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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

Astroturfing has typically involved people. By far the biggest use of it I've seen has been in global warming discussions.

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Right, "persona management" is a technique for keeping track of simulated people with simulated interests, simulated aging (so the accounts can exist for years and be reputable), simulated interests and consistent simulated schedules, and simulated vocabulary.

"Persona management" software allows centers of contractors to maintain the identities of these people in a rotating fashion, with the software helping the contractor to choose the right accents and vocabulary, etc.

The biggest use I've seen it in is in politics, specifically events of national security importance.

That's wild. You have personal anecdata seeing this in action? How do you detect it? How do you know you aren't just being... paranoid? Can you give irrefutable evidence of an simulated persona? How would one even prove that?

There is a wiki [1] dedicated to persona management topics that explains more. A company called Ntrepid [2] for example was contracted by the US Army to use persona management in the middle east. I'm sure that it would also work fine in domestic situations, although I couldn't find any instances of that happening...

[1] http://wiki.project-pm.org/wiki/Persona_Management [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid

Here is a link to a research paper on the subject, based on an ethically questionable experiment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...

tldr: it's extremely difficult to detect and mitigate, relatively easy to do (assuming you have some technical skills), and quite effective

I have a feeling about half of the "Global warming isn't real/isn't bad/can't be sure/too late" posts here are by paid astroturfers.

Too drunk to look now but I've read about such companies in the past. They're even willing to pay for older accounts with good karma on big sites.

Try googling "Koch brothers astroturfing" I remember some news about their climate change astroturfing recently.

Maybe also "Tony Abbott fake twitter likes". The Australian PM was paying for twitter likes.

The Statfor hack showed that the USG has contracted out the development of "persona management software".

Sounds like a paranoia fueled nightmare. But it's technically possible, so why not.

How do you know it was astroturfing? Or is this just a lame inflammatory way to imply nobody could disagree with you?

There's a definite pattern, like people that post very little, or don't post in a particular subreddit at all but then swarm on Climate change posts in seconds.

A lot also don't seem to be able to pass a Turing test but it's a very blurry line.

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