Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum (2012)

pastebin.com

78 pointsbuserror46 comments

This reads less like a genuine guide to a disrupting a forum, and more like an imitation of one, produced by a participant of such a conspiracy/anti-government forum or some such, in an attempt to convince others that such activity was happening. As if the author was upset at the typical properties and pathologies of such forums frustrating his attempts to push his own agenda, and decided they must be the result of a co-ordinated effort to disrupt it. Like fringe political groups that are obsessed by the bogeyman of establishment infiltrators, not realising their own true believers' lunacy and internecine tendencies is often far more disruptive to their efforts.

Agreed. Not enough obscure acronyms for a genuine government document, and insufficient count of the word "cyber".

Also, poor spelling. I'd expect members of an intelligence community to be more [drum roll] intelligent. "precidence" instead of "precedent?" Really?

And this, I think, is an even bigger giveaway: "... and no longer useful in maintaining their freedoms." "Freedoms" is one of the hot-button words of conspiracy theorists. As far as I've been able to tell, even the most heavily oppressive American 3 letter thugs tell themselves that they are indeed struggling to _preserve_ the citizens' freedoms.

Are you implying that an anonymous, unsourced pastebin could possibly not be authoritative?

How much does the government pay you to distract people from the truth?

Well, JTRIG exists whether or not this article is real-- and it probably isn't real. There are people who do this for their full time job. Additionally, your dismissal of "conspiracy" wholesale is troubling; conspiracy is merely another interpretation of reality that draws intense dislike because it questions the accepted story.

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

It's also undeniable that the government does try to disrupt dissenting groups, even if they are nonviolent. In the light of the modern version of this, it's hard to say exactly what movements failed due to internal disruption, and which failed due to not having popular appeal.

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

Keep in mind that it is not always the government(s) using strategies like this. Political groups (left and right alike) do know about it, and use it, as well as the occasional 'troll for the lulz'. And there is the whole issue of corporate wikipedia-editing networks, if they exist, you can reasonably assume some shadowy businesses also do operations like that.

I think that corporate PR constitutes a larger (maybe even the largest) source of deceit/propaganda like in the OP. It's no secret that on reddit there are a large corpus of Monsanto shills (people who sit around and respond to Monsanto-related topics to defuse critcicism).

except they presumably pay for their own PR and don't have a monopoly of force, unlike the Gov.

Wow, textbook application of forum sliding. +1

Ah yes, I remember reading this back in 2012. It's a good document, but you can't take it too literally or go around accusing everyone of being a shill. Interestingly, I'd say HN is probably one of the least-threatened online communities for this kind of disruption, as administration is stringent and relatively consistent and transparent about the rules. A small, tightly-knit userbase also makes me doubt that HN is heavily targeted by these types of programs, however there are still a few issues (Israel, Russia, the NSA) that predictably draw out people who may not be legitimate. This gets noticed quite frequently by posters here, though.

A site like reddit I would classify as high risk. I would say with certainty that reddit is heavily targeted by various propaganda/control programs, potentially with some degree of complicity from the administration. reddit has a large, free user base that isn't likely to have expert level information on certain topics-- new accounts can be made easily, developed, then used for propaganda for free. It's easy to manipulate voting system, and reddit is known for its openly corrupt moderators. I happened to browse reddit in the past, during the Russian invasion of Crimea-- the shills were palpable in every related thread. The same could be said for the volumes of accounts with little history that (on reddit, the largest Snowden-friendly place that exists) were openly calling for Snowden to be executed and other stuff like that. Then there's the perpetual corporate advertisements that are disguised as posts or submissions. The unfortunate reality is that reddit is fully locked down and propagandized, and has been for a few years now. The size of reddit makes attempts to control it inevitable.

My point here is that the techniques discussed in the article are real, and actively practiced on audiences similar to our own here. The remedy is knowledge of propaganda, harsh moderation, and critical thinking. I think a new killer app would be a form of automated shill-detection for forums... the trouble would be reducing the false positives to zero. The reality of our era (and, in fact, any modern era) is that people can be convinced of insane or unreasonable things by powerful outside forces very easily.

What it describes as the behavior of shills and government agents, though, are also common behaviors on anonymous forums. It seems designed as flamebait for /x/ or Usenet, because if you take it seriously then inevitably you'll see conspiracies everywhere.

I think that it shines as a "consider the following when assessing other forum users". Knowing the tricks of deception attunes you to people's witting or unwitting attempts to use them, which will improve your ability to form good arguments and also argue against ideas which you disagree with.

HN doesn't need these techniques because the HN frontpage is heavily controlled by the site's moderators. I can't even count how many times I've seen a freshly posted and upvoted anti-startup or anti-capitalist posting get buried into insignificance.

> I think a new killer app would be a form of automated shill-detection for forums... the trouble would be reducing the false positives to zero.

An interesting idea for AI! Although, the domain knowledge and contextual information required to classify a poster as say, "normal vs. astroturfer", might be too great, and vary from topic to topic. Also, there's the question of how positive / negative training examples would be obtained - who's going to admit to the ground-truth labels for the "astroturf" class, for example?

Why are we talking about this as a conspiracy to incite distrust in governments?

It's just what it says it is; "techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of an internet forum". It doesn't matter where it came from or who actually uses the techniques described.

Shouldn't the discussion be more about the effectiveness of these strategies and their repercussions?

Anyway I agree that the spelling is poor and an anonymous pastebin isn't a very authoritative source but there's still content there.

Also reading the point of view of 'paranoids' (for lack of better term) can be intriguing, see: http://stealthiswiki.tk/wiki.stealthiswiki.org/wiki/Main_Pag...

Edit: the discussion changed while I was writing this, disregard the first thing I said :P

Can't wait to see some comments on this one. Posts like these are dividing HN.

Anyone with anything mildly divisive to say left HN long ago.

The only thing you can earn here by leaving a mildly divisive comment is a shadowban.

Just out of interest, what would be considered mildly divisive on here, besides aything political that disagrees with the HN consensus?

You should be shadowbanned!!

Be careful that comment is starting to sound divisive. You should edit the word shadowban to "Hug and Rainbows"

Yawn. That sounds like your typical "this forum is going downhill" sort of talk. Do you have anything to back your claim?

What would be something "divisive", in your opinion? I think some very divisive topics are discussed fairly regularly here, among them:

1. Gender politics

2. NSA/surveillance

3. Vim/Emacs

And I could name at least 2-3 regular commenters on HN who fall pretty cleanly into each of the opposing sides of these issues (ok, maybe not Emacs, but all the others).

Just because we're not degenerating into flame wars doesn't mean we don't discuss divisive topics.

Don't forget self-driving cars.

The most divisive thing you can do on HN is point out the obvious true fact that there's no such thing as a self-driving car yet.

So what are you suggesting, that we all drive diesel cars?

No way. Volkswagen is a major proponent of diesel cars, and as we all know VW was created by Hitler.

He also wrote emacs.

There's a lot of populations on HN. Some of us avoid those topics like the plague. So no general indictment can be made.

Those topics are poisonous because they can't be driven to a conclusion in two paragraphs or less. And most everything's been said, so they run in circles rehashing tired points. Not to say they aren't important topics. But it takes an essay of 100 pages to cover all the ground, or a PhD even. But everybody has opinions, often based on whatever they just were thinking about. Their arguments come off as sophomoric (which they mostly are). Folks point that out, and away they spin.

> Those topics are poisonous because they can't be driven to a conclusion in two paragraphs or less.

They are poison on voting sites because one side quickly becomes grey. Votes do nothing but squelch conversation, and many choose to self-censor to avoid that.

4. Manned space exploration

There can be pretty good diversity of well-informed and well-argued opinion here. I'm not sure I would call it divisive, but take a look at any of the threads regarding surveillance/police states, economic inequality, geopolitics, etc-- lots of people taking different positions, though admittedly there are a few positions that are more dominant than others.

Interestingly, I think that the SJW-phenomenon would be divisive here as well, but it's seldomly mentioned because of how inane the events which prompt discussion are.

Edit: I appear to have struck a nerve somewhere.

Do you have any statistics to show the division of HN before and after posts like this? If you don't, then clearly you're wrong about this, and everything else you have ever said.

Well that's socialism and look at how many people that killed.

I think you need to be more precise about your definition of "socialism".

Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!

How does that address all of our problems? Thinking of the children isn't helping generate clean energy or prevent climate change.

Poe's law in full effect: I can't work out whether this comment and its parent are jokes or not..

Just trying out my dilution and misdirection.

Sounds like it worked :-)

NB When I posted that comment the entire thread appeared to be people trying out the techniques mentioned in the article.

Do you have info on all the things he has ever said? Etc..

Haha. "You're dividing the movement."

Now the question is, did you make this comment by accident or on purpose, and when on purpose, then on what purpose. :) Funny uh?

Well, at least you managed me to expose that I read this document. I do not think that this is a genuine one, but it is an still interesting read.

Another similar, a more general topic is the decision theory. This paired with the forum control is a good knowledge when you want to lead a big organization.

The second part reminds me of Schopenhauer's "Eristische Dialektik" (discourse stratagems): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

There should be a "The Kurzgesagt" channel video about this topic.

The 2nd part also jumped out at me too for it's similarity to every politician's response to any given question.

I've been using forums of one kind or another for nearly twenty years.

So my question is, how much of what I believe was planted there by somebody using this stuff?

Probably at least some. It's not such a big deal, though. Pretty much everyone in modern society is operating on a set of ideas that were 99.99% not their own. The trick is evaluating the placed-ideas and then replacing them with better ideas if they aren't working.

Well, these kind of tactics are not only useful in Internet forums but in various kind of organizations for people who want to have control.

For example you can assume that your supervisor at work may have used at least some of these.

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