Everyone wants to believe they're sizing up some psyops scheme. The dopamine chemistry is just too good: you've got an enemy, the feeling of being in a dramatic narrative where nothing's what it seems, the superiority of knowing that you've spotted something everyone missed, and a way of bucketing the stories you dislike as illegitimate. The threads are even worse, because if you've got an all-purpose argument for shutting down rebuttals, why not use it?
Ironically, a lot of the organic content posted on Reddit is probably better at generating social unrest, demoralizing citizens, and altering perceptions of the United States than any foreign adversary could manufacture. I think many of these same motivations are at play:
> The dopamine chemistry is just too good: you've got an enemy, the feeling of being in a dramatic narrative where nothing's what it seems, the superiority of knowing that you've spotted something everyone missed
People on social media sites just love to think that they've got everything figured out in a way that isn't obvious to the people around them in the real world. These sites create a feedback loop wherein people are encouraged to post more content that feeds the hive minds' ideas while downvoting/rejecting anything that doesn't match.
> Ironically, a lot of the organic content posted on Reddit is probably better at generating social unrest, demoralizing citizens, and altering perceptions of the United States than any foreign adversary could manufacture.
Why would anyone need to manufacture content? There’s plenty to grab from already. But you have to wonder if we’ll learn in the future that the reason my Facebook feed is flooded with outrage about the treatment of Uyghurs, and the reason my Tiktok feed went from being memes and dances to a live stream from Black Lives Matters protests was due to organic growth of content or due to State sponsored manipulations.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the content is manufactured, but most the time, most people just don’t care about these things and will stick to their baby-falling over memes on both Facebook and Tiktok, so when the platforms turn into politically oriented outrage machines it’s natural to wonder if it’s due to those who stand to gain from these narrative, of if it’s just because there weren’t that many babies that fell over that particular week.
It's also very hard to tell an enthusiastic supporter of a regime from someone paid or imprisoned by the regime.
IE I used to think the phrase "lifting a billion people out of poverty" was a dead giveaway for state-sponsored PRC shills.
Then it occurred to me: anyone who had heard that phrase enough, and was sympathetic to it, would naturally (and often times subconsciously) repeat it.
"China" is the subject of the sentence, while "800 million people" is the subject.
The implication being that China - or the CCP - was doing the lifting. The people just kind of passively did got carried upwards.
Even the choice of verb is illuminating. "Lifting", making the number after it add a sense of difficulty to the achievement that "China" accomplished.
People do not talk this in real life. No one is broke, moves to Boise, Idaho, and then says "Boise, Idaho lifted me out poverty".
So yes, "China lifed X people out of poverty" is 100% a canned propaganda phrase. The more neutral description of what actually happened is "China transitioned from a low income economy to a middle income economy".
"Government Assistance Lifts 45.4 Million Out of Poverty in 2021" - US Census Bureau
>odd phrasing
And accurate.
Governance systems > individual effort. Populations do as well as their system allows. At scale of large nations, it's mostly down to management, even suggesting it's a team effort is being charitable. Contrast how India is doing under same timeframe, ergo accurate to say CCP governance was/is primarily responsible for lifting 800m people out of poverty.
TLDR of "China lifted 800 million out of poverty" is fine.
More accurate and neutral TLDR is "Chinese Communist Party lifted 800 million out of extreme poverty"
But for some reason most western press like to minimize/trivialize the CCP part with China.
I'm a PRC born person who likes to keep up with PRC related geopolitics, now based in CAN but have lived/worked between East and West with experience in both systems if that helps you calibrate. Not an enthusiastic supporter, nor paid, nor imprisoned by regime. Just some dude whose a nightowl who pass time on forums that responds to posts that pique my interest, usually under different accounts for different subjects on other platforms, but on HN it's just this.
>I remember his name
...
>he's tracked down a post of mine deep inside a thread.
I don't remember you at all, my custom CSS on hn/reddit removes user names by default. And I listen to mass comments with a screen reader. Certainly dont' care enough to track anyone down. If you want, I can mute your account to avoid future interactions.
E: I will just go ahead and do that for both our sake, this account has already been rate limited because people think I'm state sponsored shill. Which gives me ~5 comments day, that I tend to titrate based on interest, which means generally spending them on PRC topics to exclusion of other subjects. Which reinforces that perception. Wish you well otherwise.
China also put millions into poverty during Mao's Great Leap Forward. Note that your link refers to the last 4 decades. Just before that, the same government was decimating the countries wealth.
In large communities with persistent handles, reader-managed killfiles/filters/mutelists can allow readers to focus on the content they deem valuable, with inherent decentralization as a side effect of killfile privacy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
LOL! Reddit is full of psyop posters like these. Especially when some celebrity says some real shit about govmnt, you'll see reddit next day overloaded with personal attacks of all kinds on such person.
> Especially when some celebrity says some real shit about govmnt,
LOL indeed. Celebrities rarely say "real shit" about the government. They are good at the thing that made them famous. They are... tertiary sources, at best, when it comes to talking about things relating to government. Celebrity didn't give them insight, just a larger megaphon to shout through.
Everything cited in this article can be grouped under the umbrella of 'manipulation of public opinion'. The tactics used have been analyzed and grouped similarly before, for example there was the late 1930s Institute of Propaganda Analysis which produced some publications grouping propaganda tactics into these categories:
The other notions - i.e. malicious sabotage or disruption of groups by inserting agent provocateurs - have a similar long history and have also been analyzed, it's basically just spying of various sorts (see Sun Tzu, Art of War, Chapter 13)
As others note, assuming someone you disagree with on an internet forum is a malicious bad-faith actor isn't a very healthy or useful perspective to take. Yes, there's a lot of PR efforts directed at social media platforms for various reasons, but it's always best to just present a well-reasoned argument in support of your views and leave it at that.
> Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser ... wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites ... also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government.
> The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We’re in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organised or trained ... Only a powerful public campaign against state secrecy and private sector deception can thwart the rise of the trolls. This is a bridge we must cross now.
HN makes it easy to stifle dissent with "flag" and graying out a comment until it is "dead". That's why I always browse with "showdead" set to "yes." Most of the dead comments deserve it, but some of them are quite interesting but don't match the values of the HN community. I've been "killed" a couple times when I didn't think I deserved it. I'm a contrarian by nature, but I value HN too much to feel bad about it. There are other places to discuss sensitive topics.
Reddit has a system that works better for controversy. Then if I really want to discuss a crazy idea I go on 4chan/pol/. There are a small percentage of really bright people on 4chan/pol/ who don't fit into normal society (mostly autism it seems) that can sometimes offer some surprising insights. People always focus on the racism on 4chan, but I ignore it because a lot of the time it's an identifier. You have to show some willingness to say things offensive to the normies to prove you are one of them. I'm not willing to do that so I get told to go back to Reddit often. It's uncanny how they know I don't belong there and not just because I don't say hateful things. They are very sensitive to tone.
>It's uncanny how they know I don't belong there and not just because I don't say hateful things. They are very sensitive to tone.
it has nothing to do with the frequency of your hate -- I could tell you don't belong just because of your word choice here.
there are things one picks up about board culture when browsing for a respectable amount of time, and it shows in the speech patterns of their posts. amplified by high post frequency and anonymity making it the only identifier, users get _very_ good at spotting when somebody either doesn't know the culture or is relying on an incorrect/incomplete summary like you are doing here.
If you're a teenager, which I'm not. And like I said, I don't post that stuff. I ignore it and then hope for an intelligent response to something I said and often get it. Barring that, 4chan is sometimes funny because it's so off the wall and out of left field.
Nitpick: "Nazism" (espec. capitalized) is a particular brand of white-supremacy racism. One which (by the book) held most white people to be non-members of its Master Race.
If all it would take to become a Nazi is reading Nazi opinions, don't you think we'd have a lot more Nazis?
I don't doubt there are people with reprehensible views on 4chan, but it's a bit uncharitable to the reader to suggest that browsing 4chan will put them at the precipice of becoming an Actual Nazi.
> but it's a bit uncharitable to the reader to suggest that browsing 4chan will put them at the precipice of becoming an Actual Nazi.
What else, other than "reading Nazi opinions" do you think it takes to become an "Actual Nazi?" It's not like the ghost of Joseph Goebbels flies in through your window and bites you in the neck and now you're a Nazi. Radicalization works by normalization, through repeated exposure to and gradual acceptance of propaganda, and gaining sympathy and trust for a community and its ideals.
I assume that the HN mod team (or maybe just dang) can find out if you are doing this. The HN submission algorithm is very sensitive to small numbers of upvotes early on in a submission's life. Using a few alt accounts to boost your posts would have an outsized effect here.
Not sure why only a few alt accounts instead of perhaps thousands would be used by someone who would want to influence what topics get discussed and what don't. Also not difficult to use a reverse exponential decay function to modulate votes.
I think they look for cliques in the graph of people who upvote certain content. Even with "natural" vote times, you may get caught doing this over and over.
This is one of the ways that Reddit and Twitter search for bots too.
That's never happened to me. Once I'm dead I'm dead. I sometimes get my satisfaction later on, for example when Bitcoin was popular on HN I was one of the few people early on to call it a waste of electricity. Now that's not so controversial.
But the vouch button does exist, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work for vast majority of dead comments, since they probably wouldn't be dead in the first place if enough people upvoted them.
Narrative acceptability changes over time, partly due to narratives being debated here and elsewhere. HN debate on sensitive topics is possible, but like any contested space, it requires more care and effort.
The second sentence is a statement about activity on this site. If a story or comment is flagged incorrectly, you can email the mods. I have participated in HN debates where a comment goes through several rounds of negative and positive upvotes.
> HN debate on sensitive topics is possible, but like any contested space, it requires more care and effort.
I’m skeptical how good anyone is at identifying any of this.
The amount of “you’re one of them” or “you’re just a troll” out there on the internet when someone simply doesn’t agree or even understand is seemingly infinite.
It’s a nearly weekly accusation thrown at me on Reddit.
People’s willingness to believe someone else is a troll or similar seems to just mean they never have to consider any ideas they don’t like.
Redditors are getting younger and dumber every day. If you don't toe the party line (which is usually an absurd or extreme position), they accuse you of being a bot or a troll. They literally can't fathom that people who don't agree with them exist. They are not worth the arguing.
It's always easier to believe your opposition is ontologically evil -- that way you never have to address your own epistemological emptiness. Of course, the fact that it's blatantly obvious that far too many "people" on the net are behaving indistinguishably from chatbots doesn't help matters.
> Like they come up with really terrible classification categories?
Rather they just declare their opposition evil by nature so they don't have to analyze their behavior any further, and anything done to them is, in their eyes, morally justified. It is, in other words, dehumanizing.
> Does this mean one does not have a theory of knowledge or that one thinks that knowledge does not exist?
It means that they have no formal theory of knowledge and simply accept whatever is conventionally wise to them (or, more specifically, whatever fits their unacknowledged class interest).
Incredibly bad. People seem to be too comfortable in their safe bubbles that when confronted when dissenting opinions they tend to see it as an attack that must be the orchestrated by an enemy real or imaginary.
When I started participating in some random forum a very long time ago as a kid, some guy I was arguing with told me to never assume bad intent unless you see clear evidence of it. I didn't get it at first but eventually made my interactions way more manageable.
>Incredibly bad. People seem to be too comfortable in their safe bubbles that when confronted when dissenting opinions they tend to see it as an attack that must be the orchestrated by an enemy real or imaginary.
It's more; you must belong to the Other Team. It's an astroturf account. It's a troll.
For how could anyone possibly disagree with me and do so in good faith?
> It’s a nearly weekly accusation thrown at me on Reddit.
I think it's just because redditors tend to be younger (and the site is advertising to young people specifically). There's no point in arguing with literal children
> There's no point in arguing with literal children
Isn't there? How do we expect them to learn? There is no point in getting frustrated or angry with literal children, but I believe that arguing with them, in the educational and not rhetorical sense, is helpful. Children learn from example, and if the only examples are their peers, then how do you expect them to grow up differently than them?
So much this, it's not even funny. Anyone who is concerned about "enemy posters" is either a nazi or SJW (or some other category) in my opinion. There are exceptions but in general it's true. They have some specific cause they're trying to put forth and naturally people say things that conflict with it and so they get upset at random innocent bystanders. I've never had this feeling where a """psyop""" is under way in my entire life, so I have zero empathy for it. My internet experience since the 90s on public servers has been miserable due to these insufferable people with undue power (moderation capabilities).
I cannot name a single internet service that has ever been controlled by level headed people. I expect to go on there and just casually talk about whatever I want but within 5 minutes they post a giant wall of rules and my immediate first thought is, "jesus christ, what the fuck happened???". Of course a big part of the problem is that the moderation position attracts a certain type of brain dead, melodramatic, moral obsessed person whereas in reality it only exists to delete spam posts.
There are pretty good (albeit probabilistic) methods for adversarial* analysis - mainly focusing on posting metrics and interaction behavior, with content/semantic analysis as a second tier (although many exceptions apply).
* much of the literature about reducing trolling etc. is focused on platform operators, which isn't that useful to participants since platform operators are not incentivized to provide transparency or accountability.
In online discussions it seems like the threshold to accept an idea as true is much lower if one is to reach that conclusion themselves than if it has been reached by another regardless of one's awareness of the other party's threshold for accepting something as true.
I'm not saying this doesn't happen. It obviously does. But I still think you have to take everyone at face value if you want to have a healthy community. The only thing less healthy than a forum full of psyops and shills is a forum full of genuine people accusing each other of being shills.
This is kind of a false dichotomy. Taking everyone at face value is one of the dumbest thing you can do on the internet. Assuming there are exactly 0 paid posters in your forum, there are still plenty of people who are enthusiastic trolls and bad faith actors because that’s just how they have fun. Letting those people go unchallenged is a recipe for a community that’s dominated by malignant narcissist.
I agree it's false. But because the two perceptions are not mutually exclusive. Use delayed tit for tat. First take at face value, then learn from repeated encounters. That's the best part about forums versus social media sites: many repeated interactions with the same people. From that you can evolve trust without being a cynic.
Coherent communities are surprisingly good at detecting malicious interlopers and simply giving them a hard time is a surprisingly effective tactic. This paper from the Stanford social media lab showcases some nice research on the dynamics of competitive forum raiding on Reddit that are fairly generalizable to other contexts.
> The only thing less healthy than a forum full of psyops and shills is a forum full of genuine people accusing each other of being shills.
Simply wishing the forum to be full of genuine people doesn't make it so. Proceeding as if it is creates a forum full of people with their heads buried in the sand, which probably is the true only thing less healthy than a forum full of psyops and shills.
Clearly there are insidious forces at play in many online forums nowadays. The more we try to unearth it, the less we ignore it and the more we talk about it the healthier our forums become.
Nowadays many of the largest forums are simply captured, by a dedicated team working to a script with dozens of alts. Once you have complicit moderators, this stuff is lame in comparison.
Once your guy / team has mod control, you can change the entire culture and tone of the forum, as soft or as hard as you like, and ban complainers.
You can make posts invisible to search engines, or remove posts for a couple hours and then put them back once the algorithm is bored of them. You can wipe posts entirely, give no explanation, and wipe the posts that complain.
If you think people wouldn't bother to do this, think again. There's significant amounts of money and political capital involved. What PR company or major political party wouldn't want control of a national subreddit that keeps making corruption and cover-ups hard to control?
I never realized just how bad this can be until I started selling/marketing my startup. I was so confused by the reaction to my participation on a few subreddits where my target customers hang out - I had never experienced anything like it before.
I started to see patterns (not only against my posts personally, although I quickly stopped trying to participate) because I began to understand the market players. It's unreal how inauthentic most of the content actually is and how much of it is straight up shill marketing. I suspect this is true for a large number of niche forums where specific products or services become "blessed" by the community.
The only way to accomplish this is with either a large network of puppet accounts or with the support of the moderators. Probably both.
With a lot of effort, tbh. And that's just to see it happening - making anyone care is orders of magnitude harder again. People have enough to be worrying about these days without online forum drama.
To answer your question a bit though:
* The 'dead giveaway' is basically always going to be some kind of mod drama. Sometimes this is fake drama, sometimes it's to harass existing mods out, sometimes it goes as far as print media and tv stories accusing a forum of bad behavior. Look at who is instigating it, how often they support each other, how much they're posting and commenting, how quickly they comment on relevant threads etc.
* Keep an eye out for sudden and extreme rule changes, such as moving political talk to a seperate (much smaller) subreddit moderated by known antagonists; or removing discussion of topics such as racism, BLM, etc. This can be a sign that the new mods are 'bought' in some way.
* Browse by new to get a glimpse at stories before they're removed. This is most useful when there's a story getting actively buried, or a narrative being pushed.
* There are tools that can help you keep track of users such as RES, or to analyze user's history.
* You can use these tools to find people who are fighting back and keep track of their insights, or keep an eye on accounts known for bs-ing. It's a lot of effort for very little reward though lol.
* It can be illuminating to post verboten stories yourself, then keep track of any strangeness. E.g., the story getting removed, funniness with the vote count, particular commenters rushing in to spread fud, etc.
You can try it here on HN, to get a glimpse of how actively some groups keep track of hot topics: Find a fresh story that goes against an industry (or empire) known for their online PR goons, and see what happens when you post it. Even comments mentioning certain keywords will attract attention. If you think that sounds conspiratorial - just try it.
If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum - it can be quickly removed from public view by 'forum sliding.' In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly prepositioned on the forum and allowed to 'age.' Each of these misdirectional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a 'forum slide.' The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public. To trigger a 'forum slide' and 'flush' the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then 'replying' to prepositined postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list, and the critical posting 'slides' down the front page, and quickly out of public view. Although it is difficult or impossible to censor the posting it is now lost in a sea of unrelated and unuseful postings. By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items.
Except if someone bumps it again it means you need to make a bunch of new replies again, which will look suspicious and be a lot of work. Also, it would still be indexable in google.
This doesn't even seem like a viable strategy. When you're on forms and you're discussing a topic you're interested in, you add that thread to your watch list. You come back to the forum and check on updates for the threads you are participating in, no amount of sliding will hide that. And as long as you're not replying too late, you're not necroing, no matter how much the thread has slid. You'd have to play this game before a thread even kicks off. And the amount of posts before the thread pages? And how fast you'd have to make them? Hard to hide that.
FWIW I've seen this term used more when discussing *chans, and less traditional forums. I think cognizance of the temporally-sorted nature of those imageboards makes the practice of "forum sliding" that much more alarming -- but that nature also makes the prospect of "forum sliding" almost inherently conspiratorial. How can one prove that activity that moves a thread off the front page (and thus probabilistically dooms it to irrelevance) is the result of some co-ordinated effort or the natural process of people using the forum?
Nothing in this article is specifically related to forum posts. This stuff can be found within any gathering of people and most have been described way earlier than the internet, as far back as the original Forum or Agora. That is not what is wrong with it.
If you read the article and think there is something to it, please read it again and compare all the 'evidence' to the behavior of what you suspect a normal forum user would do: Ask questions? Gather information? Establish rapport? Propose something stupid or dangerous? Comment on the wrong thing? Post something that leads people away from the post you are interested in and have so much people comment on it that your important information disappears. You can get that just by the number of people telling the original poster it is 'off-topic'. Yes you would expect normal users to do all of them some of the time.
If you value your (online) community judge all actions by Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". If malice was that easily distinguishable from normal behavior there would be a lot less of it. Don't let anyone tell you you should approach your community with suspicion, because then they are already halfway there in destroying it.
What is your specific suggestion? It sounds like you're saying that we should assume it's all just stupidity, and there is no intentionality to any kind of apparent psyops/agitators/shills, and we should just pretend like it's all good.
That's naive. We simply end up with forums where, if such bad actors do exist, they have a much easier time controlling the narratives. Better to harbor a modicum of suspicion, for the sake of protecting the genuineness of the community.
Well my suggestion would be to be confident and positive. Confident that your issue/ cause/subject is important and that there are enough other people sharing that believe in the forum, regardless of the nay-sayers.
With positive I mean post things that are on topic for you, comment on things you find contributing to the issue/cause/subject and refrain from the rest. You really don't have to tell people that something is inappropriate, that they are wrong, dangerous. They will learn by not getting a response.
Don't try to control a narrative, try to share a narrative with as much people who are willing to join the forum.
Hanlon's razor should be modified to to include 'without adequate evidence' at the beginning. You can gain this evidence from repeated interactions or from the community as a whole. This is going to be subjective so there is not going to be a list of pass/fail tests you can apply.
There is a claim that getting caught is bad for the attacker, but it seems like creating a few fake accounts that get caught probably would help increase the level of distrust quite a bit.
This is fantastic, because it describes fairly typical forum activity as a sign of _soviet KGB super spy activity_. Now, those happen, but aren’t _that_ frequent. Meanwhile when you see those “who cares” posts, you’re just dealing with genuine bona fide terrible people.
So now this post triggered folks here to look at every time their post - or something they _personally_ believe important - sinks and think “oh, it’s the COINTELPRO” - meanwhile it’s just that nobody cares. Maybe they should, I don’t know, but they don’t.
On top of that, I bet it made a few of you think that police violence videos are Russian psyops. Just smuggled that under the radar, phrased it in a technically correct way.
Essentially I’m saying it’s like those “protect women against trafficking” videos aimed at wealthy middle-class white women - that both make them paranoid, and distract from real issues, all so that the poster can feel smart.
I mean, it's literally called "The Gentleman's Guide To Forum Spies" and claims one of the obvious signs of being a fed is denying the credibility of conspiracy theories. It's an obvious /x/ shitpost that for some reason a lot of people take seriously.
It may have some value in describing the psychology of forums, trolling techniques and logical fallacies but it's purpose is obviously to troll paranoids into seeing spooks everywhere.
As in many other areas, the younger generation raised on Web 2.0 are far beyond the Web 1.0 crowd in regards to industriousness and psyche. Nobody writes or reads stuff like this anymore. They just install Shinigami Eyes and move on with their day
In contrast to all the dubiously useful AI applications springing up lately, one that would be great is an AI that can reliably and accurately detect bots, shills, astroturf, disguised advertisements and other sponsored content masquerading as organic. I’d install a browser plug-in that could put a warning under comments and tweets that are detected as fake or a bad faith actor.
There's a lot of research papers on this topic and you can detects some kinds of bad behavior consistently, but mostly involving spamming. Sophisticated information operations distribute the work across multiple participants, and the technological side of it is a constantly evolving arms race.
I would as well... but how would you actually target an actual shill? You'd need a dataset of confirmed shills.
If you have a dataset of people who you speculate to be shills, doesn't that trend close to a dataset of people who's opinion you don't like?
To be clear, I'm not saying that wouldn't be personally valuable... but uh, if I was creating a system like this for myself, I'd curate that dataset VERY carefully (assuming I could even get the system to work :\\\)
> New York state attorney general issued a report on ... big telecommunications companies paid millions of dollars to specialist “AstroTurf” companies to generate public comments. These companies then stole people’s names and email addresses from old files and from hacked data dumps and attached them to 8.5 million public comments and half a million letters to members of Congress. All of them said that they supported the corporations’ position on something called “net neutrality,” the idea that telecommunications companies must treat all Internet content equally and not prioritize any company or service. Three AstroTurf companies — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media — agreed to pay nearly $4 million in fines.
> Walker shows how repertoires of participation originally developed by advocacy organizations, electoral campaigns, and social movements are commercialized by public affairs consultants who offer them as professional services ... The result is an increasingly “subsidized public” where selective incentivization and rational prospecting by public affairs consultants looking to mobilize support for their clients’ interests work to get people involved in particular political processes.
> ..illuminates how elite consultants have adopted grassroots advocacy tactics for paying clients. Rather than being dismissed as mere 'astroturf', these consultants' campaigns should be seen as having real effects on political participation and policymaking
Organized (e.g. software-assisted) online pseudo-persona lobbyists of public opinion are usually outnumbered by individual humans, who can gain the experience to move such arms races towards higher quality debate.
Just stringing words together does not make you sound as smart as you think it does. Apparently we’ve had the most successful conspiracy in history where telcos have hidden all articles about the internet dying while simultaneously also shielding me from seeing the effects of a dying internet.
Propaganda so fucking efficient, it leaves you asking for more.
Dead services tell no journalists. Zero-rating has been debated at length here and elsewhere.
For those who don't have time to read the 39-page report linked above:
> Biggest Broadband Companies Spent $8.2 Million to Oppose
Net Neutrality, Including Generating 9 Million Comments and Letters in Opposition .. Broadband Company Money Funded Three Astroturfing Efforts, and Each Resulted in Fraud ... The Broadband Industry Hid Its Involvement Behind Advocacy Groups to Create the False Impression of Widespread Grassroots Opposition to Net Neutrality ...More than 9.3 Million Additional Fake Comments Using Fictitious Identities
Were Submitted to the FCC with Automated Software.
And … ? After all that debate, is it statistically proven that the internet has gotten worse in reach, speed and affordability? Please link since you seem to think you have all knowledge on this topic.
> A comprehensive multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works, comparing the 30 member countries of the European Union (EU) on net neutrality enforcement, has found that zero rating business practices by wireless carriers have increased the cost of wireless data compared to countries without zero rating. This directly contradicts all of the assertions by major wireless carriers that their zero rating practices are “free data” for consumers.
Sorry this is valid and all, but I want to see the effects of the US ruling specifically. I’m being selective and pedantic and all that, but I’m trying to understand how I cannot even find a negative result from the time net neutrality was struck down.
That’s fair. I search for this periodically each time Ajit pai does a victory lap on twitter, but I’m unable to find anything concrete and am forced to agree with him.
Oops, thank you. I misread the "last edited" date on the bottom as the created date. That makes way more sense - my intuition was that I had read this article a long time ago, and a mere 4 years ago didn't seem right, but, I don't want to blame it all on the COVID era, but I've lost my sense of time these past 7 years.
Which is kind of crazy in a small way, right? These techniques could have applied even back in the late 90’s early 00’s. They’re effectively just mechanisms for warping a forum, which is to perhaps claim that forums are a withered technology, perhaps without enough lateral thinking.
Schopenhauer wrote a bitter sarcastic book on logical fallacies nearly 2 centuries ago which was (probably) meant as a critique of his intellectual rivals but has enjoyed a revival as an early guide to trolling.
Having run a forum hosting service back then, I can tell you that these things were applied.
The more interesting post (considering it talks about both sides) would include the counter-measures that moderators and platform providers do. Although, truth be told, obscurity of these things was (and is) very effective on most.
I’ll talk about one: assume that there are a number of agitators, but they are still a small minority inside a forum. What we would do if things were getting out of hand, is make the forum require a login.
At this point, we know who is looking at the forum, and therefore we could present different views of content to different people for the same forum. (Rarely we would do this with a supercookie).
We went ahead and grouped all the agitators together, so that they would be able to communicate with each other, and not think that their posts were deleted. However, the main forum members would never see these messages or replies by these people, and the order of the messages would reflect that. Much better than sliding. But if they gained access under a different name, they would realize. This obscurity of the practice was important.
Nothing quiets an agitator more than silence from that they are trying to agitate.
> they would be able to communicate with each other, and not think that their posts were deleted. However, the main forum members would never see these messages or replies by these people
Easiest way to see psyops and narrative control in action is to go look at all the deleted comments from any of the popular subreddits. If dissent gets you banned then you know something is wrong.
Yes, but I hazard a guess it's 30/30/30 fanbois/trolls/real. I would love to be paid to be nasty about Musk, alas I have to decide to do it for love not money. What category does that put me in?
I'm pretty sure he or his PR firm actually does this, particularly on Reddit (where it seems to be cheap to manufacture consensus). A lot of other big business interests too.
As far as people paid to bash him, I doubt anyone has the same incentives.
I honestly think its just easy to hate on well-known companies. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that most posts that go that way are legit.
On the other hand... I'd be more suspect of posts about random companies that pop out of no where and get a ton of random engagement. * of course, not implying start ups don't go viral, etc.
> I honestly think its just easy to hate on well-known companies. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that most posts that go that way are legit.
What happens is that probably bots/alts do all the work at first to bad-mouth specific companies often enough, until it gets a critical mass and all simple-minded NPCs end up parroting the same narrative.
on a forum like this the most straight forward explanation is almost always organic pro-tech bias given the audience, or the opposite, extreme distaste for particular companies. I honestly doubt this mindset of smelling psyops everywhere, especially on a tiny forum that gets maybe a few hundred comments on every article is a good idea.
My guess is the closest thing to coordinated "psyops" that HN has ever seen is when an aspiring "founder" asks a group of his buddies to upvote his post and make accounts to give praise or ask softball questions (which I have seen).
But it feels like in every controversial discussion there are accusations of being a shill or astroturfer or whatever in the pay of the enemy. I've been occasionally accused of this myself. I think it's just a lazy substitute for debate rather than an accusation that's actually been thought out or is even believed in any way.
I have no insight into how psyops are run, but I find the idea of an agent springing into action because a HN article critical of or praising X has just come along. Who knows I guess...
I personally encountered unexplained behavior like this whenever I make comments critical to Apple (I'm specifically concerned with their "privacy" PR hiding a nascent mega-ad empire so mostly comment about that) and Elon Musk being anything but perfect (particularly expressing doubt on his new initiatives based on his track record of over-promising and -severely- underdelivering).
I'm convinced there are genuine people that believe Apple / Musk can do no wrong, but the veracity of flagging and downvoting is making me suspicious to something more going on.
I don't think I've ever heard people claim that Apple or Musk "can do no wrong". Not even their most enthusiastic proponents. What I do hear from their proponents (including myself) is push-back on provably false claims, conspiracy theories, and opinions-declared-as-fact.
I don't think you'll find many devout fans who will defend Apple's intransigence with the butterfly keyboard debacle. Or how they're marketing ProRes RAW video codecs on a smartphone that doesn't have a USB-C port.
As for Musk, he's just a person. I am impressed by what he has achieved and I greatly admire his work ethic. That doesn't mean I defend the entirety of his character. But his flaws aren't reason for me to avoid rebutting claims which are obviously false, such as claims that he's just a "cheerleader" with no particular skills.
You mention a "track record of over-promising and severely underdelivering" but I wonder if that's just a matter of which parts of his track record you place emphasis on. Far from over-promising or under-delivering, Falcon 9 is an astounding success. Dragon is an astounding success. Starlink is providing a level of service previously unheard of and is now the largest fleet of satellites by an enormous margin.
The Model S was described as vapourware before its release, then it won multiple car of the year awards. The Model 3 was described as vapourware before its release, then it won multiple car of the year awards. The Model Y is currently the top selling car in Germany. I don't recall any of them turning out to be flops or disappointments. The yoke steering wheel was described as dangerous and maybe illegal, and it won't make it to any production vehicles, then it was released and the howls of controversy vanished overnight.
Right now the criticism is focused on claims that Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta is vapourware. For a long time it was described as impossible. And also that it's scandalous how it is taking some years longer to complete than initially estimated. And also it doesn't work. And it is killing people. And it's unimpressive and Tesla's technology is dead last among competitors. Just don't look at YouTube.
Personally that Brave Browser article a few days ago looked quite strange (to me, at least). A lot of top-level comments positive about the browser within a relatively short period of time after posting. Not a lot of commentary about the company itself and related controversies. That only happened after the post hit the front page.
The guidelines ask you not to post stuff like this. If you're actually worried that a story was gamed onto the front page, mail hn@yc and tell Dan & co. Otherwise, everyone's got a set of front page stories they don't like, and the game where people pick their least favorite stories and claim they're gamed is corrosive to the site.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Problem is that we know for certain that it happens and we know dang runs some kind of heuristics to try to identify it, so that creates a weird situation where we know it positively happens, but we can't talk about the ones that we suspect slip through.
And the title article is all about astroturfing and foreign agents and the like, so it seems like if you don't want to read that discussion you shouldn't really be reading this comment section. It should be pretty obvious what the content is going to be like from the title. Flag the post if you don't like it and want it all gone.
I made a positive comment in maybe that thread, and I'm a human, and sadly enough nobody has ever even offered to pay me money in return for an internet post.
Seriously, I found myself thinking that most of the criticism against Brave is done by... not an organized group, but a group that is predisposed to loudly criticize it regardless of any actual failing or problem. But that kind of thinking is unfair to the vast majority of posters, pro OR con, who are honestly expressing their opinions. It's probably best to assume good faith, as the good lord and HN guidelines dictate.
Brave fans are relentless in their pursuit to shill the browser to others. It’s why the browser has such a stigma. The browser has a shady reputation due to the fact that every comment section attached to a Brave topic is filled with “Brave is perfect and if you disagree, then you’re wrong” level responses.
Well you're not wrong. A big reason why I've never checked out rust is because of how rabid the fanbase was for a while. Seems to have simmered down within the past ~6 months though which is nice.
Lots of HN folks like underdogs who are sticking it to FAANG companies, which is the image that Brave is trying to present. Whether or not they are actually sticking it to anyone is debatable, but i really dont think its surprising that Brave fans hang out at hn.
Brave is a bit of a political football because the CEO is Brendan Eich, who left Mozilla after a very short tenure as CEO due to controversy about his opposition to same sex marriage.
So that makes him a hero-by-default to a variety of conservatives - some who think his political views unfairly eclipsed his technical achievements, some who feel his free speech was curtailed, some who are just homophobes. Eich hasn't talked much about the issue since so it's hard to say how much of this support is rooted in people projecting their own feelings onto him. Brave also appeals to the crypto crowd because it has its own token with which you can earn and/or redistribute 'Brave Attention Tokens.'
I don't know that the behavior around Brave is any sort of astroturfing in the sense of being coordinated; it could just be organic behavior by people who happen to have similarly narrow reasons for preferring it.
I think attributing it all to the circumstances of Eich's tenure as mozilla ceo is probably missing a large part of the story.
Don't get me wrong, i am sure there exists people who are motivated by that, but except in the early days of brave, i have not really seen brave evangelists talk about that at all. The talking points mostly seem to be anti-google, anti-big advertisers, anti-chrome monoply and pro-privacy stuff. And i think the amount of people motivated by those talking points far eclipse the other drama, which at this point feels like a historical footnote. Especially because as far as i know Eich hasn't continued to publicly express these views.
That's actually in line with what I said. There are other browsers with similar aspirations, but Brave happened with a broader political current, so it ended up with a dominant position in that particular market, which became self-reinforcing.
Once people feel loyal to a brand (or anything really) the original reasons don't have to stay top of mind for very long, and the loyalty symbol becomes a sort of in-group signal in its own right. It's not very different from fashion signatures in music subcultures.
The easiest way to spot it (at least for me) is to pay attention to how you feel when reading a forum. If you get super pissed off or anxious while reading, there's a chance you're getting screwed with
An example: the other day I read a NYT article that seemed like it was almost designed to be irritating. It was so irritating that I was about to subscribe just to comment on how stupid the author was, but then I realized I had my credit card out. Then I realized that I was the stupid one and put the card away
Forum agitators will almost always go for your emotions (because it scales better). How to solve this? Don't go to online places that fuck with your head. Go to the places that tend to be less emotionally charged, less groupthink oriented, and more boring. I.e. the reuters of social media
Assuming that Elon Musk is paying off shills, or proponents of nuclear energy are, or whomever else you suspect, how hard would it be to get a job doing this, get paid for it, then go public with receipts and proof that it's happening?
You sign an NDA when you take the job. Going public often opens up the possibility for lawsuits. Plus, a lot of these things are already publicly known, but most people don't think that it affects them:
I really doubt that happens all that much. Far easier to find existing super fans and just make sure your preferred arguments make it to them. They’ll do the rest, for free.
What kind of receipts are there that people would believe? "This guy said he works for elon musk and he paid me $2000 to go on reddit and call people pedophiles, just look at this zelle email!" wouldn't go very far.
I don't know, presumably there are statements in a bank, employment contracts. Take them to a journalist, I bet they would be interested; you could stay anonymous if wanted to avoid NDA trouble.
I think it would be newsworthy! And the fact that it hasn't happened makes me skeptical.
For a real-time example, go to r/politics and sort by new. See what news never sees the light of day but somehow still gets 50+ comments saying “who cares” or “what about…”.
Or go here anytime a post shows up about crime in San Francisco.
In r/bayarea there was a poster that posted nothing but crime posts multiple times a day. If anyone pointed it out they’d be heavily downvoted within minutes. There are groups dedicated to this in many city subreddits.
Which sides were the shills in that story? Was it the alt-right "thah! This is what ya get without the thin blue line" or the fixie riding tankies saying "everything is perfect, I've never even heard of crime here before, and the whole place smells like fresh clean ocean breeze!"
At least in the NYC subreddit, we have a consistent group of a few dozen people who blame Alvin Bragg for every single thing that happens in the city. Never mind the fact that he’s only the Manhattan DA; you’ll see the same handles blame him for random crimes that happen in other boroughs.
Okay, but that doesn’t really change what I’ve said: it simply doesn’t make sense to blame the Manhattan DA for crime in other boroughs. It’s like blaming the mayor of LA for crime in Peoria.
I am visiting forums for entertainment. Well I also get some really useful tech links on HN every once in a while. If the author of this insanely long list thinks that I have nothing to do with my life but study their creation and then use the "wisdom" gained to hunt for psyops they have to get a life. Well if it is their job I understand ;)
Yes there are all type of "agents" on forums. If they think that their posts are going to change my opinions I have a bridge to sell.
I think everyone likes to think they are immune to this type of manipulation and only those "other" people fall for it, but it's a lot more subtle than that. Thinking that you are immune to it is probably a sign that you are much more vulnerable than you realize.
I do not eat babies for breakfast, I never want to force my point of view if people disagree, I do not search Putin under my bed in the morning. If all of this the result of me being affected by forum propagandists then kudos to them. As I said I do not give a flying fuck and prefer doing something productive rather than study some mental regurgitation that supposedly meant to "protect" me from "improper" thoughts.
