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posted by takyon on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-my-hundred-million-cents dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday April 26 2016, @03:36AM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday April 26 2016, @03:36AM (#337284) Journal

    But you are missing the point of it, which is to drown the signal in so much noise that no communication is possible.

    How far down are you willing to dig to find actual discussion when there are 300 "Hillary is teh bomb, you are a misogynist if you don't embrace teh vagina!" posts? A dozen? Two? They have found that crapflooding works and it works very well because people will give up and move on if you fill a thread with enough shit. Again go look at some of the articles that were crapflooded on /., there were articles that pushed 200 posts were a good 80% of them were nothing but crapflooding with either shilling or "You don't like this? You must be a nigger" levels of trolling. Just post after post after post after post so if you were lucky you'd get one real post out of three pages of nothing but shitposts.

    These corps and their pets like Hillary do not spend a million bucks on things that do not work, for that amount of money how many Chinese or Indian workers do you think they can hire to just bury a thread in hundreds of shitposts? They know most simply won't waste their time trying to dig through a mountain of shit just to get a few bits of info so they move on...and they win.

    --
    ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
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  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by frojack on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:23AM

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:23AM (#337340) Journal

    Oh woe is us, they are drowning out our voices.

    We have to find a way to silence them.

    Because even though WE understand their tactics, OTHER people are not as smart a US and they won't understand they've been astorturfed, Because they aren't as smart as US. WE are soooo much smarter than OTHERS....

    You really are a bit of an elitist aren't you Hairy....

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 2, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday April 26 2016, @09:43AM

      by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday April 26 2016, @09:43AM (#337397) Journal

      Nice strawman, shame about this match...WHOOSH!

      Nice babble but I notice you completely chickenshitted out on the question so I will highlight it for you...how many shitposts will you go through to get the info? 10? 20? How many do you think will ever hear anything but corporate propaganda if everything that isn't "Gee isn't corp A great Biff? It sure is Bob, they are the bestest!" is buried under 500 "You are just a little nigger faggot, you know that?" posts?

      It has nothing to do with elitism, or are you so damned head up your ass clueless you think they just spent 1 million fucking bucks on nothing? That money is being used to bury all non pro Hillary discussion under a wall of shit, simple as that. and more importantly there are things that can be done to stop this, such as 1.- Limits to the amount of anon posts per IP address, 2.- anons being rated no different than regular users through some sort of reputation system, I'm sure there are seveeral other things that can be done if we were to put our mind to it.

      But if you just want to sit back and hand the Internet to corporate and political interests? Just say so, I'm sure big business and big government loves the lazy and apathetic.

      --
      ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:25PM (#337593)

      The above average caliber people who come to this website from many different walks of life can spot obvious astroturfing and shilling and say "obvious astroturfer is obvious." At the very least, the critical thinkers here will follow a discussion, point for counterpoint, maybe some of us back in the peanut gallery will request citations every now and then, and sooner or later it at least becomes obvious which viewpoint being presented has the better debater. That viewpoint may not be the end-all-be-all of viewpoints, but we understand that. Perhaps somebody will come along and argue the other viewpoint more eloquently. If the viewpoint is rubbish, no person who's here for reasonable debate will bother salvaging it and there it will rot having been summarily tossed out of the arena of ideas. Hopefully you gather what I'm getting at.

      The problem is that the hearts and minds to be won or lost on the real issues are the masses of sheep/cows who are Facebookers, Twits, change.org frequenters, all the people posting to your local newspaper's Disqus comments section, etc.

      At least, that is a problem as long as a democratic republic is the best kind of government we know to work.

      This AC doesn't have a better form of government to propose. In sci-fi, we often see an advanced expert system or post-singularity AI take the reigns of a technocratic government where everyone prospers. Yet, that seem to me to boil down to supposing we have a government made of incorruptible angels. I don't see how this is workable in the real world.

      I've seen radical proposals such as allowing all people to choose which government they want to pay taxes to. Say I choose to join a minarchist libertarian government whose only form of social safety net is universal basic income and universal healthcare. (Seems we get a lot of immigrants each year from the anarchist "fuck you I've got mine" Randian bootstrapper paradise government lol.) I get to smoke weed after work. Yay. Say my neighbor is a member of a theocratic authoritarian government such as the one Cruz seems to want. Its people pay it taxes for a convoluted social safety net and dysfunctional criminal justice system, but hey, they're happy paying for-profit prisons to imprison infidels. (Another source of immigrants each year for my minarchist utopia lol.)

      One day my neighbor gets pissed because I smoked a particularly pungent blunt after a stressful day and reports this to his police. Smoking weed is strictly forbidden under his government. How does that confrontation go down? Don't try to think of all the stupid details like wafting odors or somesuch. It could be anything. Maybe my neighbor notices that I often get kebaps at a local Muslim take-out place and tries to get his government to arrest me for doing business with Muslims or something. I don't see how it can work. (Yeah, he'd probably try first to get the kebap stand shut down but say that resulted in an armed standoff between my government and his already and an uneasy treaty to agree to disagree on the matter of whether Muslims can own and operate businesses.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:39PM (#337601)

      Just give up already. How many times do you have to be bitch slapped before the point sinks in?

      Oh, I get it. You're one of those "No matter how wrong I am proven to be I will continue to stand my ground!" Because anything else would be admitting weakness. You are terrified of humiliation and humbling yourself by admitting wrong doing. Because that's for pussy liberal hippies. Your abusive, alcoholic, low life father must have done a real number of you.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:43AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:43AM (#337348) Journal

    More noise should trigger the development of better filters. Maybe we finally get a forum with an implementation of a web of trust. Like, you rank some pseudonym as trusted by a certain percentage, and those it ranks trustworthy as well are automatically ranked trustworthy for you as well (to a certain lesser degree). If you manually overwrite, your trust for the initial pseudonym can be reduced automatically as well, and if you trust a pseudonym but disagree on their trust-ranking towards a third party, this could trigger a nice discussion as well (if the ranking is public).

    It takes some discipline to not rate people by sympathy but only by credibility, but might work.

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:04PM

      by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:04PM (#337488) Homepage Journal

      That only works on smaller sites like this one. You get the bazillion posts like /. has and it breaks down. That's why I'm here and not there.

      --
      mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 26 2016, @12:16PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday April 26 2016, @12:16PM (#337432) Journal

    These corps and their pets like Hillary do not spend a million bucks on things that do not work, for that amount of money how many Chinese or Indian workers do you think they can hire to just bury a thread in hundreds of shitposts? They know most simply won't waste their time trying to dig through a mountain of shit just to get a few bits of info so they move on...and they win.

    I know for a fact that the Clintons are not that bright, and have nowhere near the amount of online sophistication you're attributing to them. They spend all kinds of money on things that don't work, and they do not have good judgement when it comes to anything tech-related. In fact, they're quite fearful and make poor choices. (A member of the general public might be able to discern that from the business surrounding Hillary's email server).

    But take your cited example of Hillary flooding sites with a social media campaign. It's ham-fisted, and everyone knows it. No one is fooled by the manufactured semblance of public approval. So it's really a million of her donors' dollars, wasted. They might elicit a genuine "Right on!" from the 1500 people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who consistently give money to the Clintons, but no one else is really taken in, not even sycophants out there who are gunning for internships.

    I would go further and say that generally speaking, corporate social media campaigns fail, and will always fail, because they ring so false. Even when a company is being forthright that the words are coming from them, I have never yet seen it done well. A good portion of my career was in advertising, and I can tell you that as much as all those companies wanted to be hip and cool on social media, the managers, the MBA's, and, most importantly, the lawyers, who run those companies are congenitally incapable of being hip and cool. The managers and MBAs are utterly tone deaf when it comes to dealing with non-sociopath humans (READ: us), and the lawyers want to pre-process every post to pablum, with a turn-around time of 10 business days (which is so, so very effective in an immediate medium like social media, eh?).

    It will always be that way, unless and until the politicians and corporations re-write their own DNA from the ground up.

    In short, we shouldn't be so afraid of them on social media, but instead point and laugh at how utterly incompetent they are.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:09PM

      by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:09PM (#337491) Homepage Journal

      I know for a fact that the Clintons are not that bright, and have nowhere near the amount of online sophistication you're attributing to them.

      Whether or not that's true, they can easily hire competent people, and during his presidency Bill showed that he was good at that kind of thing. He was, after all, one of the best presidents in my 64 years.

      I would go further and say that generally speaking, corporate social media campaigns fail

      Then why are people so eager to overpay for a shirt because it has a swoosh or an alligator on it? The fact that you don't notice this is proof that they are, indeed, VERY competent at it.

      --
      mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 26 2016, @03:14PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 26 2016, @03:14PM (#337527) Journal

        Then why are people so eager to overpay for a shirt because it has a swoosh or an alligator on it? The fact that you don't notice this is proof that they are, indeed, VERY competent at it.

        By definition, you would only see the successful campaigns. They can be covert, but they can't be invisible.

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:58AM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:58AM (#337732) Journal

        they can easily hire competent people, and during his presidency Bill showed that he was good at that kind of thing. He was, after all, one of the best presidents in my 64 years.

        Yes, but the trouble is they don't. They hire cronies. And you could have the smartest people in the world, but they wouldn't be able to accomplish crap if they answered to an ADHD bunny on crack. "One of the best presidents" is unclear, but if you're like most people who have a favorable impression of Bill Clinton it's because he lucked into a speculative bubble that hadn't burst before he was done with office. It had nothing to do with him, and if anything his de-regulation set the stage for the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the out-of-control Wall Street we're suffering from today.

        Then why are people so eager to overpay for a shirt because it has a swoosh or an alligator on it? The fact that you don't notice this is proof that they are, indeed, VERY competent at it.

        What you're talking about is advertising/branding, when what we were talking about was social media campaigns. Two different animals. Advertising and branding work, but corporations are terrible at social media because their organizational DNA is antithetical to the medium. In all my years working on Madison Avenue, I saw really one organization use social media well: Charity: Water. But they're a non-profit that digs wells in places around the world where people don't have access to clean drinking water, not a giant soulless corporation trying to sell you a shirt with an alligator on it.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday April 27 2016, @03:23PM

          by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Wednesday April 27 2016, @03:23PM (#337976) Homepage Journal

          Yes, but the trouble is they don't. They hire cronies.

          They hire both, unless they're named Bush. Then they only hire cronies.

          if you're like most people who have a favorable impression of Bill Clinton it's because he lucked into a speculative bubble that hadn't burst before he was done with office.

          That bubble didn't bring crime down or end generational welfare like bills he signed did.

          What you're talking about is advertising/branding, when what we were talking about was social media campaigns.

          That's what astroturfing is about.

          --
          mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 28 2016, @11:08AM

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday April 28 2016, @11:08AM (#338355) Journal

            Your perception of the competence of Clinton's hires is based on the reality distortion field projected by image makers and the media. It's not a knock on you, it's all most people in the world have to go on. In this context I base my assessment of them on direct knowledge and knowing those people personally. It was never intentional, but my strange career has taken me behind that curtain of fame and power. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leadership or management skills, no moral compass, and incredibly flawed judgement. Many people "know" those things. I do know them. They are grifters of the highest order, and not one blessed thing about you, me, or any human on earth matters to them more than their own power and bank account.

            The bubble did bring crime down, because for a short time people had jobs. Bill Clinton did not end welfare, he just decided corporate welfare was much more profitable for him than the other kind. In that, his policies and outlook are indistinguishable from every other Republican or Democratic president of the last 35 years.

            Astroturfing is not advertising/branding. It's meant to be reputation management, and is more akin to PR. That is, in fact, why PR firms went on a hiring spree for social media "experts" starting about 6 years ago. But they suck at it, because, as I've asserted, corporations are simply not able to use the medium; lawyer-approved talking points do not for a successful social media presence make.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
            • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday April 28 2016, @06:08PM

              by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday April 28 2016, @06:08PM (#338574) Homepage Journal

              AllI know from my own knowledge is that I worked for the Illinois Department of Public Aid since 1987, and things where I worked changed drastically for the better shortly after Clinton took office, the bad neighborhood I lived in got its own neighborhood cop (one of the things Clinton had promised) and Federal money for the poor and especially for getting them jobs started coming in. When he signed PWORA Thompson (I think he was still Governor then, iirc) moved everything around and started the Department of Human Services and moved mu bureau in.

              For all I know, the Clintons may be cockroaches in person, but all I have to go on, like yourself, is what I experienced.

              --
              mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:55PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:55PM (#337484) Homepage Journal

    My problem with /. wasn't crapflooding with astroturf but crapflooding with stupid unfunny jokes that scrolled on and on and on with nobody actually talking about the topic itself. I still go there, but usually only to friends' journals.

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:41PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:41PM (#337602) Journal

    Well, there's an answer, but it's another arms-race kind of evolutionary cycle. Just like spam filters "sort-of" work against spam, there could be analogous things added to other channels of communication. But each thing you add will be worked around as it becomes popular, so you'll need to work around their work arounds, and then...

    With web pages I use a combination of ad blocker and not installing flash. But note the continual approaches to making ad blockers useless. And my wife won't give up flash, because some sites she dotes on demand it. So avoiding intrusion is countered by its requirement that certain features be avoided. At one time I just had javascript turned off, but too many sites now require it...so I enabled it and use an ad blocker...but that creates a weakness in my system that can be a wedge for entry.

    Eventually we'll be required to have an powerful AI dedicated to nothing but screening attempts at communication...the way people used to use a secretary, only more integrated into the internet. But if it's not locally hosted, someone will take advantage of it. (And even if it is, there's likely to be some EULA or law that requires vulnerabilities built in.)

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.