The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon

I once read is that if an activist movement rises they prop a flawed individual, find as much as info as they can, and at an opportune moment they ‘out’ the leader.

Apparently this happened with the Occupy movement.

Don't be too shocked. Vietnam is little China in the region. People are still ok with it because Vietnam has been seeing tremendous growth in the last couple of decades… sounds familiar? Lots of tech companies are also setting up shop there… it's a 100% dejavu. I just hope it won't suffer the same fate in 20 years.

Average commenters hasn't been worth the effort, at least pre chatgpt.

Everytime one of these foreign (non English country) programs gets revealed, the underlying pattern is concentrated effort coordinated against visible voices on public platforms with high dissemination potential (not HN). There's a reason they're spamming reporting to silence instead of just drown out with counter content is because it takes a lot of effort, disproportionate amount, to disrupt even one voice. Especially by non English speaking countries where English fluency is much better allocated and rewarded for other sectors. Up until now, coordinated groups are limited / busy with a few dozen/hundred state enemies, not yhour average commenter, and even then they don't have time/energy/resources to "particpate" in discussions. Even PRC, with all their resources, coordiated campaigns was mostly limited to twitter size responses, most of the time splamming pro PRC platitudes instead of engaging in topic, because ROI of genuinely exchanging paragraphs of discussion with some nobody on HN or reddit is terrible.

Of course this is pre LLM.

In Turkey Erdoğan's presidential communications office has budget of 100 million dollars and 30 story building. He has also 11 million registered members and the word on the street is that they are granting jobs based on social media trolling performance and pay for tweets. When Musk announced the Twitter Blue subscription, Erdogan said he will ask him for discount and regional pricing.

You think you can catch trolls by IP or geolocation? Nope, those people work from home or wherever they are. You think you can catch them by requiring government ID or payment? Nope, they have the budget and they are real people.

The content created by these people is nor organic but it's not a bot generated crap too. They do utilise bots to manipulate trending topics but the wast majority is real people following orders.

Maybe large scale monitoring over trends can be helpful to identify inorganic campaigns nut the lines are very blurry. After all, arguably, marching behind a leader with agenda is an organic behaviour.

Humans are simply not equipped with defense mechanisms for the era of mass communications. Tiny issues can be easily amplified to push an agenda. If you look at the social media you would think that half of the youngsters are trans, the other are fascists or something.

It gets unhealthier and unhealthier as the in person relationships are breaking down, people start living in imaginary worlds where the life is about culture wars.

Techies like to imagine that they are going to "defeat the government with tech" but they are wrong, the governments can have the tech because they have the money and the power to design the landscape. For example, here is the Turkish interior minister boosting to a Youtuber about this special app which has total overview of the social media and takes a photo of him to run face recognition in seconds: https://twitter.com/Darkwebhaber/status/1655561171900964865?

It's taken me years but I think he's a 'bad guy'.

I think he'll err always on the side of money and really strongly look the other way.

I think it might have a lot to do with isolation.

Also, weirdly, I think Zuck, Musk get 'attacked' for their actions, and knowing that most of their actions are not really bad, they get defensive and reactionary. I think they lose their grounding and get deluded.

Could Facebook be doing better or more? Probably. But they are surrounded by malicious actors from all sides, ranging from people who issue coordinated takedown requests like in this story to people who use Facebook to maliciously push "fake news" stories to just banal and boring spammers to outright scams. Balancing this all out and keeping a grip on things at scale is very hard, perhaps even impossible.

Even HN would be vulnerable to these kind of attacks; HN's scale is much smaller than Facebook's but still much too large for anyone to really get a "grip" on. A few years ago one of my stories got flagged[1], and while I'm probably biased I don't think it should be (I probably should have email dang about it, but I didn't post it myself and didn't really want to bother him with it). Was it "coordinated"? Probably not. The end result is the same though: people abuse the "flag" feature to hide stories they would prefer to not be seen. I also know for a fact that some companies will coordinate employees to upvote comments and stories because I worked for a company that did this.

Is HN currently under attack from coordinated flagging? Maybe, maybe not. I would be surprised if it hasn't happened on at least some occasions, and the only reason it doesn't happen more often is that it's small enough to fly under the radar for most of these kind of government agencies.

I think it's important to have a good understanding of the situation as only with a good understanding can you come up with a good solution. "Facebook bad" may or may not be true, but it is not a good understanding of things.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26579225

I think Orwell first made that observation, but it's become a much more effectice propaganda instrument since his day.

Vietnam is more like China and Russia: a country that was taken over by the communists, and has now become capitalist, but the power structures are still analogs of the old days.

> [use] publicly available data, including material shared on social media platforms, to assess UK disinformation trends. It is not to be involved in regulating, policing or even reporting opinion that it may or may not agree with.[2]

This is pretty damming, and makes me credit the whistleblower report more than I originally thought.

Obviously it is inappropriate for the Army to target anyone on the basis of their political opinion. I will point out, however, that Peter Hitchens is a loon. He's said that it's "simply not possible" the UK lockdown could have caused the subsequent fall in deaths because it's generally accepted that short-term mortality from Covid occurs 4 weeks after infection, and thus the reduction in mortality must have come from a reduction in infection before the start of the lockdown. [3] He claims his 4 week number is "pretty much accepted". This is false, he had one non-peer reviewed cite. [4]

Tangentially he also believes that the fall of the UK is imminent because of the permission of no-fault divorce. [5]

[1]: https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Mi...

[2]: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2023-01-30/debates/F9C...

[3]: https://youtu.be/UTpJmT1KQrc?t=153

[4]: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-the-nhs-was-not-overr...

[5]: https://www.thepinknews.com/2015/09/12/mail-columnist-peter-...

However, I think that this is a reasonably extension of the classic definition to fit newer problems. Rather than post the specious argument directly to Facebook they're sending it to the moderators. The purpose is the same, to disrupt the discussion.

> 2. n. An individual who .. regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion.

Further down in TFA they do bring up conventional trolling

> She first noticed her pages getting targeted around a year ago, when a swarm of trolls began calling the Australia-based vlogger a prostitute or a loser, but never commenting on the actual content of her show, she said.

[1]: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html

That's the lies the ruling class in those countries are trying to make you beleive. If it was cultural, they would not need such a tight grip on society to make sure the dictatorship continues, in reality, the power struggle is the same everywhere.

This isn't really the case. Technically that's the law, but like many others it isn't actually enforced. It comes into play when the party wants to make an example out of a VPN provider.

Viet Nam is generally more relaxed anyways. The policy has always just been to care about things written in the Vietnamese language. Even foreigners living in the country, posting mildly critical things in any other language tend to be ignored. The focus is more about keeping the average Viet living in the country from becoming openly politically nihilistic against the party. As more Viets learn English and the country becomes more global, we may see more inter-linguistic crackdowns, but honestly who can say. It's well known amongst everybody in the country except the extremely naive that the government is a lazy and corrupt do-nothing. The appearance of effort passes for a job well done for careerist party people in Viet Nam lmao