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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.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:41AM
You pray that trolls are susceptible to profiling! A good troll is the troll that know one knowes is a Troll, so the seem legit, they win minds and influence people by shaping public opinion with things like "SJW" and "libtard". And thus the troll preys on the unwitting. They are unwitted. Because they have no wit. And no sense of humar. And are probably whit. So you see, your simple plan, typical of a programmer when faced with a real world problem like politics, is not nearly sufficient. No wonder so many computer programmers are libertarians of some sort. But two razors: First, Ockham's: the simplest explanation is often simplistic (Ockham's Razor states that the simpler of two explanations is more likely to be correct, that leaves out all the ones based on Rand.) Second: Hanlon's Razor, courtesy of Heinlein: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Reverse this for trolls. The ones you can't detect, the ones you think you can trust, the ones that seem legit, they are the ones you should worry about, and they are that way by design. AND THEY ARE RIGHT HERE on SoylentNews. Be afraid, be very afraid, trust no one, and send me all your money for safekeeping. We must help each other in these perilous times.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:47AM
There are ways of manual interaction methods to weed them out to.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 26 2016, @03:44AM
To weed out exactly who?
Trolls? The unwittings? The humarless? The computer programmers? The libertarians? Ockham and/or Heinlein?... or only their razors?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Redundant) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 26 2016, @05:24AM
Cut me to the quick, has this! Like a razor's edge upon the untrammelled plains of pure reason! Could it be, that someone has a financial interest in poesy? Shakespeare, why dost thou foist the Apple upon us so? Can not thee see that the windows are blemished with a pox well past mending? OK, I will try to limit my posts to just one issue, in small words, so the weeds can understand.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:59AM
Oh, I wish I could... (but that's another story).
Depends on what you want to achieve and to what extent.
If you want to get across through every thick skull (weedy or not, maybe including mine), why don't cha [youtube.com] forget your style and goto basics
(an axe may be less wasteful and pretty much to same end will come*)
But this you do and soylentnews will lose its single lean-looked prophet to whisper fearful change (then offer to safe keep the money in return).
---
* "About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe."
Edsger W. Dijkstra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:50AM
Kudos, c0lo, a razor sharp axe do you wield thyself! The only defense against astroturfing is education! Once you know the truth, the truth will set you free, and it does that by making you realize that all those preachers of Prosperity, systemd, and Trump are full of something. Astroturf is plastic! Lighter fluid it, and it will burn of its own accord! Fake grassroots has no ties to the earth, to the people. to the penguins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 26 2016, @09:33AM
Why! Thanks magister... truth be told, I wasn't born into the English language (as such, your words come sweeter to my years, but...)
Because of this, I needn't waste my time with weird spelling, and thus the rote has rotten less my mind.
And therefore I'm able now to ask...
The truth of whom, magister, the truth of whom?
(ok. Fooling around set aside, let me pretend I'm profound now)
---
You can’t educate one who doesn't want to be educated. The first step for one to want this is to admit one has questions; if no other questions can come into one's mind, to doubt one's own truths. A constant act of creative destruction towards their own answers.
Now, I ask you: how many questions do you see coming from us, the SNers?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I mainly see a bunch of guys who have plenty of answers (different answers to the same question, of course).
And the dialogues here resemble a skirmish in which those answers are used like clubs; then everybody is tired and put their hard and unchiped-in-battle answers on their shoulders and go home. Until next time. No questions asked (that's bad), no strings attached either (and this is a good thing™)
(is this S/N specific?) Will this ever change? If not, there's no chance of education...
So, what gives? I don't know, I'm happy from time to time I get to read one of your hermetical rants: (letting aside they sound delicious) their hermetism have the quality of raising questions, even if your sole intention was to encode your answers into them.
What questions? Well, discovering the nuances of your answers in the references, fun, sarcasm, choice of words (and puns, don't forget the puns, especially the gang-chained puns you conjure for your purposes) and everything that you put together and make their form so puzzling delicious.
My opinion? I might be wrong but I think if you become more didacticist than you are now, you'll just become just a guy with yet another set of answers.
(meditation mantra: questions give birth, answers kill)
My apologies for inflicting my answer onto you.
In truth (my truth), the story goes like this: in his childhood, the man's mind is opened to a wide horizon; as he ages, this horizon becomes narrower until, sooner or later, it collapses to a single point. That point is called his point of view.
Well, the above is my point of view (as recursive and metabullshitphysical as it may be).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Redundant) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 26 2016, @05:56AM
bitstream! Keep your hands off me, you damn filthy ape! [Said in my very best Charleston Heston voice)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @03:33AM
Prey be gentle, because that's not what he said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:25AM
> shaping public opinion with things like "SJW" and "libtard"
These kinds of words are clear markings. Clever troll should avoid them, but I'm not sure they are paid enough for that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:13PM
I think "SJW" and "libtard" are codewords meant to signal like-minded people. In conversation you'd drop those terms and see if your interlocutors echoed them before you'd feel safe to tell a Jewish joke, or say something else non-PC. It's a common practice among people who express categorical hatred, but don't want to get called out for it.
I think it's a pointless practice, because it doesn't fool anyone, not the people they're afraid will call them out for it, and not them, themselves. But the psychological cover they think it gives them must be enough security blanket to proceed with their categorical hatred. And the codewords sure are popular, because they're always coming out with new ones. "Low-information voter" is a new one that sprang up after Mitt Romney's presidential bid failed, and is a codeword for "stupid and/or young and/or black."
Covering behaviors with liberals are different. They don't rely on name-calling so much as what I'd call credentials. For example, in about year 7 of the 8 years of the Bush & Cheney reign, liberals were tired of conservatives arrogating God and religion to themselves so they started talking up their own religion and faith traditions. They got tired of being hit for being weak and soft on defense, so they started joining the NRA and playing up the voices of liberals in the military. They were taking a shellacking with the issue framing that Frank Luntz and his ilk were so good at, so they tried to counter it with their own (issue framing being, essentially, boiling down complex issues into simple slogans with an emotional trigger, designed to defeat policy proposals. SEE: "Death tax"); that was a miserable failure but eventually the liberals found a potent counter-weapon in withering sarcasm.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @05:30PM
That's odd. I typically think of knee-jerk Republican voters as being "low information". Just my $0.02.