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Comment by mcantelon | Hacker News Reader

The scale was massive, yet no one noticed this astroturfing campaign until the election... and this astroturfing campaign dwarfed all other competing astroturfing campaigns by other states/NGO factions?

All this talk of Russia astroturfing without any additional context, as if they're the only party astroturfing (Democrat-affiliated ShareBlue, for example, was kicked out of a large subreddit due to astroturfing)...

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It was covered extensively during the election.

However as time goes on more evidence emerges. That's natural.

> The scale was massive, yet no one noticed this astroturfing campaign until the election

It was being discussed in major US and even major foreign media outlets several months before the election.

> All this talk of Russia astroturfing

Astroturfing was not the whole of the Russian influence campaign.

One substantial difference worth noting between the Russian astroturfing and astroturfing from other countries is that Russian crime have been refining their ability to automate human-like behavior for ad-fraud purposes. For those not familiar with ad fraud, there's been an arms race between criminal organizations to emulate human behavior clicking on ads and the advertising companies trying to detect it. The resulting algorithms have dual use properties that can be applied to astroturfing (e.g. https://www.trustwave.com/Resources/SpiderLabs-Blog/Bedep-tr...).

Remember when the term "fake news" was coined, before Trump embraced it for his own use? It was originally referring to inexplicable growth in stories from invented news outlets.

This is from 2 days before the election: https://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing...

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