An Internet propaganda campaign at your fingertips | Hacker News Reader

An Internet propaganda campaign at your fingertips

it-was-fun-at-first.net

76 pointsjonaslund23 comments

I think this is brilliant social satire come to life. Can there be a block chain of people who "trust" a source within the net and where central claims originate?

Googling the name of the authors suggests they are artists[0-1]:

[0] http://jonaslund.biz/

[1] http://sebastianschmieg.com/

Judging by the number of comments taking seriously, it might be a little too brilliant ;)

There is a .zip you can download, and a link to give it access to your Twitter account. That's enough to make me think it's legitimate :) If you are brave enough to go through either of the steps, let me know what's at the end of the rainbow.

I like the idea. But I don't see why this should have a horrible red background.

> I like the idea.

A voluntary bot net is still a bot net. And I wonder how voluntary it really is? Can you easily decline further participation if you start to disagree with some of the "fake news" it is spamming?

One would think that simply changing the password on the Twitter account would be the end of it. But for the curious, I would still recommend establishing a "burner" account for testing purposes.

You can easily de-authorize the application that you join to remove yourself from the botnet

Lol, first thing I did was change it in dev tools. Couldn't stand it.

This looks like it will end up like Microsoft's inadvertently racist chat bot, except it will be people and on purpose. And it'll happen faster.

The bot, Tay, was taken offline after about 16 hours. There was an organized, purposeful effort by /pol/ to train Tay to be racist.

Damn. Fair enough, I must have missed that. My thoughts on its fate remain unchanged though, haha.

I'll call shenanigans on this one:

>> In order to hire the Botnet you first need to join the bots with your Twitter account.

Any actual commercial enterprise, legal or not, would take your money without asking your participation.

Are credit unions not "actual commercial enterprise"?

In a credit union it is your money that is doing the participating. They don't ask for your car keys before taking your money. These guys are taking your money but first want your twitter account ... or at least some twitter account. I assume most "customers" will create and submit dummy accounts.

They aren't taking your money. Did you read it?

In a credit union, you must give them money to purchase a share of the CU before they'll take your money -- you literally have to buy in.

Requiring a Twitter account just changes the form of payment from being all dollars.

I wouldn't trust this system with my twitter credentials and I expect this site to get a fun letter from twitter and maybe countermeasures .

Yeah, this is terrible on several levels. The lack of any transparency about who is running it should be as red a flag as that background color.

I like the idea but sadly I'm sure it's more of a marketing effort than an actual platform. I've been saddened to not be able to find social media marketplaces that provide an actual twitter platform (ie programmable). All you can buy is x thousands of account blasting an identical message. Or maybe I haven't been looking hard enough?

One of the authors here. You can actually use spintax to compose your tweets.

I like the inline comment in the page source.

Mac-only? Where's the linux port? :)

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