
A Global Guide to State-Sponsored Trolling - dsr12
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-government-sponsored-cyber-militia-cookbook/
======
cjslep
When I was a child using the internet of the late 90's and early 2000's my
extended family of grandparents, aunts, and uncles always repeated to me the
mantra "Don't believe everything you read on the internet."

These are the same people that still forward chain emails and now believe
outrageous articles merely because a person they _know_ on a social media site
has shared it. As if the person doing the sharing has legitimized the source.

Anyway, while not directly influenced by trolls, the kind of content trolls
promote still gets to them, and now I feel silly when I try to repeat my
childhood mantra back to them. This stuff is really effective.

~~~
aldous
Yes, indeed the genius of spreading propaganda this way is that it is often
disseminated through personal networks, increasing its potency as a wealth of
cognitive biases come into play. And how on earth can these campaigns be
mitigated? The buffer of ‘mainstream media’ no longer appears to exists as it
once did with the concept of ‘fake news’ etc very effectively delegitimising
the concept of a reliable resource for information. The smartphone mightier
than the sword. Weird isn’t it looking back on those halcyon days of early
FB/Twitter? But on reflection, it’s totally logical that social platforms
would ultimately end up being leveraged in this way.

~~~
mieseratte
> the concept of ‘fake news’ etc very effectively delegitimising the concept
> of a reliable resource for information.

I'd say the mainstream media and their talking-head opinion-pieces
masquerading as news did as much if not more to hurt their image. This would
be a much less pernicious problem in a world of genuine, balanced reporting.

~~~
dfxm12
_I 'd say the mainstream media and their talking-head opinion-pieces
masquerading as news did as much if not more to hurt their image._

I don't think mainstream media masquerades opinion pieces as news. I think the
public at large, vis-a-vis confirmation bias, just wants to believe anything
they agree with is true and miscategorizes these stories on their own.

The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NPR at least are all clear about what's news and
what's opinion.

~~~
mieseratte
> just wants to believe anything they agree with is true and miscategorizes
> these stories on their own.

I implore you, go sample "news" segments from major sources (CNN, MSNBC, Fox)
on a topic you are intimately familiar with. You'll quickly realize these
mouth-pieces are spreading FUD to acquire more eyeballs and ad dollars.

> The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NPR at least are all clear about what's news and
> what's opinion.

MSNBC, and to a perhaps lesser extent CNN are hysterically bad.

I had the pleasure of catching a few hours of primetime "coverage" on MSNBC
last month and the talking heads were shrieking about some Federal department
spending $1,500 on ten pairs of "tactical pants" for security officers. Well,
go price some "tactical pants" from 5.11[0], a well known, reasonable brand,
and you'll quickly see it's a fairly reasonable sum. Hell, ten pairs of decent
Carhartts will set you back a similar sum. Yet the opinion-as-news talking-
heads spent 15+ minutes railing on it as obvious corruption and frivolity of
the current administration.

This is what passes for news. They're a bad joke.

[0] - [https://www.511tactical.com/mens-
professional.html](https://www.511tactical.com/mens-professional.html)

~~~
dfxm12
Is this the story you're talking about? [https://www.msnbc.com/all-
in/watch/why-did-scott-pruitt-spen...](https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/why-
did-scott-pruitt-spend-1500-on-tactical-pants-1261397059663)

Where the talking head concedes the pants were apparently sensible?

~~~
mieseratte
There were actually multiple talking-heads / segments, with the linked video
being the final one. It started with a woman with short-hard (Maddow?) and
transitioned to that man.

The video you linked proceeds to list random Twitter users' jokes about
tactical pants, e.g. "Chuck Norris Action Jeans" or how one might need the
pants to sleep on a used Trump mattress. One would be mistaken for thinking
this is Comedy Central's latest political comedy show and not "reputable"
news.

> Where the talking head concedes the pants were apparently sensible?

Yes, after spending much time mocking the purchase the video concedes the
purchase was perfectly normal (it was actually 40 pairs of pants at roughly
$40 per pair.)

So why spend time and effort reporting a non-story on a mainstream "news"
channel? It seems they are trying to fill the spot the Colbert Report vacated.

------
SimplyUseless
How is this not cyber terrorism?

Lynching of muslims in India - by spreading WhatsApp messages on false
pretense that they are cow killers - is a direct result of the trolls.

Despite being a secular country, India is turning into a social-media driven
Hindu/Modi agenda.

The trolling is also supplemented by Mainstream media in supporting the agenda
by collusion.

[https://thewire.in/media/times-group-vineet-jain-sting-
opera...](https://thewire.in/media/times-group-vineet-jain-sting-operation-
cobrapost)

~~~
ihsw2
How do you differentiate between genuine grassroots opposition and
astroturfing campaigns?

~~~
d0lph
Astroturfing is meant to look like a grassroots movement, a key difference
seems to be actively concealing the source of funding or influencing group.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing)

------
TangoTrotFox
It seems that the media's focus on 'start sponsored trolling' is starting to
result in hysteria. You can already see people beginning to insist others are
'trolls' of this sort seemingly based on nothing other than a disagreement of
opinions. It would seem that the more responsible way to handle things would
be to try to educate people on media rather than aiming towards something that
seems to be encouraging people to think that anybody who disagrees with them
might be a shill.

In particular it seems there are just two issues that could help people detect
BS so much more easily:

\- 1. Avoid emotional responses. If you see something that tugs at the heart
strings, or hear of an awful story, there's a good chance it's fake or an
outlier event being portrayed as something regular. This [1] is one of the
most famous examples. What that's actually an image of is not cosmetic testing
on animals, as it was portrayed as in social media, but the spaying/neutering
of a large number of cats rescued from abusive conditions. The reason I say
there is a "good chance" it's fake is because appeals to emotion are
specifically geared at provoking a response people might not otherwise engage
in.

\- 2. Hold _new_ things you expect to be true to the same scrutiny you'd hold
_new_ things you expect to be false. This one is _really_ hard, but exploiting
people by confirming their biases is perhaps even more effective (and
dangerous) than exploiting emotional response. And a subpoint of this issue is
that while honest mistakes are indeed a part of life, when there is a pattern
of honest mistakes - they're probably not honest mistakes.

Granted educating people on critical thinking and emotional control is going
to be an uphill battle, to put it mildly, but I think it's a wiser strategy
than instead engaging in behavior that's predictably going to result in people
calling each other shills. In an era of increasing political polarization,
this is doubly dangerous.

[1] - [https://i.imgur.com/SIMvJ6Z.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/SIMvJ6Z.jpg)

~~~
matt4077
These suggestions are impossible too follow: you can't validate any and each
new information from first principle, i. e. without regard for a source's
reputation, your previews experience, etc.

First, because it's impossible to actually validate anything. If you read a
quote from a politician, you can only evaluate the quote's accuracy by
considering the publisher's track record, and the politician's previous
behaviour. Videos and audio are often not available, and can possibly be faked
rather well now or in the near future.

Even if some sort of proof were possible, the workload would far outstrip any
single person's capabilities.

Analogy: You don't ask your spouse for collateral when they want to borrow
your car. Because you know and trust them, and they are invested in a good,
continuing relationship with you. It's different if a stranger comes up to you
on the street and asks for your car keys.

That's why societies' have come up with a sort of collaborative verification:
get together as a group that trusts each other and split the workload. Or even
allow people to specialize, and pay them for it. You can do your best to
verify some subset of their work to assess their reliability.

The New York Times, as but one example: they have a 150+ year record of
processes and individual commitment to get their facts straight, and they are
open about their failures. Publishing stories about "XYZ runs a ring of
pedophiles from a DC pizza parlor" would destroy their value almost instantly,
so their incentives are aligned with yours.

~~~
testies
So if the NYTimes is such a bastion of credibility, how do you explain this
newsdiff? This isn't just outright slanted, the article was originally neutral
and somebody decided it needed to be edited from a factual report into a
heroic tale in the battle for social justice:

[https://archive.is/t4EVf](https://archive.is/t4EVf)

This is textbook propaganda, so perfect you could use it as classroom
material.

Furthermore, we hear so much about social media filter bubbles, but it doesn't
seem to occur to contemporary reporters that if they write stories based on
what they see and hear on their own social feed, it is going to be equally
skewed and subject to a massive preselected availability bias of their own
making.

If you wanted to effectively manipulate the news, you'd organize massive
protests and disruptions right outside every news station... Well, now this is
the default mode for much of what you hear. Every time you read any story
about online sentiment that is not explicitly statistical and honest and
precise in its conclusions, it's pretty much bullshit from top to bottom for
this reason.

Now, before you say this doesn't apply to "real" news in the "real" world, I
remind you that the topics they haven't been able to shut up about for 5
minutes is Trump's tweeting, Russian trolls, and the online anger of a
supposedly pervasive alt-right, and that they blame everything from Brexit to
Charlottesville on that. This includes people who are frequently misquoted,
misconstrued and misrepresented at a level that, if it isn't malice, is
chronic and incurable professional incompetence.

Their incentives are not aligned with mine, because to me, truth and
skepticism are foundational values.

------
AllegedAlec
Why is this called trolling? It's disinformation at best, and propaganda at
worst.

~~~
Fnoord
Its meant to destabilise, akin to terrorism's goal, but seemingly less
harmful.

~~~
jessaustin
But trolling is a rhetorical technique, entirely unrelated to "terrorism".

------
zzzcpan
Full paper:
[http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/DigIntel/IF...](http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/DigIntel/IFTF_State_sponsored_trolling_report.pdf)

Also a bunch of countries are missing. Like Ukraine, nowadays it follows
Russia with trolling and uses volunteers and government trolls to spread war
propaganda and other government propaganda. Xenophobia, demonization of, hate
towards russians, patriotism, hate towards any dissent, etc.

~~~
anticodon
The West was first in using "fake news": there were radio stations
broadcasting western propaganda in Russian. When Soviet Union collapsed, the
volume of propaganda increased by several orders.

And it continue to this day via internet. I have no other explanation to a
never ending flurry of articles in social networks and forums that we
Russians: 1) evil people dreaming of conquering every country on this planet
(this contradicts history and common sense but who cares) 2) we're "genetic
garbage" 3) we didn't win in WW2, we just plundered Germany and raped German
women 4) it would be better if we surrendered to Germany in WW2 5) we're dumb
aggressive people and all our inventions were stolen from the west scientists

Etc etc.

I see articles with all these points and more every day on Facebook. Who
writes and disseminate them?..

~~~
Fins
As if Russian-language forums were the least bit better, talking about
пиндосы, гейропа etc. etc.

Of course while Voice of America, RL/RFE etc. were propaganda, compared to the
Soviet media they were rather good. And the rape of German women,,, that's
probably not the point that you would want to raise, it does not look good.

~~~
anticodon
Well I don't know which forums are you reading. When I open just any video on
YouTube for example.

If it is a video about any technology, ussr or Russian (cars, planes,
electronics, heavy machinery), there will be at least several comments saying
that it was stolen from the west. No matter what kind of car or plane the
video is about, even if it was first off its kind in the world, and there were
simply no sample to copy.

If it's DIY video, then there will be comments that if the author lived in the
west, he would be a billionaire already.

If it's a video of village life, there will be comments that if it would be
western village, authors would have lived in government sponsored mansion,
harvest would be bought by the government by price that is 10x market price,
etc.

How write all these comments? They are everywhere. Under every video, every
Facebook party, every article on the news site.

~~~
Fins
Even disregarding the fact that for any given X, that X most like actually was
stolen...

But these aren't particularly interesting places. Now, if you check the
Russian section of LiveJournal, or comments sections of online news sites, let
alone professionally patriotic sites (Goblin etc.), you would be amazed as how
anyone could complain about perfectly sensible and reasonable comments you
mention above.

I do assume that you speak/read Russian well enough...

------
eksemplar
What has surprised me the most is how uneducated people have become on complex
matters. I work in the public sector, in digitization which gives me some
pretty high levels of access because there is literally digitization in
everything.

I’ve never met a bureaucrat at any higher level of office that wasn’t
dedicated, hardworking and intelligent. I’ve never seen a decision or any
important matter decided upon without good reason. I have seen a lot of
terrible decisions, but they were all made on a solid base that later turned
out to be wrong.

Politicians are another story, but the vast majority of them are really great
at what they do, and if you gave them more than 15 seconds on a tv channel
you’d probably get a very different view of most of them than you have now, I
know I did, and I wasn’t even particularly negative toward them before it.

So there is that, the reality of a complex public sector, which simply isn’t
perfect in a democracy, where one of the highest virtues in political
decisions comes down to compromise.

Yet whenever I go out of my bubble, I’m constantly met with jokes about how
monkeys could do better, or drain the swamp type comments. Not just from
idiots either, but from virtually anyone. Almost all the time I can dismiss
it, by giving an example of why a decision isn’t just black and white.

Like open source and the public sector. I talked with a comp.sci. professor
about it once, and he had excellent points on why public funding (in it)
should mainly go to open source software. Except in reality, a municipality
like mine operates 470 different softwares of which 90% haven’t got an open
source alternative. Not only that, our entire IT staff is schooled and
certified in things that aren’t open source, and even if I could magically
replace them over night without it costing millions of dollars, it’s almost
impossible to find open source focused replacements.

Faced with the complex realities of modern management the professor toned down
his argument, but at the time it got me thinking.

How did we become a world of people who think we can analyze anything and come
up with a solution on how to do it better? And when I say that, analyse, is
really the wrong word because we watch a few 15 second clips on politics here
and there through out the year, and suddenly we think we can run our
institutions better than the people who are actually educated and experienced
at running them? We see a few clips of plastic in the ocean, or get snow in
April and we think we’re climate scientists?

I say we, because I’m just as guilty of this as you are. Compared to people
who buy into the social media memes, my only personal advantage, is that I was
schooled in verifying my sources before I believe them, but just imagine if
you weren’t.

------
zyxzevn
I am missing "Correct the Record" and other agencies that can be paid to troll
and shape opinion. Also there are state-propaganda machines that are designed
to push the opinion of people on forums. Want to talk about Israel? Then we
have "operation Mockingbird" and other operations still going on.

Don't forget that we have the thousands of companies that post stuff on the
internet for clicks and commercial gain. Can we distinguish them from the
others? And finally we have click-farms that can give us top-posts. Or we can
pay social media to get "promoted".

------
naruvimama
Propaganda is no longer the monopoly of media houses. Journalists do not have
much credibility either.

Countries of Western Europe are missing in the map maybe only because the
state holds the purse strings to the media through compulsory tv/radio
licensing.

Perhaps universities should start courses in trolling instead of journalism.
Not that they are any different.

~~~
saturdaysaint
There are major propaganda efforts in motion by dictators and wannabe
dictators to discredit genuine journalism, yet American journalists routinely
lose their jobs or face extreme demotions if they're caught fabricating. I
would state forthrightly that the news pages of the major American and
European papers are trustworthy. Do you have evidence of fabrications that
have gone unpunished?

~~~
miracle2k
That isn't really the way to think about it. Both bias and laziness affect
what is written about, which pieces of information are selected, how well
something is researched, and what kind of idea is forming in the reader's
mind. State television in countries you would call dictatorships don't
necessarily just make up stuff either, nor do they need to.

~~~
throwaway5752
It seems like, when pressed for specific examples, that your response is a bit
lazy. I see career ending consequences over basic, minor mistakes in the
mainstream news industry in the US. I say mainstream, because of specific
examples like Hannity/Seth Rich which was based on sourced on baseless
conspiracy theories (and never had a retraction or consequences). But
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/3-cnn-
journalist...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/3-cnn-journalists-
resign-after-retracted-story-on-trump-ally.html), Brian Williams, or Jemele
Hill all come to mind. I wasn't able to find conservative media examples, but
if you are able to provide some that would help.

