US Teens Are Being Paid to Spread Disinformation on Social Media | Hacker News Reader

US Teens Are Being Paid to Spread Disinformation on Social Media

politics.slashdot.org

42 pointsrchaudhary16 comments

I too was once an avid Slashdot reader but linking to a Slashdot post makes even less sense to me than linking to an HN post.

Actual reference: https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2020/09/15/pro-trump-youth-...

I think since ADN syndicated it off of the Washington Post, this is the better link? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/turning-point-teens-...

Thanks, I didn't take the step of actually reading the ADN article since the site didn't like private mode and either the text content didn't load or was removed by javascript before I was able to get rid of it.

One more link down, the actual story from The Washington Post: "Pro-Trump youth group enlists teens in secretive campaign likened to a ‘troll farm,’ prompting rebuke by Facebook and Twitter" [1]

"Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out the messages at the direction of Turning Point Action, an affiliate of Turning Point USA, the prominent conservative youth organization based in Phoenix, according to four people with independent knowledge of the effort. Their descriptions were confirmed by detailed notes from relatives of one of the teenagers who recorded conversations with him about the efforts."

Turning Point Action site:[1] (Not to be confused with several evangelical organizations called Turning Point or some variation thereof, or TurningPoint Inc. (polling software)).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/turning-point-teens-...

[2] https://www.tpusa.com/

If only I had a Beowulf cluster of upvotes to give you. Thanks for the direct link.

Holy can of worms. Queue someone training an AI to categorize social media comments as partisan, neutral, factual, or not factual. Probably the next step but what will this accomplish? By putting a label on a comment are you defining the comment, or the label?

The people training the AI will categorize their own bias as neutral.

Yes

What ever they are doing, it is definitely working:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/21/health/cdc-reverts-airborne-t...

Professional marketers are being paid to spread disinformation.

Well, since these marketers are teenagers, it also feels like indoctrination to me.

The Slashdot article title depoliticizes this, but TFA is emphatic about this being staged by pro-Trump supporters. I think the original article's title is valuable.

Quite an editorialized title.

> experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation

In none of the articles does it say that the information they are posting is disinformation.

The articles are absolutely saying they are spreading disinformation.

> The messages — some of them false and some simply partisan — were parceled out in precise increments as directed by the effort’s leaders, according to the people with knowledge of the highly coordinated activity, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the privacy of minors carrying out the work.

In the WP article the first line states "One tweet claimed coronavirus numbers were intentionally inflated, adding, “It’s hard to know what to believe.” Another warned, “Don’t trust Dr. Fauci.”"

I'd say with strong confidence that this would classify as disinformation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/turning-point-teens-...

I do find some of the methods to categorize COVID deaths and some of the early fear-mongering quite hard to believe. This could easily fall into the "it's hard to know what to believe" summarization.

Side note: I'm not being paid to spread misinformation and I probably didn't create a news.yc account 12 years ago and post fairly consistently while patiently lying in wait to sprinkle a little bit of COVID misinformation in this thread.

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