A Global Guide to State-Sponsored Trolling
bloomberg.com
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These are the same people that still forward chain emails and now believe outrageous articles merely because a person they know on a social media site has shared it. As if the person doing the sharing has legitimized the source.
Anyway, while not directly influenced by trolls, the kind of content trolls promote still gets to them, and now I feel silly when I try to repeat my childhood mantra back to them. This stuff is really effective.
I'd say the mainstream media and their talking-head opinion-pieces masquerading as news did as much if not more to hurt their image. This would be a much less pernicious problem in a world of genuine, balanced reporting.
Why do you doubt it is permanent? I'm personally very pessimistic about this.
He has an opinion and he shares it. But he will let the other side talk. In his famous fight with Senator McCarthy he gave him a whole episode to tell his side, never interrupting.
I don't think mainstream media masquerades opinion pieces as news. I think the public at large, vis-a-vis confirmation bias, just wants to believe anything they agree with is true and miscategorizes these stories on their own.
The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NPR at least are all clear about what's news and what's opinion.
I implore you, go sample "news" segments from major sources (CNN, MSNBC, Fox) on a topic you are intimately familiar with. You'll quickly realize these mouth-pieces are spreading FUD to acquire more eyeballs and ad dollars.
> The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NPR at least are all clear about what's news and what's opinion.
MSNBC, and to a perhaps lesser extent CNN are hysterically bad.
I had the pleasure of catching a few hours of primetime "coverage" on MSNBC last month and the talking heads were shrieking about some Federal department spending $1,500 on ten pairs of "tactical pants" for security officers. Well, go price some "tactical pants" from 5.11[0], a well known, reasonable brand, and you'll quickly see it's a fairly reasonable sum. Hell, ten pairs of decent Carhartts will set you back a similar sum. Yet the opinion-as-news talking-heads spent 15+ minutes railing on it as obvious corruption and frivolity of the current administration.
This is what passes for news. They're a bad joke.
Where the talking head concedes the pants were apparently sensible?
The video you linked proceeds to list random Twitter users' jokes about tactical pants, e.g. "Chuck Norris Action Jeans" or how one might need the pants to sleep on a used Trump mattress. One would be mistaken for thinking this is Comedy Central's latest political comedy show and not "reputable" news.
> Where the talking head concedes the pants were apparently sensible?
Yes, after spending much time mocking the purchase the video concedes the purchase was perfectly normal (it was actually 40 pairs of pants at roughly $40 per pair.)
So why spend time and effort reporting a non-story on a mainstream "news" channel? It seems they are trying to fill the spot the Colbert Report vacated.
Even the more upmarket ones like the Guardian and Telegraph pander to their audience and twist stories to fit political slants...
Lynching of muslims in India - by spreading WhatsApp messages on false pretense that they are cow killers - is a direct result of the trolls.
Despite being a secular country, India is turning into a social-media driven Hindu/Modi agenda.
The trolling is also supplemented by Mainstream media in supporting the agenda by collusion.
https://thewire.in/media/times-group-vineet-jain-sting-opera...
What springs to mind is the "Arab springs" of how great nations were turned to hell holes.
There is no Hindu/Modi agenda, especially no ruling govt wants instability in the country.
The real problem is the pseudo-liberal dishonesty that turns every crime into a hate crime.
The gang of arm-chair pseudo - socialists, communists, liberals and seculars, are the ones who are spreading the hate, fear and distrust. They who are uncomfortable with the sudden change in the status quo.
In particular it seems there are just two issues that could help people detect BS so much more easily:
- 1. Avoid emotional responses. If you see something that tugs at the heart strings, or hear of an awful story, there's a good chance it's fake or an outlier event being portrayed as something regular. This [1] is one of the most famous examples. What that's actually an image of is not cosmetic testing on animals, as it was portrayed as in social media, but the spaying/neutering of a large number of cats rescued from abusive conditions. The reason I say there is a "good chance" it's fake is because appeals to emotion are specifically geared at provoking a response people might not otherwise engage in.
- 2. Hold new things you expect to be true to the same scrutiny you'd hold new things you expect to be false. This one is really hard, but exploiting people by confirming their biases is perhaps even more effective (and dangerous) than exploiting emotional response. And a subpoint of this issue is that while honest mistakes are indeed a part of life, when there is a pattern of honest mistakes - they're probably not honest mistakes.
Granted educating people on critical thinking and emotional control is going to be an uphill battle, to put it mildly, but I think it's a wiser strategy than instead engaging in behavior that's predictably going to result in people calling each other shills. In an era of increasing political polarization, this is doubly dangerous.
First, because it's impossible to actually validate anything. If you read a quote from a politician, you can only evaluate the quote's accuracy by considering the publisher's track record, and the politician's previous behaviour. Videos and audio are often not available, and can possibly be faked rather well now or in the near future.
Even if some sort of proof were possible, the workload would far outstrip any single person's capabilities.
Analogy: You don't ask your spouse for collateral when they want to borrow your car. Because you know and trust them, and they are invested in a good, continuing relationship with you. It's different if a stranger comes up to you on the street and asks for your car keys.
That's why societies' have come up with a sort of collaborative verification: get together as a group that trusts each other and split the workload. Or even allow people to specialize, and pay them for it. You can do your best to verify some subset of their work to assess their reliability.
The New York Times, as but one example: they have a 150+ year record of processes and individual commitment to get their facts straight, and they are open about their failures. Publishing stories about "XYZ runs a ring of pedophiles from a DC pizza parlor" would destroy their value almost instantly, so their incentives are aligned with yours.
This is textbook propaganda, so perfect you could use it as classroom material.
Furthermore, we hear so much about social media filter bubbles, but it doesn't seem to occur to contemporary reporters that if they write stories based on what they see and hear on their own social feed, it is going to be equally skewed and subject to a massive preselected availability bias of their own making.
If you wanted to effectively manipulate the news, you'd organize massive protests and disruptions right outside every news station... Well, now this is the default mode for much of what you hear. Every time you read any story about online sentiment that is not explicitly statistical and honest and precise in its conclusions, it's pretty much bullshit from top to bottom for this reason.
Now, before you say this doesn't apply to "real" news in the "real" world, I remind you that the topics they haven't been able to shut up about for 5 minutes is Trump's tweeting, Russian trolls, and the online anger of a supposedly pervasive alt-right, and that they blame everything from Brexit to Charlottesville on that. This includes people who are frequently misquoted, misconstrued and misrepresented at a level that, if it isn't malice, is chronic and incurable professional incompetence.
Their incentives are not aligned with mine, because to me, truth and skepticism are foundational values.
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So where to start? Let's start with the person who made the allegations. She is likely a literal psychopath. She ended up getting charged with attempted murder for trying to kill one boyfriend after the case was over. She somehow managed to get that reduced to 'contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile' and a handful of other minor charges and served 3 weekends in jail. 3 years later she went all the way and stabbed to death a different boyfriend. She's now in prison serving a 14 year sentence for murder.
What about the district attorney? He was literally "race baiting." He was running for election in an extremely close contest where the black vote was critical (the person who made the fake allegations was black, the victims were white). He apparently felt that going hard after these kids would help him get that vote. He won the democratic primary and then the general election by 833 votes. Fortunately it didn't really matter. It was revealed that not only did he lie in order to try to get the kids convicted, he also illegally withheld evidence that would have completely exonerated them. He was dismissed and disbarred after being found guilty on some 27 different ethics and other charges. That he's not in prison is a travesty.
It doesn't even end there. Apparently the lead investigator in the case, Mark Gottlieb, had it out for Duke players. He had a long history of disproportionate force, allegations of perjury, disproportionate response (e.g. arrest when the typical response was ticketing), and so on specifically against Duke players. And there's no doubt he was up to games during this investigation. He ended up killing himself.
The reason I mention all of these things is to emphasize how much of a shit show this case should have been from the get go. Again I just do not believe that the NYTimes would have been unable to dig up evidence to this end. Yet they did not present it this way, or even as remotely questionable. And in fact even tried to demonize the players in other articles - apparently one of the players and some friends had, at one time, gotten into a fight with another group of guys where somebody got punched! What a social deviant! Rolling Stone got much more flack for their case because it was an exclusive, but the complete lack of journalistic integrity by the Times exhibited in this case is something I find in no way less excusable.
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The 'moral' of this is that the New York Times put their own social preferences and biases ahead of the raw truth of the story here. Even if they were genuinely unable to dig up the evidence on the case, they lost any and all notions of objectivity in their reporting. And that's dangerous in today's highly polarized times. And maybe more importantly this and their numerous other failures have in no way negatively affected their "value". People tend to be rather happy to excuse even quite egregious behavior and wrongs when it comes from sources that they want to believe. And that's really what I was getting at in holding institutions you agree with to the same standard of those that you don't. Imagine in some parallel dimension an equivalent of Fox News or whatever was running a story inciting a mob against the players, while the NYTimes ran an article objectively discussing the dubious merits of the case and increasing indicators that the case may not hold up to scrutiny. And then it turns out that the players were innocent. How would you view the reporting of our parallel dimension Fox News? Yet, of course it somehow seems so different when it comes from a source that we want to trust.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/sports/duke-players-pract...
I can't help but think that we ought to bring philosophy, formal logic, reasoning, and rhetoric courses down from select majors in higher education, and into primary education. And it ought to start young.
notice how the US and UK are completely missing there? (well, there is a note about the US and hints at trump followers but ignores CIA --search grasshopper)
"Troll army" is the new Comunist.
The same way worker unions and gay holywood actors were purged by calling them Comunists, todays worker unions and small political organizations and true grass-roots movements will be steamrolled by calling them Trolls from some foreign troll army.
Also a bunch of countries are missing. Like Ukraine, nowadays it follows Russia with trolling and uses volunteers and government trolls to spread war propaganda and other government propaganda. Xenophobia, demonization of, hate towards russians, patriotism, hate towards any dissent, etc.
And it continue to this day via internet. I have no other explanation to a never ending flurry of articles in social networks and forums that we Russians: 1) evil people dreaming of conquering every country on this planet (this contradicts history and common sense but who cares) 2) we're "genetic garbage" 3) we didn't win in WW2, we just plundered Germany and raped German women 4) it would be better if we surrendered to Germany in WW2 5) we're dumb aggressive people and all our inventions were stolen from the west scientists
Etc etc.
I see articles with all these points and more every day on Facebook. Who writes and disseminate them?..
Of course while Voice of America, RL/RFE etc. were propaganda, compared to the Soviet media they were rather good. And the rape of German women,,, that's probably not the point that you would want to raise, it does not look good.
If it is a video about any technology, ussr or Russian (cars, planes, electronics, heavy machinery), there will be at least several comments saying that it was stolen from the west. No matter what kind of car or plane the video is about, even if it was first off its kind in the world, and there were simply no sample to copy.
If it's DIY video, then there will be comments that if the author lived in the west, he would be a billionaire already.
If it's a video of village life, there will be comments that if it would be western village, authors would have lived in government sponsored mansion, harvest would be bought by the government by price that is 10x market price, etc.
How write all these comments? They are everywhere. Under every video, every Facebook party, every article on the news site.
But these aren't particularly interesting places. Now, if you check the Russian section of LiveJournal, or comments sections of online news sites, let alone professionally patriotic sites (Goblin etc.), you would be amazed as how anyone could complain about perfectly sensible and reasonable comments you mention above.
I do assume that you speak/read Russian well enough...
I’ve never met a bureaucrat at any higher level of office that wasn’t dedicated, hardworking and intelligent. I’ve never seen a decision or any important matter decided upon without good reason. I have seen a lot of terrible decisions, but they were all made on a solid base that later turned out to be wrong.
Politicians are another story, but the vast majority of them are really great at what they do, and if you gave them more than 15 seconds on a tv channel you’d probably get a very different view of most of them than you have now, I know I did, and I wasn’t even particularly negative toward them before it.
So there is that, the reality of a complex public sector, which simply isn’t perfect in a democracy, where one of the highest virtues in political decisions comes down to compromise.
Yet whenever I go out of my bubble, I’m constantly met with jokes about how monkeys could do better, or drain the swamp type comments. Not just from idiots either, but from virtually anyone. Almost all the time I can dismiss it, by giving an example of why a decision isn’t just black and white.
Like open source and the public sector. I talked with a comp.sci. professor about it once, and he had excellent points on why public funding (in it) should mainly go to open source software. Except in reality, a municipality like mine operates 470 different softwares of which 90% haven’t got an open source alternative. Not only that, our entire IT staff is schooled and certified in things that aren’t open source, and even if I could magically replace them over night without it costing millions of dollars, it’s almost impossible to find open source focused replacements.
Faced with the complex realities of modern management the professor toned down his argument, but at the time it got me thinking.
How did we become a world of people who think we can analyze anything and come up with a solution on how to do it better? And when I say that, analyse, is really the wrong word because we watch a few 15 second clips on politics here and there through out the year, and suddenly we think we can run our institutions better than the people who are actually educated and experienced at running them? We see a few clips of plastic in the ocean, or get snow in April and we think we’re climate scientists?
I say we, because I’m just as guilty of this as you are. Compared to people who buy into the social media memes, my only personal advantage, is that I was schooled in verifying my sources before I believe them, but just imagine if you weren’t.
Don't forget that we have the thousands of companies that post stuff on the internet for clicks and commercial gain. Can we distinguish them from the others? And finally we have click-farms that can give us top-posts. Or we can pay social media to get "promoted".
Countries of Western Europe are missing in the map maybe only because the state holds the purse strings to the media through compulsory tv/radio licensing.
Perhaps universities should start courses in trolling instead of journalism. Not that they are any different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence, the amount collected by western countries are significantly more than what is needed for basic services.
Could a TV license be even justified in the internet age. The best reason I can come up with is that the govts are worried about loosing control over the narrative.