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Comment by pillowkusis | Hacker News Reader

Astroturfing like this, shilling and manipulating discussion, has gotten so advanced that it's almost impossible to tell real opinions from fake anymore. On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog[0]. I don't see any way to sort authentic comments from in-authentic ones. My conclusion has been to assume that any major conversation about companies/brands/products/governments on Reddit is probably astroturfed to some extent. HN "growth hackers" probably do the same thing.

This is a real problem, how to sort real users from the fake ones, and I'm not sure there is even a solution. But the integrity of our discourse, politics, and direction as a society is dependent upon finding a solution.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

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This is actually something I've been quite curious about. For example, I know that stormfront regularly organizes brigades and disseminates talking points to disrupt conversation on Reddit - same with FSB/corporation/ etc.

I was wondering if I could mine all users on stormfront and then perform a stylometric analysis on Reddit posts to ferret out those same users.

Same with other astroturfing groups, instead maybe running some type of classification technique to find aockpuppet accounts.

I'll probably make this an ask hn at some point to get some input.

I don't know what stormfont is but I'd focus on /r/politics. I managed to bump randomly there in what looked liked bots or some organized trolling. In one case I disagreed with some topic regarding Clinton during elections and got this general (vague) insulting comment back. Looking through posters' history noticed they/it? just copy-pasted same thing into their other responses.

FSB ones might be fun too. There is a certain class of grammar mistakes Russians make when writing in English. You could filter by that in addition to other stuff.

> FSB ones might be fun too. There is a certain class of grammar mistakes Russians make when writing in English. You could filter by that in addition to other stuff.

Cool, you would filter me out too. Or would you not? If my English is good enough to confuse your bot, then what stops FSB from hiring somebody like me?

Also, what stops FSB from hiring native speakers of English?

There are plenty of people on the Earth who speak Russian, but don't live in Russia and don't support the Russian government. Bear that in mind too, please.

Heh, I meant it would be an additional filter not the primary. If you copy and paste the same response to multiple posts back to back you might be a robot, as Jeff Foxworthy would say :-)

FSB probably doesn't pay as many non-Russians on average. It would be expensive, risky and harder to control.

The point about grammar is interesting. Last time I heard of it was when there was discussion if Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian hacker or not. Some were saying he wasn't because his grammar mistakes were not characteristic of Russian speakers and most likely it was a native English speaker trying to talk in broken English trying to sound like a Russian.

> I don't know what stormfont is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_%28website%29

Stormfront is a white nationalist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum that was the Web's first major racial hate site.

Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1996 by former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist Don Black

Makes sense, it is the new KKK.

> I know that stormfront regularly organizes brigades and disseminates talking points to disrupt conversation on Reddit

Any proof of this?

I am a bit skeptical of right-wing astroturfing/brigading having happened on Reddit, because it would have been a total and utter failure, given that Reddit is really left-leaning these days, even in non-political subs.

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