Russian Trolls Used Vaccine Debate to Sow Discord, Study Find | Hacker News Reader

Russian Trolls Used Vaccine Debate to Sow Discord, Study Find

nytimes.com

29 pointsmatt407720 comments

Has it been conclusively shown that these are actually russian trolls or do people just repeat that factoid? I feel like a lot of things get attributed to the Russians with little more than "trust us" as proof.

Yes, it is well established that this was Russian trolls. Some of the accounts were the same ones that interfered with the US election.

I didn't follow the US election thing in much detail. Was there proof that those accounts where controlled by Russian trolls?

There is never any proof offered, only blatant assertions.

And its working very well as a propaganda point too - now, any time someone questions the powers that be and the way they operate, well .. obviously that person is a Russian troll.

The irony in how quickly Americans seem to have picked up this authoritarian control mechanism (propaganda==truth) seems to have been lost on a lot of people. Do they still teach Orwell in schools in America?

They still teach Animal Farm. Remember: Russians are Bad.

Current Russian government are pro at playing this "but there are no proof offered" game. Lithuania, where i live, is pretty close to armed conflict in Ukraine where Russian backed (no proofs here according to Russia) separatists are fighting (as in war) to declare independent republics from Ukraine.

Crimea (part of Ukraine) was "liberated" by "little green men"[0] and then coincidently decided to join Russian federation.

There is no secret that Russian government sponsors internet trolls to push it's agenda [1]

I agree that someone might abuse "Russian troll" card but keep in mind that Russian (government) is no saint here. Russians themselves are fine though. And please don't start with "but Americans also do this and that". Im saying here that Russian trolls are real. One use twitter, other use military uniforms without insignia. Depending on situation ;)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men_(Ukrainian_cr... [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/15/594062887/...

So, where is the evidence then? Like, actual evidence.

Not propaganda, which is what your links are really.

Real evidence. Something tangible, which leads to the conclusions being promoted by the propaganda. I'm yet to see any. Like, there is literally ZERO evidence preferred, every single time.

As someone very familiar with hacking, I can say definitively that hackers and other threat actors can often very easily mask their real identities. They can also frame other people for their actions.

They only need to manipulate the metadata. The CIA admitted that they do this as well in Vault 7.

As such, any claims by journalists with arts degrees that they somehow know definitively what is happening in the cyberspace are fake.

Yes.

If you want an in-depth examination of Russian trolls this document about Latvia is useful.

https://www.stratcomcoe.org/internet-trolling-hybrid-warfare...

Or you can read this: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/disinfo-review/

These accounts are either from Russian state media, or linked to the Kremlin.

Thanks, I really appreciate this.

>Pro-vaccine tweets from the same accounts argued that vaccines saved lives. Some said they should be mandatory. Some were insulting, such as “You can’t fix stupidity. Let them die from measles, and I’m for #vaccination.”

The same account being both pro and anti vaccines would be a definite proof in that case, I have no doubt that propaganda has no problem being spread by actual people, however in that case we would need to read the full study to be sure.

Parent was asking about the "Russian" part, not the "troll" part. As in, the trolls could be from somewhere else.

The paper[1] says that they use "accounts known to be bots or trolls and identified in 7 publicly available lists of Twitter user IDs" such as this list ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/now-available-more...

A lot of what gets reported as "Russian trolls" is based on the data from this site ...

https://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/

which monitors 600 twitter accounts that link content "relevant to Russian messaging themes." You can read more about their methodology here ...

https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/the-methodology-of-the-h...

[1] http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/i/today/z_creative/WeaponizedHea...

I don't know, but if something like:

>“Don’t get #vaccines. Illuminati are behind it.”

is actually given any credibility and can actually contribute to form or shift an opinion, there is then IMHO an underlying (bigger) problem with the gullibility of the people.

Yes, there is, and much of the issue comes from the way our brains work. We have an entire branch of science dedicated to it: psychology. Knowing about it doesn’t mean you can wave a magic wand and fix it though, so you need to attack the problem at every level you can.

>With colleagues at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Broniatowski looked at 899 vaccine-related tweets sent from mid-2014 to late 2017.

If there were either hundreds or at least several tens of thousands tweets like that, or if all of the tweets they've screened were highly popular, then I could take that study seriously. As it is, however, this appears to be a targeted evaluation failing to qualify the significance of those tweets' impact.

source publication: http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/i/today/z_creative/WeaponizedHea...

via NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/russian-trolls-pushed...

I’d be inclined to flag this because the source is paywalled [0]. Is the analysis accurate? Hard to tell from the excerpt.

[0]: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2018....

IMHO if a society is susceptible to discord caused by debates around very, very unambiguous topic, then this society indeed deserves D. Trump in the office.

The irony is that Americans are quite happy to be manipulated through Dialectic Materialism, communisms favourite philosophy...

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