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