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Comment by robonerd | Hacker News Reader

For years now, there have been seemingly crazy people on 4chan who insist that systems like this are already employed on 4chan to guide or simply disrupt conversations. Maybe they were crazy to think that a few years ago (or maybe not) but I expect they definitely feel vindicated now.

Related: "Is The Government Spying On Schizophrenics Enough?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoXQKumgCw

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I ran a simple Markov chain text generator bot on 4chan for a while back in 2008, because I wanted to see if it could pass the Turing test on /b/. It could, and also derailed conversations quite a lot, so the technology is certainly there.

Modern political accusations of botting are more like a way to turn people with differing opinions into a non-person conspiracy, though. It's not as fun and silly as my old Markov bot.

I check in on occasion to see what the underbelly of the internet is up to. More when i was younger so i have some sense of how it was back in the day. There is for sure from time to time massive coordinated and sustained efforts to undermine, change or break up discussions on there how much of it thats automatic is hard to say but i would bet a lot.

>For years now, there have been seemingly crazy people on 4chan who insist that systems like this are already employed on 4chan to guide or simply disrupt conversations.

I'd say that probably from about 2009 and certainly from the onset of the Trump candidacy, it would be absurd to suggest there wasn't at least some degree of astroturfing occurring on /b/ and /pol/ (aka /new/ depending on what time frame we're talking about) at a minimum.

It's important to remember that 4chan was a lot more influential in the past, and the anonymous nature of posting there would seem to me to make it an easy place for early astroturfing campaigns to manufacture their common ground.

For whatever reason, looking back from now the Ron Paul stuff seems like a major shift. It seemed like natural support, different from the Obama enthusiasm for in some way. I haven't thought about it much before your post but it almost feels like it was a trial run for methods later used in the Trump campaign.

they may also agree with the bot. I am waiting for the bot to start claiming that anyone it disagrees with is actually a foreign intelligence shill who is subverting the board.

I’d rather be surprised if russian disinformation doesn’t target 4chan. It’s frequented by Western society’s outcasts; there is no more fertile ground for subversion.

It was interesting to see two generals about Ukraine, one pro Ukrainian, one Pro Russian, both adamant the other is absolutely run by [cia/mossad/shareblue/etc]

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