Russian trolls hit Reddit, too | Hacker News Reader

Russian trolls hit Reddit, too

arstechnica.com

38 pointsrbanffy62 comments

All: could you please keep political talking points and the shallow-angry comment style out of threads like this? I know it's hard, but it's possible if you try.

Low-information internet attack mode is the biggest threat to Hacker News these days, and when you add that acid to one thread it seeps into others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I found it interesting that they actually published the list of accounts: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/suspiciousaccounts

Looking through some of them, I would be interested to see a bit more detail into how they identified these accounts.

Because, for example, this account[1] never seemed to post anything political at all, but is included in the list.

1: https://www.reddit.com/user/reggaebull

I don't know. Some of those photos of puppies are highly suspect.

There are some political posts in its history but I agree with your sentiment. I posed a similar question in the announcement thread (not asking for specifics because they'd never share that) but received no answer.

Elsewhere in the thread however I did see that they worked with some other companies like Twitter to share data of suspected Russian trolls and issued bans based off of that.

Perhaps it's one of many accounts identified sharing the same IP address, but this particular one was still in the process of farming karma. (In order to make a later post look more legitimate)

Then again, quite a few on the list have little to no karma points anyway.

Could be part of a voting ring.

The account is created on October 14th, 2015. Posts dogs and cats to relevant channels, then posts political articles from a dead domain (butthis.com). But two months later the account goes dark. Looking at what other posts (and their subreddits) posted this domain [1] I can't help but think this is suspicious.

Then I see the four TESTING posts at the bottom of the list, all on July 1st 2015. They even use TESTING URLs of butthis.com, and no other posts are made from an earlier date. Every account that posted one of these TESTING posts is also banned in the same way as the OP's account.

One of those TESTING post accounts [2] left a little russian in his links too [3].

I would be very interested in seeing these accounts' upvote/downvote history.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/domain/butthis.com/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/user/ser005

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/test/comments/3ayiwh/test_post/

If Russian(user_IP) && Russianness(user_comments) > 1922

This is propaganda from intelligence agencies. The "RUSSIAN TROLLING" is an organic movement of right-wring nationalism that is building in America.

Russians may have tried to stoke the flames of the divide in America, but its real, and its here.

> This is propaganda from intelligence agencies.

What is? This article? The source? Or the arguments in general?

Claims like this require hard evidence provided in the same context, or they will be dismissed outright.

> Claims like this require hard evidence

This is an interesting take. The CIA/FBI/GCHQ have provided precisely zero evidence to the public on their various, and extensive, list of claims that Russia did bad thing X.

Why is the burden of proof on the conspiracy theorist to prove a negative assertion, and not on the intelligence services - many of whom have a storied history of making things up - to prove a positive assertion?

I did not say the intelligence services do not have any burden of proof. Their claims absolutely require evidence that can stand up to scrutiny. I'd say they even require harder evidence because of the history you mention.

You can say their claims are unsubstantiated, or if they have provided evidence then you can provide counterarguments against it. But accusations like 'intelligence propaganda' need proof as well.

There is no hard evidence. This is the nature of the game. First of all how do you even suppose evidence could be procured? What form would this "evidence" have? Claims by partisan authority figures, like the media or politicians? Is that evidence? No. There is no evidence.

You have to make judgments based on your own perception and what you think is plausible, all the while being aware that your own perception is biased, by your preconceived understanding of the world, and also your perception is also actively manipulated by those who you are trying to assess.

With regards to the topic at hand I think what the GP claimed is plausible, Russian propaganda does exist, but also our politicians are now going to use this excuse every time there is legitimate discontent.

For example: a story broke out some weeks ago about Russian shills, shilling against the controversial Keystone Pipeline. This is usually not a right-wing political position. Those who stand to make a lot of money from the pipeline immediately tried to discredit all the opposition to the pipeline as Russian trolling.

I've been a moderator over at Reddit for over a decade.

Personally I found Steve Huffman's claims to be disingenuous, deceptive, and self serving. I have no idea if there will ever be any consequences for that but I feel like Reddit would be a better place if there were.

Which claims? That Russian trolls used reddit to influence US voters?

I would guess OP doubts that Reddit cares at all...

Reddit generally never acts on anything (whatever the subject) unless it appears in the news and they are in the spotlight. There's very rarely any proactive action from Reddit.

That’s because every time they make a change, no matter how small, they get a very loud reaction from pissed off users, many of whom generate the bulk of Reddit’s content.

Yes. It's clear to me that the priorities and incentives that Reddit operates with are not those they talk about. So surely "Reddit cares" but it's ridiculous on its face to pretend that what they care about is what they're saying in public.

Consequences for what? Everybody is lying about something on Reddit, why should Russian trolls be singled out?

I'm not singling out "Russian trolls" for lying on Reddit. I'm singling out Steve Huffman for lying on Reddit. Presumably there's a distinction.

As long as he doesn't hurt the stock price, I think he can say what he wants. CEO's aren't known for being the most honest and frank people in the planet.

During the elections r/politics and reddit generally was intensely pro Hillary. The margins who supported Trump did so regardless of some Russian originated postings of comments (like this one). Actually did you know I am an agent of the government of Malaysia. You've all been trolled and influenced in ways you don't even realize yet.

No it wasn't, it was pro Sanders and still is.

During the primaries, yes. Once Sanders was out, r/politics just looked like the internet wing of the Democratic Party.

Hardly, butthurt sanders fans (and lots of shills) everywhere. Hell, they're still all over reddit.

/r/politics flipped right after the DNC convention. Filled quickly with rabid pro-Hillary accounts, and any voice critical of her candidacy was quickly silenced with a flood of down votes and horribly formulated arguments and claims

I was there and my experience was also exactly like this, and not subtly either, it was unmistakable.

Is it difficult to find threads from a specific date?

Hi "agent from Malaysia".

It is well known that "Correct The Record" has been influencing the discussions and votes. In the beginning it was easy to identify them, because they just copy-pasted political statements. They were very active during the primary elections. In some subreddits we had discussions whether there were any people at all on reddit that were in support of H. That was how popular Bernie was, and partially still is on reddit.

There also military level manipulations going on directly from military bases, and also manipulations by some Israeli agencies. Also the UK has active agencies, but they seem more subtle.

And then we have manipulations by companies that want to support their product (or favourite politician). There are even click-farms that you can pay to work for you, and companies specialized in manipulating social media (as Correct the Record).

And we have groups that work together to get upvotes and downvote unwanted posts. We usually call this "brigading", and while it is forbidden, this is also very common on reddit.

In 24 hours you can see the upvotes switch between soccer and football. Each nation has its own favourites and opinions. And I think that this is a good thing. We as different nations learn to communicate with each other.

Compared to all the manipulating going on, the manipulations of "Russian bots" is not much. And as far I have seen the influence, it is really overhyped. Frankly, if you really want to destabilize the US, you can do that by letting the internal political corruption bring it to the ground.

By communicating on the other hand, besides all bots and trolls, we can learn to see problems and solutions of our and other nations. See many different sides of problems and politics. This can be beneficial to all nations. (Even Malaysia ;-)

> In comments, Huffman also noted that these troubling accounts were most active in /r/funny, /r/uncen, /r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut, /r/gifs, /r/PoliticalHumor, and /r/The_Donald, a notorious pro-Donald Trump subreddit.

Russian trolls are active in many other subreddits such as /r/politics. But Huffman only lists the rightwing subreddits he personally disagrees with. He's using Russian propaganda to create his own propaganda.

Reddit needs a CEO who doesn't engage in amateur stuff like this.

>Huffman only lists the rightwing subreddits he personally disagrees with

8/10 of the top 10 subreddits he mentioned were left-wing or neutral:

* funny

* uncen

* Bad_Cop_No_Donut

* gifs

* PoliticalHumor

* The_Donald

* news

* aww

* POLITIC

* racism

Why does nobody talk about the fact that Clinton and Democrats spent 10s of millions astroturfing various online communities? You could see r/politics go from fairly balanced to rabid pro-clinton when CTR got fresh funding infusions. You can check Alexa rankings and see the massive traffic surges at the same time. You could see sentiment shift on weekends when the shills were off.

Hell, the CIA had an entire "Meme warfare division" according the vault7 leaks.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xyvwdk/meme-warfa...

Because a bunch of losers hiding in their parents basements upvoting comments for a penny doesn't inspire the same awe that a Russian "hacker" does

Considering it was so easy for you to find two articles about it, it appears many people are talking about it, counter to your claim of "nobody."

Maybe no one's discussing it in this thread because this article is about something specific.

It's hardly mentioned in many popular political forums, and when it is mentioned the user posting gets overran with claims of being a Russian agent, or that it's a conspiracy

> Why does nobody talk about the fact that Clinton and Democrats spent 10s of millions astroturfing various online communities?

Because that's a conspiracy theory, based on one pet interpretation of one press release and ignoring all the times Correct the Record denied it (such as the instance in this article you posted: "Barrier Breakers accounts are always identified as Correct the Record").

The article you posted describes what they actually did ("Much of the effort appears to be fairly anodyne so far. An official-looking Twitter account, Facebook page, and Instagram and Pinterest accounts have been set up. The social media accounts seem to consist mainly of graphics and videos that deliver inspirational pro-Clinton messages, content that appears to have been designed in the hopes that it might go viral.")

I have little doubt that the CTR conspiracy theory was largely spread by the very real Russian astroturfers. It was super effective at effortlessly shutting down Clinton supporters online.

> I have little doubt that the CTR conspiracy theory was largely spread by the very real Russian astroturfers.

Could you source/clarify this?

I agree that the narrative around CTR as an astroturf source is either massively overstated and outright wrong, but that's a basically negative claim - there's no real evidence for it. The Russian astroturf part is a very specific positive claim, and across the identified Russian accounts (e.g. Reddit, Tumblr) I haven't seen any indication that they meaningfully drove the CTR rumors.

It's not like Americans have any trouble starting political conspiracy theories without outside help; why are we laughing at claims of "this idea came from an astroturf campaign" and then making comparable claims without strong evidence?

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