and sustained period of time.
If they're worried about this level of sockpuppetry, wait until the sockpuppets get automated. It's this kind of lapping-up-against-the-Singularity stuff that will make H. sapiens obsolete in the end.
Well the article does talk about that. And there are plenty of bot posters out there as well, they were quite notorious in manipulating stock prices.
Terminology note - sockpuppet is a Persona that is created to back up the opinions of second Persona. The general term here seems to be Persona, of which sockpuppet is a specific kind of Persona.
I think this illustrates a need for an HN-like internet-global karma system. That is, unless some of you have sockpuppet armies upvoting your comments.
Nigerians, scammers, fraudsters, and all other sorts of Internet criminals already do this kind of stuff and have for years. Plus this happens in the real world, it's just called identity fraud. This once again further proves the technological ineptitude of the US Government and it's contractors, this isn't in any way an advanced concept. HB Gary got rooted by a 16 year old girl, what is everyone so worried about?
Can I take it, then, that you like the idea of federal contractors spending taxpayer dollars on semi-automated sockpuppets in order to spam propaganda on their behalf, as long as it's not liberal propaganda?
No, I definitely don't like the idea of a government spending taxpayer money on any kind of domestic brainwashing operations, high-tech or traditional-media.
Many people who know me consider me to be "left" but it makes sense to me. The Internet is just a medium. It doesn't favor any particular viewpoint. There's this idea from summer movies that the "good guys" are always hip with the new tools. That's not true. If anything, it does tend to be the underdogs or insurgents that are the early adopters, but this status has nothing to do with "good/bad" or with any particular political affiliation.
Unfortunately, the "explanation" feature is not built into the sockpuppet software yet, it is still in alpha, but I am sure in a 6-9 month period you will be able to get some kind of vague generic explanation.
So for instance, they say if you want people to read your work, concentrate on quality. But that's bullshit, what you need to concentrate on is popularity. On any given day, boards all over the place are full of high-ranking articles that are crap that people vote on simply because the author is popular.
Then they say that the wisdom of the crowds will help pick clear winners. But the wisdom part begins to look like mob rule and crowds can be easily gamed, as this article shows.
I could go on, but I think I'm not alone in realizing that the cool interconnected internet that I wanted and the one we're actually getting are two completely different things.
So on one hand I congratulate this author -- we critically need to get this information out and emphasize it. But on the other hand, it's just another in a long series of "So, you thought it worked this way? Boy were you wrong." kind of things.
So I'm left wondering: do we all just sit around and whine about how things aren't turning out the right way? Go out and "fight the system" Adapt? Make the most of it? What? While you can fight the system if it's the local town government putting up a stoplight, fighting the system effectively and honorably where the system is billions of people of hundreds of cultures all interacting randomly is a bit too much to fit in my head.
Apologies for the rant. Just seemed like a pattern I've noticed of late.