The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (2012)
cryptome.org
cryptome.org
LOL indeed. Celebrities rarely say "real shit" about the government. They are good at the thing that made them famous. They are... tertiary sources, at best, when it comes to talking about things relating to government. Celebrity didn't give them insight, just a larger megaphon to shout through.
Doesn't matter what their political beliefs are.
I'm probably psyops too.
> The dopamine chemistry is just too good: you've got an enemy, the feeling of being in a dramatic narrative where nothing's what it seems, the superiority of knowing that you've spotted something everyone missed
People on social media sites just love to think that they've got everything figured out in a way that isn't obvious to the people around them in the real world. These sites create a feedback loop wherein people are encouraged to post more content that feeds the hive minds' ideas while downvoting/rejecting anything that doesn't match.
Why would anyone need to manufacture content? There’s plenty to grab from already. But you have to wonder if we’ll learn in the future that the reason my Facebook feed is flooded with outrage about the treatment of Uyghurs, and the reason my Tiktok feed went from being memes and dances to a live stream from Black Lives Matters protests was due to organic growth of content or due to State sponsored manipulations.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the content is manufactured, but most the time, most people just don’t care about these things and will stick to their baby-falling over memes on both Facebook and Tiktok, so when the platforms turn into politically oriented outrage machines it’s natural to wonder if it’s due to those who stand to gain from these narrative, of if it’s just because there weren’t that many babies that fell over that particular week.
IE I used to think the phrase "lifting a billion people out of poverty" was a dead giveaway for state-sponsored PRC shills.
Then it occurred to me: anyone who had heard that phrase enough, and was sympathetic to it, would naturally (and often times subconsciously) repeat it.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
"China" is the subject of the sentence, while "800 million people" is the subject.
The implication being that China - or the CCP - was doing the lifting. The people just kind of passively did got carried upwards.
Even the choice of verb is illuminating. "Lifting", making the number after it add a sense of difficulty to the achievement that "China" accomplished.
People do not talk this in real life. No one is broke, moves to Boise, Idaho, and then says "Boise, Idaho lifted me out poverty".
So yes, "China lifed X people out of poverty" is 100% a canned propaganda phrase. The more neutral description of what actually happened is "China transitioned from a low income economy to a middle income economy".
"American dream" / land of opportunity"
"Government Assistance Lifts 45.4 Million Out of Poverty in 2021" - US Census Bureau
>odd phrasing
And accurate.
Governance systems > individual effort. Populations do as well as their system allows. At scale of large nations, it's mostly down to management, even suggesting it's a team effort is being charitable. Contrast how India is doing under same timeframe, ergo accurate to say CCP governance was/is primarily responsible for lifting 800m people out of poverty.
TLDR of "China lifted 800 million out of poverty" is fine.
More accurate and neutral TLDR is "Chinese Communist Party lifted 800 million out of extreme poverty"
But for some reason most western press like to minimize/trivialize the CCP part with China.
Name-calling, Glittering generalities, Transfer, Testimonial, Plain folks, Card stacking, Bandwagon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Propaganda_Analy...
The other notions - i.e. malicious sabotage or disruption of groups by inserting agent provocateurs - have a similar long history and have also been analyzed, it's basically just spying of various sorts (see Sun Tzu, Art of War, Chapter 13)
https://suntzuart.com/sun-tzu-art-of-war/chapter-13
As others note, assuming someone you disagree with on an internet forum is a malicious bad-faith actor isn't a very healthy or useful perspective to take. Yes, there's a lot of PR efforts directed at social media platforms for various reasons, but it's always best to just present a well-reasoned argument in support of your views and leave it at that.
Information Operations (IO)
Influence Operations (IO)
Inform and Influence Activities (IIA)
Interactive Internet Activities (IIA)
> Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser ... wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites ... also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government.
2015 review, https://medium.com/secret-politics/trolls-on-the-astroturf-4...
> The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We’re in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organised or trained ... Only a powerful public campaign against state secrecy and private sector deception can thwart the rise of the trolls. This is a bridge we must cross now.
I don't agree. All it takes is 4 people to downvote and flag you and you're dead
This is one of the ways that Reddit and Twitter search for bots too.
Social engineering at it's finest.
Curious to hear about those other places.
Vs. there is lot of racism on the internet which is "non-white on non-white". One example: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
I don't doubt there are people with reprehensible views on 4chan, but it's a bit uncharitable to the reader to suggest that browsing 4chan will put them at the precipice of becoming an Actual Nazi.
What else, other than "reading Nazi opinions" do you think it takes to become an "Actual Nazi?" It's not like the ghost of Joseph Goebbels flies in through your window and bites you in the neck and now you're a Nazi. Radicalization works by normalization, through repeated exposure to and gradual acceptance of propaganda, and gaining sympathy and trust for a community and its ideals.
lurk moar
>It's uncanny how they know I don't belong there and not just because I don't say hateful things. They are very sensitive to tone.
it has nothing to do with the frequency of your hate -- I could tell you don't belong just because of your word choice here.
there are things one picks up about board culture when browsing for a respectable amount of time, and it shows in the speech patterns of their posts. amplified by high post frequency and anonymity making it the only identifier, users get _very_ good at spotting when somebody either doesn't know the culture or is relying on an incorrect/incomplete summary like you are doing here.
The amount of “you’re one of them” or “you’re just a troll” out there on the internet when someone simply doesn’t agree or even understand is seemingly infinite.
It’s a nearly weekly accusation thrown at me on Reddit.
People’s willingness to believe someone else is a troll or similar seems to just mean they never have to consider any ideas they don’t like.
Like they come up with really terrible classification categories?
> epistemological emptiness
Does this mean one does not have a theory of knowledge or that one thinks that knowledge does not exist?
https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/u1675o/hey...
https://www.quora.com/Are-emptiness-and-nothing-better-as-on...
Rather they just declare their opposition evil by nature so they don't have to analyze their behavior any further, and anything done to them is, in their eyes, morally justified. It is, in other words, dehumanizing.
> Does this mean one does not have a theory of knowledge or that one thinks that knowledge does not exist?
It means that they have no formal theory of knowledge and simply accept whatever is conventionally wise to them (or, more specifically, whatever fits their unacknowledged class interest).
When I started participating in some random forum a very long time ago as a kid, some guy I was arguing with told me to never assume bad intent unless you see clear evidence of it. I didn't get it at first but eventually made my interactions way more manageable.
It's more; you must belong to the Other Team. It's an astroturf account. It's a troll.
For how could anyone possibly disagree with me and do so in good faith?
I cannot name a single internet service that has ever been controlled by level headed people. I expect to go on there and just casually talk about whatever I want but within 5 minutes they post a giant wall of rules and my immediate first thought is, "jesus christ, what the fuck happened???". Of course a big part of the problem is that the moderation position attracts a certain type of brain dead, melodramatic, moral obsessed person whereas in reality it only exists to delete spam posts.
I think it's just because redditors tend to be younger (and the site is advertising to young people specifically). There's no point in arguing with literal children
Isn't there? How do we expect them to learn? There is no point in getting frustrated or angry with literal children, but I believe that arguing with them, in the educational and not rhetorical sense, is helpful. Children learn from example, and if the only examples are their peers, then how do you expect them to grow up differently than them?
More for this audience than on other internet forums. For those, good luck.
* much of the literature about reducing trolling etc. is focused on platform operators, which isn't that useful to participants since platform operators are not incentivized to provide transparency or accountability.
If this is happening so often, then you are clearly doing something wrong and people are picking up on it.
Also, like everyone else said, reddit is basically idiots arguing with other idiots. There's almost no value there anymore.
Simply wishing the forum to be full of genuine people doesn't make it so. Proceeding as if it is creates a forum full of people with their heads buried in the sand, which probably is the true only thing less healthy than a forum full of psyops and shills.
Clearly there are insidious forces at play in many online forums nowadays. The more we try to unearth it, the less we ignore it and the more we talk about it the healthier our forums become.
Nowadays many of the largest forums are simply captured, by a dedicated team working to a script with dozens of alts. Once you have complicit moderators, this stuff is lame in comparison.
Once your guy / team has mod control, you can change the entire culture and tone of the forum, as soft or as hard as you like, and ban complainers.
You can make posts invisible to search engines, or remove posts for a couple hours and then put them back once the algorithm is bored of them. You can wipe posts entirely, give no explanation, and wipe the posts that complain.
If you think people wouldn't bother to do this, think again. There's significant amounts of money and political capital involved. What PR company or major political party wouldn't want control of a national subreddit that keeps making corruption and cover-ups hard to control?
I started to see patterns (not only against my posts personally, although I quickly stopped trying to participate) because I began to understand the market players. It's unreal how inauthentic most of the content actually is and how much of it is straight up shill marketing. I suspect this is true for a large number of niche forums where specific products or services become "blessed" by the community.
The only way to accomplish this is with either a large network of puppet accounts or with the support of the moderators. Probably both.
To answer your question a bit though:
* The 'dead giveaway' is basically always going to be some kind of mod drama. Sometimes this is fake drama, sometimes it's to harass existing mods out, sometimes it goes as far as print media and tv stories accusing a forum of bad behavior. Look at who is instigating it, how often they support each other, how much they're posting and commenting, how quickly they comment on relevant threads etc.
* Keep an eye out for sudden and extreme rule changes, such as moving political talk to a seperate (much smaller) subreddit moderated by known antagonists; or removing discussion of topics such as racism, BLM, etc. This can be a sign that the new mods are 'bought' in some way.
* Browse by new to get a glimpse at stories before they're removed. This is most useful when there's a story getting actively buried, or a narrative being pushed.
* There are tools that can help you keep track of users such as RES, or to analyze user's history.
* You can use these tools to find people who are fighting back and keep track of their insights, or keep an eye on accounts known for bs-ing. It's a lot of effort for very little reward though lol.
* It can be illuminating to post verboten stories yourself, then keep track of any strangeness. E.g., the story getting removed, funniness with the vote count, particular commenters rushing in to spread fud, etc.
You can try it here on HN, to get a glimpse of how actively some groups keep track of hot topics: Find a fresh story that goes against an industry (or empire) known for their online PR goons, and see what happens when you post it. Even comments mentioning certain keywords will attract attention. If you think that sounds conspiratorial - just try it.
The problem with posting comments the order they are submitted. https://xkcd.com/1019/
But like you said, any system can be gamed. The whole situation is rather depressing.
Except if someone bumps it again it means you need to make a bunch of new replies again, which will look suspicious and be a lot of work. Also, it would still be indexable in google.
If you read the article and think there is something to it, please read it again and compare all the 'evidence' to the behavior of what you suspect a normal forum user would do: Ask questions? Gather information? Establish rapport? Propose something stupid or dangerous? Comment on the wrong thing? Post something that leads people away from the post you are interested in and have so much people comment on it that your important information disappears. You can get that just by the number of people telling the original poster it is 'off-topic'. Yes you would expect normal users to do all of them some of the time.
If you value your (online) community judge all actions by Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". If malice was that easily distinguishable from normal behavior there would be a lot less of it. Don't let anyone tell you you should approach your community with suspicion, because then they are already halfway there in destroying it.
That's naive. We simply end up with forums where, if such bad actors do exist, they have a much easier time controlling the narratives. Better to harbor a modicum of suspicion, for the sake of protecting the genuineness of the community.
The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21165313 - Oct 2019 (10 comments)
The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7329162 - March 2014 (33 comments)
The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4277278 - July 2012 (57 comments)
Should I list the Simple Sabotage Manual threads too?
So now this post triggered folks here to look at every time their post - or something they _personally_ believe important - sinks and think “oh, it’s the COINTELPRO” - meanwhile it’s just that nobody cares. Maybe they should, I don’t know, but they don’t.
On top of that, I bet it made a few of you think that police violence videos are Russian psyops. Just smuggled that under the radar, phrased it in a technically correct way.
Essentially I’m saying it’s like those “protect women against trafficking” videos aimed at wealthy middle-class white women - that both make them paranoid, and distract from real issues, all so that the poster can feel smart.
It may have some value in describing the psychology of forums, trolling techniques and logical fallacies but it's purpose is obviously to troll paranoids into seeing spooks everywhere.
Even just a slight deboost to "probability of shill". I'm good enough at noticing it myself, but not until I wasted 5 seconds reading their post.
If you have a dataset of people who you speculate to be shills, doesn't that trend close to a dataset of people who's opinion you don't like?
To be clear, I'm not saying that wouldn't be personally valuable... but uh, if I was creating a system like this for myself, I'd curate that dataset VERY carefully (assuming I could even get the system to work :\\\)
> New York state attorney general issued a report on ... big telecommunications companies paid millions of dollars to specialist “AstroTurf” companies to generate public comments. These companies then stole people’s names and email addresses from old files and from hacked data dumps and attached them to 8.5 million public comments and half a million letters to members of Congress. All of them said that they supported the corporations’ position on something called “net neutrality,” the idea that telecommunications companies must treat all Internet content equally and not prioritize any company or service. Three AstroTurf companies — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media — agreed to pay nearly $4 million in fines.
U.S. 2012 Smith-Mundt legalization of propaganda lead to an industrial-scale "grassroots PR" industry for use by any buyer in the "nudge" market, including a sizable subset of the global Fortune 500. This industry has since been active in online venues with meaningful audiences, http://www.techsoc.com/grassroots.html & https://twitter.com/evoleadership/status/761959456624082944 & https://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/q-a-with-ed-wa...
> Walker shows how repertoires of participation originally developed by advocacy organizations, electoral campaigns, and social movements are commercialized by public affairs consultants who offer them as professional services ... The result is an increasingly “subsidized public” where selective incentivization and rational prospecting by public affairs consultants looking to mobilize support for their clients’ interests work to get people involved in particular political processes.
2014 book http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IO0E69E/
> ..illuminates how elite consultants have adopted grassroots advocacy tactics for paying clients. Rather than being dismissed as mere 'astroturf', these consultants' campaigns should be seen as having real effects on political participation and policymaking
Organized (e.g. software-assisted) online pseudo-persona lobbyists of public opinion are usually outnumbered by individual humans, who can gain the experience to move such arms races towards higher quality debate.
Propaganda so fucking efficient, it leaves you asking for more.
For those who don't have time to read the 39-page report linked above:
> Biggest Broadband Companies Spent $8.2 Million to Oppose Net Neutrality, Including Generating 9 Million Comments and Letters in Opposition .. Broadband Company Money Funded Three Astroturfing Efforts, and Each Resulted in Fraud ... The Broadband Industry Hid Its Involvement Behind Advocacy Groups to Create the False Impression of Widespread Grassroots Opposition to Net Neutrality ...More than 9.3 Million Additional Fake Comments Using Fictitious Identities Were Submitted to the FCC with Automated Software.
> A comprehensive multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works, comparing the 30 member countries of the European Union (EU) on net neutrality enforcement, has found that zero rating business practices by wireless carriers have increased the cost of wireless data compared to countries without zero rating. This directly contradicts all of the assertions by major wireless carriers that their zero rating practices are “free data” for consumers.
Which is kind of crazy in a small way, right? These techniques could have applied even back in the late 90’s early 00’s. They’re effectively just mechanisms for warping a forum, which is to perhaps claim that forums are a withered technology, perhaps without enough lateral thinking.
The more interesting post (considering it talks about both sides) would include the counter-measures that moderators and platform providers do. Although, truth be told, obscurity of these things was (and is) very effective on most.
At this point, we know who is looking at the forum, and therefore we could present different views of content to different people for the same forum. (Rarely we would do this with a supercookie).
We went ahead and grouped all the agitators together, so that they would be able to communicate with each other, and not think that their posts were deleted. However, the main forum members would never see these messages or replies by these people, and the order of the messages would reflect that. Much better than sliding. But if they gained access under a different name, they would realize. This obscurity of the practice was important.
Nothing quiets an agitator more than silence from that they are trying to agitate.
Golden Rule of Trollception.
> Guys they are trying to disrupt my obscure forum about some niche technical subject!
> Who?
> Them!
May be next article will talk about the practice of Hasbara and Israel...
let's wait and see.
As far as people paid to bash him, I doubt anyone has the same incentives.
Seriously, I found myself thinking that most of the criticism against Brave is done by... not an organized group, but a group that is predisposed to loudly criticize it regardless of any actual failing or problem. But that kind of thinking is unfair to the vast majority of posters, pro OR con, who are honestly expressing their opinions. It's probably best to assume good faith, as the good lord and HN guidelines dictate.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
And the title article is all about astroturfing and foreign agents and the like, so it seems like if you don't want to read that discussion you shouldn't really be reading this comment section. It should be pretty obvious what the content is going to be like from the title. Flag the post if you don't like it and want it all gone.
So that makes him a hero-by-default to a variety of conservatives - some who think his political views unfairly eclipsed his technical achievements, some who feel his free speech was curtailed, some who are just homophobes. Eich hasn't talked much about the issue since so it's hard to say how much of this support is rooted in people projecting their own feelings onto him. Brave also appeals to the crypto crowd because it has its own token with which you can earn and/or redistribute 'Brave Attention Tokens.'
I don't know that the behavior around Brave is any sort of astroturfing in the sense of being coordinated; it could just be organic behavior by people who happen to have similarly narrow reasons for preferring it.
Don't get me wrong, i am sure there exists people who are motivated by that, but except in the early days of brave, i have not really seen brave evangelists talk about that at all. The talking points mostly seem to be anti-google, anti-big advertisers, anti-chrome monoply and pro-privacy stuff. And i think the amount of people motivated by those talking points far eclipse the other drama, which at this point feels like a historical footnote. Especially because as far as i know Eich hasn't continued to publicly express these views.
Once people feel loyal to a brand (or anything really) the original reasons don't have to stay top of mind for very long, and the loyalty symbol becomes a sort of in-group signal in its own right. It's not very different from fashion signatures in music subcultures.
On the other hand... I'd be more suspect of posts about random companies that pop out of no where and get a ton of random engagement. * of course, not implying start ups don't go viral, etc.
What happens is that probably bots/alts do all the work at first to bad-mouth specific companies often enough, until it gets a critical mass and all simple-minded NPCs end up parroting the same narrative.
I mean take google for example. Who is paying money to have bots come on here and claim "google starts 100 projects and never finishes them" ?
Everyone knows that, because everyone is/was a user of those projects, lol.
It's easy to meme on them for that.
But it feels like in every controversial discussion there are accusations of being a shill or astroturfer or whatever in the pay of the enemy. I've been occasionally accused of this myself. I think it's just a lazy substitute for debate rather than an accusation that's actually been thought out or is even believed in any way.
I have no insight into how psyops are run, but I find the idea of an agent springing into action because a HN article critical of or praising X has just come along. Who knows I guess...
The speed which high-levels appear means it’s being monitored for sure.
I'm convinced there are genuine people that believe Apple / Musk can do no wrong, but the veracity of flagging and downvoting is making me suspicious to something more going on.
I don't think you'll find many devout fans who will defend Apple's intransigence with the butterfly keyboard debacle. Or how they're marketing ProRes RAW video codecs on a smartphone that doesn't have a USB-C port.
As for Musk, he's just a person. I am impressed by what he has achieved and I greatly admire his work ethic. That doesn't mean I defend the entirety of his character. But his flaws aren't reason for me to avoid rebutting claims which are obviously false, such as claims that he's just a "cheerleader" with no particular skills.
You mention a "track record of over-promising and severely underdelivering" but I wonder if that's just a matter of which parts of his track record you place emphasis on. Far from over-promising or under-delivering, Falcon 9 is an astounding success. Dragon is an astounding success. Starlink is providing a level of service previously unheard of and is now the largest fleet of satellites by an enormous margin.
The Model S was described as vapourware before its release, then it won multiple car of the year awards. The Model 3 was described as vapourware before its release, then it won multiple car of the year awards. The Model Y is currently the top selling car in Germany. I don't recall any of them turning out to be flops or disappointments. The yoke steering wheel was described as dangerous and maybe illegal, and it won't make it to any production vehicles, then it was released and the howls of controversy vanished overnight.
Right now the criticism is focused on claims that Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta is vapourware. For a long time it was described as impossible. And also that it's scandalous how it is taking some years longer to complete than initially estimated. And also it doesn't work. And it is killing people. And it's unimpressive and Tesla's technology is dead last among competitors. Just don't look at YouTube.
An example: the other day I read a NYT article that seemed like it was almost designed to be irritating. It was so irritating that I was about to subscribe just to comment on how stupid the author was, but then I realized I had my credit card out. Then I realized that I was the stupid one and put the card away
Forum agitators will almost always go for your emotions (because it scales better). How to solve this? Don't go to online places that fuck with your head. Go to the places that tend to be less emotionally charged, less groupthink oriented, and more boring. I.e. the reuters of social media
"Almost designed" is the key here.
Not trolling forums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3IyqirKzNA
I think it would be newsworthy! And the fact that it hasn't happened makes me skeptical.
In r/bayarea there was a poster that posted nothing but crime posts multiple times a day. If anyone pointed it out they’d be heavily downvoted within minutes. There are groups dedicated to this in many city subreddits.
Yes there are all type of "agents" on forums. If they think that their posts are going to change my opinions I have a bridge to sell.
I think everyone likes to think they are immune to this type of manipulation and only those "other" people fall for it, but it's a lot more subtle than that. Thinking that you are immune to it is probably a sign that you are much more vulnerable than you realize.