Troll Farm

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by mapuc

In such case it's god that ignore is at hand.

Markus

I'm not getting the translation.

[Jimbuna]

My guess is that 'god' should read 'good'.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

My guess is that 'god' should read 'good'.

It was. A misspell by me

Markus

[Mr Quatro]

Maybe you (means we) shouldn't believe everything we read

Seems the person reporting may be a nut case.

The Russian source is like 250 times better than the European & US sources. They got video and documents.

Seems the lying whore might just be mixing things up instead or might be lost in translation.

http://www.mr7.ru/articles/112478/

and this: https://translate.google.com/transla...sts/67574.html

PS I liked ikalugin

[mapuc]

When it comes to this Ukrainian crisis I follow Skybirds advise-Do not believe what both side come up with

Markus

[ExFishermanBob]

Originally Posted by mapuc

In such case it's god that ignore is at hand.

Markus

On a few mailing lists that I administered, one could have a 'twit-list' to which abusive or trolling subscribers could be added: those on it could post and see their postings as usual, but others could not. What was interesting is that they would usually not notice that nobody was replying to them.

Hello...anyone there? (Ho ho)

[August]

The only problem with the ignore feature is that it's only applied to those who irritate you. I'd think a paid troll would be careful to avoid having it applied to him lest he loose access to the audience he is being paid to manipulate.

[Onkel Neal]

Yeah, you're right, August. If they get banned or shut down, they don't make any money.

[XabbaRus]

All sides are at it. Just some more blatant than others.
The article was interesting and enlightening but then, and I know this is superficial, but the way the photograph of the lady who accompanied him was posed, like for an advert in a hipster way, kind of ruined the tone.

Anyway like I said you can usually spot the trolls a mile away.
Saying that what about the likes of bellingcat? Any opinions...I'm still not convinced by him. Sure what he does looks good but there's just something odd about the speed he came about and the way he is worshiped by the press.

[ikalugin]

I had... things to do. Those who are extra paranoid would see my activity drop on all the forums I frequent. That said, I may return here as my interest in submarine related things pics up, sadly those are not discussed as actively as politics around those forums.

More GLORIOUS SEVERODVINSK (any other Russian/Soviet subs) = more Ikalugin

p.s. the sad thruth is that people do not require to be paid in order to troll on the internet. And certainly "the army of supporters" current Russian Government has is not an illusion, it is a fact - you could see Putin's approval ratings (which went through the roof back when Crimea happened) and you could immagine a proportion of those people who could speak english to some degree. Or use any of the machine translation tools.

[August]

"Troll" Farm isn't really an accurate description for an organization like the one mentioned in the OP article. Sure, irritating a bunch of people on a forum might have some useful applications but it's not (usually) the best way to influence the opinions of ones target audience. After all he's there to change your mind or at least introduce doubt in what you believe, not make your ignore list.

I'd think that a professional would far more persuasive. He'd be knowledgeable in human psychology and trained in propaganda techniques and he would have support and guidance from experts.

[ikalugin]

You would think so, however due to the size of the web and to lesser extend the compartmentalisation, you really need a lot of manpower (well or bot power if you have bots that pass Turing's test) to do any campaighns that actually change public opinion.

Smaller attacks however can and most likely do happen - the attacks that create popular myths/conspiracies (not that such won't come into being by themselves) and thus affect target groops (this tactic works especially well due to compartmentalisation, especially should the target group be fractured/radicalised).

In a way - this -is- the future of informational warfare (in my opinion), as majority of humans are incapable of processing all the excessive ammounts of information on the internet rationally in the time they have and thus tend to use information from social/mass media.
But, as I have said, you need the numbers. Now, immagine PLA getting 100k people to do the job and post 72 hours/week. That would give them (my guess) appox 2,5m equivalent posting group, which would allow to penetrate target country's user base in a significant way (ie with the UK population of ~68m you could expect to deliver a 1/15 proportion of posters, allowing total survalence of local posters (in the totalitarian states proportion of state security agents is between 1/15 to 1/10) and to exert influence in any given matter).

[Eichhörnchen]

Glad to see you back, ikalugin.

[ikalugin]

I think for an external observer it would be intersting to see how opposition related people reduce and de humanise the pro Government posters by calling them putinbots and trolls (sure there are some such posters, but as the obvious math would work - most of them are simple supporters of the establishment and not payed to do it).

At the same time those same people show the pro goverment activities as evill/wrong, while they themselves conduct very same kinds of activities (which aided the protests back in 2011), in fact opposition pionered the usage of new media.

[CCIP]

Well, let's not forget the Arab spring either for example - which owed a lot to social media to get the momentum going, something that decades of attempted revolts had failed to do through conventional means. And then, of course, Islamists proved even more successful at capitalizing on the instability, using that same social media, and that was the end of the Arab Spring.

And for Russia this too is nothing new - in many ways, the Bolsheviks (who were politically among the weakest factions going into the revolution in 1917) succeeded thanks to their ability to leverage grass-roots media of the day and put agitators in the right places (military units, workers' organizations) - not many in number, but generating the right amount of noise at the right time to direct events. And when the right moment came, they proved best at leveraging that ability to agitate.

So the playbook on this matter is pretty old, just the technology is new. Everybody who can, does use it - because it's been shown to work, historically.