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posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 19 2021, @07:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the trololololo dept.

Back in November 2020, the NATO Stratgic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga, Latvia published an analysis of the coordinated online harassment of Finnish government ministers. The conclusion is that the attacks and astroturfing are largely free from automated activity, aka bots. The report includes statistics, lots of analysis, and several illustrative graphs. The main topics triggering the online abuse were the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, immigration, EU relations, and social policies. Finland is not a NATO member but the lessons learned from studying the coordinated harrassment can be generalized to the alliance.

This report is informed by the findings of three recent Finnish studies, one of which investigated the extent and effects of online hate speech against politicians while the other two studied the use of bots to influence political discourse during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary eleections. The first study released by the research branch of the Finnish govenment in Novemeber 2019, found that a third of municipal decision-makers and nearly half of all membes of Finnish Parliament have been subjected to hate speech online.

[...] As social media platforms continue to grow in political importance, so does their use as a means for engaging with and criticising individual government officials with little or no consequences. An additional aim of our study was to determine the role, if any, bot accounts play in disseminating abusive messages, and whether such bot activity displayed characteristics of coordination. Based on previous Finnish studies analysing the impact of bots during election periods, we hypothesised that we would observe low levels of automation and coordination. Our findings confirmed this theory; our algorithm attributed less than 3% of abusive messages to bot-like accounts. However, the more significant finding was that over half of abusive messages were sent by anonymous accounts. Anonymity erases accountability online. This can have the effect of emboldening users to voice their dissatisfaction with ministers through unfiltered, abusive messages. It is possible for people to operate many anonymous accounts. However, our data do not show clear patterns indicating single users sending abusive messaging from multiple fake accounts. The unfortunate conclusion is that much of the offensive, sexually explicit, expletive-filled abuse targeting government officials is written and published by individuals.

The data was collected from March 2020 through July 2020. The report defines "hate speech" early on and categorizes it into generalized or directed, implicit or explicit. Quite a bit of material is devoted to the algorithms used to collect the data and to help do the analysis. Despite taking digs at "anonymity", which is sometimes agitated against by a key NATO member, and including hypotheses critical of it, there was little given to support the negative view. Perhaps the term could have been defined at the outset, since it seems used in several different meanings throughout the report.

Noticeably, the algorithms for sorting and prioritization of messages within social control media are not addressed, and therefore neither is the effect the non-chronological order has upon perceptions and opinions. As a result little was mentioned about the influence excerted through social control media upon individuals and resulting in modified behavior online. Thus the report ends up mistaking social control media for communications media or platforms for public engagment rather than calling them out for being about mass manipulation of opinions and propaganda.

Previously:
(2018) Politicized Trolling is More Harmful than Fake News
(2016) Astroturfing is Psychological Warfare


Original Submission

Related Stories

Astroturfing is Psychological Warfare 158 comments

Current Affairs published an in-depth editorial on recent revelations about a $1 million astroturfng campaign by Correct the Record:

Astroturfing makes me angry. It should make you angry. It should make you fucking well see red. It's marketing evolved into something incredibly scary, sophisticated, and evil. It's essentially thought warfare, or psychological warfare, which takes away much of what was supposed to make the internet a new and beautiful frontier of communication. Worse yet, if you actually identify and approach these operatives, they'll gaslight you and deny that they are such an operative. These are people who are paid to psychologically abuse you. Do you get this? It's an ugly and evil thing, and not only does it take away our ability to take information and fact at face value, but it takes away our ability to take opinions, feelings, and personal stances at face value as sincere and legitimate.

takyon: For some additional context, "Hillary-supporting super PAC invests $1 million to hit back at online Clinton critics":

Correct the Record, a super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton's bid to become US president, has promised to invest more than $1 million to respond to users criticizing its candidate on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and other social media services. The super PAC says its new "Barrier Breakers digital task force" will to respond "quickly and forcefully to negative attacks and false narratives found online," in addition to thanking major supporters and "committed superdelegates" directly.


Original Submission

Politicized Trolling is More Harmful than Fake News 57 comments

Bloomberg is covering a report from the Institute for the Future (IFTF) on an attempt to describe the phenomenon of state-sponsored trolling from a qualitative and quantitative standpoint. While partially conflating trolling with astroturfing in the body of the report, the IFTF defines online trolling as deliberately targeting an individual for "hate" and harassment. Since it is only occasionally possible to attribute the attacks, the IFTF's aim with the report is to empower individuals, researchers, and policy makers to spot the phenomenon in the wild and at least attempt to combat it.

The report itself is entitled, State-Sponsored Trolling: How Governments Are Deploying Disinformation as Part of Broader Digital Harassment Campaigns (warning for PDF)

Ed: How accurate does the report appear to be and are the suggested countermeasures harmful or helpful or both?


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 19 2021, @07:26PM (14 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 19 2021, @07:26PM (#1126402) Journal

    As social media platforms continue to grow in political importance, so does their use as a means for engaging with and criticising individual government officials with little or no consequences.

    That does NOT constitute "hate speech".

    This can have the effect of emboldening users to voice their dissatisfaction with ministers through unfiltered, abusive messages.

    That, however, may possibly constitute "hate speech".

    Of course, if you can't bear to be called a dumbass, a Nazi, or an SOB, then maybe you shouldn't be in politics?

    Are they looking at genuine hate speech, or are they trying to carve out a "safe space" for poliicians?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @07:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @07:41PM (#1126411)

      As the political class falls further and furher away from the people they supposedly represent in democracies, they're turning to ever more desperate strategies to try to maintain their grip on power. I'm not especially fond of Trump, but he was not a part of the political establishment, and said establishment is obviously working overtime to ensure we don't risk returning to the era of when you didn't have to be vetted by the establishment and media to win high office.

      They have already managed to largely suppress the publication of embarrassing information by corporate and media collusion, so they now need to go the next step and stop criticism itself. So naturally they'll start with the stuff relatively few people would disagree with censoring and move inward from that, inch by inch using the same tired argument of "Why wouldn't you want to censor [x]. Do you secretly agree with [x]? Obviously you do, otherwise you'd want to censor it."

      Apparently because every rational person wants to censor every single thing they don't agree with? Meh, logic never matters on issues of at-scale social engineering and propaganda.

    • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday March 19 2021, @07:49PM (7 children)

      by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday March 19 2021, @07:49PM (#1126416) Journal

      Read the cited NATO document, it's a real fun.
      For one, "lipstick government" is a hate speech presuming incompetence, when paired with "communist" or "left-wing".

      In other real military information sources for public (Russian, actual strategic analysis written by retired General), I just read "China can mobilize 20M well-trained soldiers in two weeks immediately and another 10M increment of new recruits for every next month following, including production of weaponry and equipment".

      My bet on NATO lipsticks bureaucracy snowflake libertines winning anything serious is quite low now.

      --
      Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 19 2021, @07:54PM (6 children)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 19 2021, @07:54PM (#1126419) Journal

        I suspect that China's ability to raise a huge-ass army almost overnight is under estimated, and understated. I know about assumptions, but I assume that China has far more than 20 million retired and inactive reserve troops who are subject to recall at an instant's notice. 10 million new recruits every month is quite likely accurate though.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @08:42PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @08:42PM (#1126451)

          Nuke 'em from orbit, problem solved. It will be trivial to hit them while in transit. We shouldn't have to think about 20 million Chinese troops, or even 100 million if we are willing to do what is necessary to defeat them.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @09:10PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @09:10PM (#1126460)

            You might want to think about what happens after you jump off that cliff before speaking of its convenience as a shortcut.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @11:41PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @11:41PM (#1126541)

              It all depends if you really want to eliminate the threat. If they go on the move, total and immediate annihilation is the only acceptable response. You can give them one warning to turn back, if they don't, BOOM! If we don't, then you will be working for the Chinese. You can't fuck around with this stuff. We have to send a message, "Don't fuck with us!"

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 20 2021, @04:47PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 20 2021, @04:47PM (#1126756) Journal
              Russia has a substantial nuclear advantage over China. I bet if there were a full blown, genocidal nuclear war today, there would be more Russian survivors than Chinese survivors. However, that probably won't remain true forever as China upgrades its nuclear weapons capabilities and Russia's corresponding capabilities decline.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 20 2021, @06:17AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 20 2021, @06:17AM (#1126648)

          Military analysis from Runaway is usually of the same quality as his legal advice. In other words, ignore redneck grandpa.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 19 2021, @07:56PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 19 2021, @07:56PM (#1126421) Journal

      IMO, when you become a 'public figure' or celebrity, there is and should be a higher level of standard of what constitutes defamation.

      A politician certainly would be a 'public figure'.

      Furthermore, public figures, probably celebrities, and most certainly politicians should have thicker skin and not be too easily offended.

      As for politicians and safe spaces and hate speech; there might not be any protection from people saying 'bad things' about you, but saying bad enough things might have social consequences because (some) people won't like you, boycott you, or 'cancel' you. At the same time, while there are politicians I do not like, I try not to say things that are too unkind. The harshest and strongest language I ever used of a politician was right here on SN when I used the word 'jackass' in reference to Trump. I don't normally use words like that. Yet it is probably mild compared to what some say of politicians of all brands.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @09:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @09:09PM (#1126459)

      What part of “abusive, sexually explicit “ did you not understand?

      Also:

      a third of municipal decision-makers and nearly half of all membes of Finnish Parliament have been subjected to hate speech online.

      Welcome to Facebook. The solution is equally obvious -don’t use Facebook. Just have a page saying you don’t use Facebook because (list reasons) and the ways can contact you.

      This deprives people of a public audience while still allowing those who have a legitimate reason to contact you to do so.

      So if, instead of posting an anonymous message saying they want to rape your kids in front of you then gouge your eyes out, they leave the same message on the office answering machine, they’re easily tracked down. And constituents can still leave legitimate messages.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Friday March 19 2021, @09:46PM

      by looorg (578) on Friday March 19 2021, @09:46PM (#1126479)

      Overall the political expectation is one-way communication. They say whatever the f*ck they want and the pops are just supposed to shut up and like it. Any communication back that disagree with their views or actions inevitably becomes labeled as hate-speech.

      There is very little in the report where they actually try to understand things such as why they trigger the response that they get. Some of it has to do with the twitter limit, it's not exactly a lot of room for a highbrow conversation there in 180 characters (or whatever the limit is again). Even if there was it's not like the politicians are going to respond in person anyway so one might as well probably just use it to vent once frustrations with their ideology, decisions and policies or how they are messing up the country.

      That said I'm fairly sure she gets a lot of messages to suck cock due to being young and female. Conservative young females probably get the same amount of hate messages and requests. It's just different senders. I somehow doubt Angela Merkel get (or got) a lot of twits asking her to suck cock, but I could be wrong. Then naturally telling someone to suck a cock should perhaps not be interpreted as a literal invitation or request for fellatio. Do male gay politicians get the same amount of request for sucking cocks?

      I do like that they at least try to sort of give a brief summary what happened during the months that they collected data from. Which might actually explain some of the messages instead of just being signs of twitter tourettes. That said they don't go much further beyond that with regards to actually trying to understand the communication taking place. But how is it hate speech when you call a commie a commie? Is it the tone?

      Some of it might actually be quite easy to explain with regards to their own examples. One is that Marin, while prime minister, is a substitute since the former one resigned. The other part is that her party only has about 18% of the vote in the country, their rival party was just a few thousand votes behind. Those are probably the people telling her that she is ruining the country in so many words. The rest of the coalition is an assortment of left-wing and green-parties; parties that would at least make Bernie look like a little more right-wing then he might be. Anyway there is ample room to find people that dislike her and the coalition in power since they don't even have the support of half the country combined.

      Page 45 is illustrating a few of these examples. Finance minister has to resign after it being revealed that she blew €50,000 on media training. Is it really hate-speech when you tell her off? The average salary for a person in Finland is just around €41k a year. She took a normal citizens entire yearly income and blew it on media training. I could understand the urge to tell her to suck some cocks.

      The Green party takes to twitter on Remembrance day (for all the soldiers that died in the defence of Finland) to promote gay-pride-propaganda. Was that really the best day they could come up with for that? I would think they are actually the once that are trolling the public when they pick some of these things to be upset about. Them being told to suck some cocks and go and die in a fire then seems quite appropriate and reasonable if you ask me.

      The whole BLM thing; less then 1% of the population in Finland is black. What do they expect when they try so hard to virtue signal and whom is it really for? What does racial injustice, and/or police violence, in America have to do with Finland and how is it even remotely interesting. Some of these politicians are clearly just to retarded to even be in politics. Know your base and keep to it, really.

      The other aspect that they do eventually note in the end is that finnish is a tiny language (page 58). That there are no large amounts of automated spam bots targeting that language group seems somewhat understandable. Certainly so if they suspect that these would be russian state sanctioned troll factories such as those that are targeting the Baltics, which are members of NATO, or english speaking countries. Difference then is also that people there (baltics and former soviet states) actually understand Russian, which is a lot more rare in Finland. You'll have a larger chance of finding people there that speak swedish, which is actually fairly common in Finland.

      Still overall somewhat disappointing as they don't actually try to explain anything or why it's happening. Just straight to the hate-speech angle.

    • (Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 20 2021, @04:42AM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday March 20 2021, @04:42AM (#1126629) Homepage Journal

      It's just their typical weaponized victimhood. Politicians, far above and beyond any other possible demographics, should have the least protections from hurtful speech in existence.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 20 2021, @08:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 20 2021, @08:14PM (#1126825)

      "Are they looking at genuine hate speech, or are they trying to carve out a "safe space" for poliicians?"

      try not to be such a shit weasel. there is no such thing as "genuine hate speech".

  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @07:37PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @07:37PM (#1126407)

    You combine the worst of Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Satan into one package.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @07:45PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @07:45PM (#1126412)

      Bad hair, inability to walk up stairs, and pyromania? Actually sounds about right.

      • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @10:09PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19 2021, @10:09PM (#1126493)

        To be fair to #SleepyJoe, he was overdue for his naptime.

      • (Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 20 2021, @04:43AM (1 child)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday March 20 2021, @04:43AM (#1126631) Homepage Journal

        What's Def Leppard got to do with anything?

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 20 2021, @04:57PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 20 2021, @04:57PM (#1126758) Journal
          It's the Finnish Nazi endgame. Are you prepared for the Def Leppardoclypse?
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 20 2021, @08:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 20 2021, @08:22PM (#1126828)

    So treasonous Finnish politicians subvert the will of the people and screw their own countrymen and the people have the gall to complain about it. Bored, parasitic NATO bureaucrats fund a study to see what could be done about the evil "hate speech" and "harassment". How about we burn all treasonous politicians and their pigs alive? Would that help?

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