
Reddit Has Become a Battleground of Alleged Chinese Trolls - mzs
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/reddit-coordinated-chinese-propaganda-trolls
======
neaden
I think right now there are three main kinds of internet trolls in things like
this. First would be the government sponsored ones who tend to post in unison
or have some theme. These seem to mainly be Chinese and Russian. Second are
the freelance trolls, people in it to make money by building an audience for
advertisements. A lot of these people are in Macedonia where they can make
relatively good money spreading false blogs on Facebook or something. Finally
are the home grown true believers who are just posting their honest views in
an abrasive, hostile, or threatening manner. I think the majority of trolls
belong to the last group, but the first two have an outsized impact at
creating new stories and coordinating messaging that is amplified by the
third.

~~~
tomatotomato37
If you're going by the original meaning of troll you're missing the fourth
category; the people who post something inflammatory because everyone freaking
out and arguing at each other is amusing to them

~~~
neaden
I think that type has mostly gone away/become the third. People "ironically"
posting racism seem to all just be flat out racists now. As Kurt Vonnegut said
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to
be.”

~~~
umvi
> I think that type has mostly gone away/become the third

I think you underestimate the entertainment value of intentionally posting
inflammatory things. It's fun to play devil's advocate. That doesn't mean you
believe it.

~~~
anigbrowl
Regardless of what one believes, posting specifically to inflame or upset
people is a form of aggression. Where aggressive debate is a norm accepted by
all participants this can manifest as interesting or even productive
competition, but where it is unilaterally inflicted on unwilling respondents
it quickly generates into sadism.

~~~
dvt
> Regardless of what one believes, posting specifically to inflame or upset
> people is a form of aggression.

This is a ridiculous, not to mention untenable, position. I take it you never
read Socrates? He saw great value in poking and prodding -- being the
proverbial gadfly.

~~~
JeremyBanks
Socratic inquiry and racist trolls are only similar if you refuse to think
beyond the shallowest surface description.

~~~
dvt
I'm not going to defend this straw-man. Refer to what I quoted.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> posting specifically to inflame or upset people

That's not what Socrates did, was it? I thought he was just making
observations and asked questions he thought had merit, _despite_ knowing it
would upset some people. But the objective wasn't to upset people in the sense
of them feeling bad, more like medicine that tastes bitter but is beneficial
in the long run.

What I do see a lot is that people impute a bad motivation for a question or
claim that allows them to dismiss it without actually having to answer or
challenge it, so today, Socrates surely would be _called_ a troll by many.
Wouldn't make him one though.

~~~
dvt
Socrates was certainly a provocateur (troll?). I think what the _objective_ of
a provocateur is: (1) to get people angry or (2) to create discourse or (3)
etc. -- is up for grabs. My point was that claiming it's "aggressive" is
nonsense.

> Socrates surely would be called a troll by many

Exactly. I contend that he would be called a troll by the person I quoted --
which I think is wrong.

~~~
anigbrowl
Your contention is mistaken, I'm a big fan of Socrates.

That's why I gave examples of aggression that could be healthy or productive.
A football game or a boxing match is an aggressive competition but one in
which all participants contend voluntarily. Likewise, a debate or dispute can
be quite heated but nevertheless proceed by mutual agreement. I distinguish
these from cases where aggression is inflicted upon unwilling recipients.

~~~
dvt
> I distinguish these from cases where aggression is inflicted upon unwilling
> recipients.

That's a clever distinction, but I don't think it's sufficient. It's not clear
that, e.g., the Athenian leadership, were "willing recipients" in Socrates'
case and so your test would fail.

Further, I think this thread itself is a testament to the murkiness of
"willingness" \-- are we willingly engaged in a formal spar? We disagree,
we're talking, we're debating. If I had thinner skin, I could accuse you of
aggression and that would be that. You could do the same.

The "marketplace of ideas" should trump an individual's sensitivities. I will
concede that the internet complicates this. Weirdos† -- neo-Nazis, furries,
flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, bronies, hoarders, etc. -- can now find like-
minded communities that validate their weird beliefs. The danger is the town
square turning into a bunch of silos. Weirdos can often be a good thing for a
society if their beliefs are validated in the marketplace. But they can also
be a very dangerous thing if they all congregate on 8chan.

† By 'weirdos' I mean those that hold fringe beliefs or partake in fringe
activities.

~~~
anigbrowl
Socrates did not follow these leaders of the city round Athens haranguing them
while they repeatedly asked him to go away and leave them alone, and while we
could mine Plato for examples of rude phrasing or an irascible attitude, I
doubt that a modern translation of Plato's ancient reports of Socrates' style
of talking will yield any definite conclusions.

I am not trying to reinvent the notion of discourse, but to say something
about the patterns of behavior that are readily observable and functionally
comparable to real life interpersonal interactions. Imagine, for example, if I
had responded to your initial comment with vile personal slurs or similarly
inappropriate behavior and then mocked you for getting angry.

------
mzs
[https://twitter.com/CraigSilverman/status/110627276452315136...](https://twitter.com/CraigSilverman/status/1106272764523151361)
»

Moderators and users on Reddit say they've seen coordinated activity on the
site by pro-China accounts. "The pro-CCP effort vastly overshadows any
operation by the Russians,” one person with insight into moderation practices
told us.

China expert Bill Bishop said the activity fits with the Party leadership's
emphasis on controlling the discourse about China outside of the country. He
said said it’s hard to know which accounts are simply patriotic Chinese
people, and which might be government actors.

We obtained a list of accounts banned frm r/geopolitics for what was described
as pro-China trolling or related behavior. Some were burner accounts created
just for the purpose of weighing in on China threads. Others seemed to be
genuine Chinese ex-pats studying or working abroad

r/geopolitics mods implemented new rules as a result.

"We've had to implement a rule that prohibits posts from accounts less than 20
days old. This has helped to an extent but these redditors seem to be very
patient and disciplined, and can ‘wait out’ the 20-day requirement.”

~~~
dx87
It's simple to work around those time requirements. It's not uncommon to see
accounts that are months old with 0 prior activity become super active as soon
as a thread criticizing China shows up.

~~~
intended
Observe the saddening axiom -

There is no such rule set that a dedicated troll or attacker would be unable
to circumvent.

Instead consider every rule as a evolutionary hint for attackers - eventually
they reach a point that they can often pass for perfectly normal users.

People are creating accounts now, filling them with karma and health comments
in funny subreddits. Then a year later, they will bring it out and use them.

~~~
Semaphor
For everything that's wrong with cryptocurrencies and the /r/cryptocurrency
subreddit, I really like their approach to tagging users. Main activity
outside of this subreddit? You get tagged. A lot of activity in one specific
coin subreddit? That's a tag. New account? Tag. Old account with little
activity before? Tag. Longer time with no activity on CC? Tag.

It feels weird at first, but it's actually a great way to recognize trolls.

~~~
intended
I expect this to become explicit in many other forums based on how I know
internal mod tools behave.

This is problematic, because it is effectively the same way as saying "this
person is a foreigner", and tribal identities overwhelm the initial intention
of a information granting doohickey - see the fate of the upvote and downvote
button today.

~~~
Semaphor
> the same way as saying "this person is a foreigner"

I disagree. It gives you context for what the person wrote. Everyone has a tag
(even if some are positive).

------
JohnJamesRambo
I’m not so sure Hacker News is free of the same group. Post an article
critical of China sometime and watch the comments. People genuinely posting
opposing viewpoints is fine and normal but there is something very uncanny
valley about most of them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

~~~
dang
I appreciate your concern for HN quality, but this kind of comment is the
reason why we have a site guideline asking people not to insinuate
astroturfing without evidence. If you think you're seeing abuse, the
guidelines ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com with specific links so we can
look at specific data. We always look. Occasionally we find it, and when we
do, we crack down on it hard. But it's rare, unless you count users getting
their friends to upvote their startup or whatever, which is a different
phenomenon. And the cases we've seen have basically all been of corporate
abuse, not nationalistic.

Overwhelmingly the most common case is people accusing others of posting in
bad faith merely because the other's view is so far from their own that they
can't conceive of them having it for legit reasons. This is a reflexive
reaction—a feeling that we all need to recognize and _stop_ ourselves from
expressing in raw form. When people vent it into comments, the result is
either war between the two sides, or, if one side outnumbers the other, an
ugly mob dynamic in which a few people are ganged up on for being different.
Those few either leave, or they become resentful and break the site guidelines
badly themselves, as a way of lashing back against unfair treatment. All these
outcomes poison the community.

Not to pick on you personally—it happens because of how human nature reacts to
the weird conditions of the internet, which we're not wired for. It is hard
for all of us to grasp how large and diverse the community is, and how divided
it is on divisive topics. Nationalistic themes are some of the most divisive
ones, and unfortunately are growing more common these days.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
largehotcoffee
You say that, but here's a perfect example of what appears to be an obvious
Chinese account that is currently unbanned.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thetechlead](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thetechlead)

~~~
dang
Obviously we don't ban people for being Chinese. Presumably you mean it's
"obvious" that they're a Chinese government agent. If so, your post is
illustrating the very dynamic I was writing about. Your intention is positive,
to protect the community, but when you express it this way, the effect is to
poison the community you mean to protect.

I'm familiar with that account. Their posts, and what private data we have,
are completely consistent with who they say they are: a former Google employee
and startup founder who has lived in both China and the U.S., has a Kubernetes
war story, opinions about Python, Go, PHP, software deployment and so on, and
who is frustrated by comments about China here because they feel many
commenters don't know what they're talking about. It's natural that someone
who lived many years in both countries would feel that way. Some of their
comments have broken the site guidelines, but that's a separate issue—and who
of us wouldn't, having our integrity attacked outright like they have?

This is clearly a case of somebody being singled out for suspicion because
they have different views, formed by different experiences, than others here.
When users do that, it puts us in toxic territory. Is it ok to accuse people
of being government agents, shills, spies, or astroturfing, just because they
have a different view on some geopolitical or economic question? Obviously we
need to not go there.

It's fine if you're not persuaded—I don't expect that—but please consider the
downside of being wrong. What if this person is as innocent as you are,
motivated by the same things as you? Can you imagine what it would be like to
show up here and see it debated whether you're a spy and a liar? Even a single
case of someone being unfairly subjected to that is unacceptable. If the
community is to avoid "sinking its teeth into itself without realizing it"
(Schopenhauer's memorable phrase) and falling into a poisonous swamp, we need
a presumption of innocence. And so we do: the guidelines say _Assume good
faith_. If you stand on the dry ground of that assumption, I see no path that
gets you to that user being a bad-faith actor any more than you or I are.

I feel bad about holding up an individual user to some sort of public trial
like this (another reason why the guidelines ask people to email concerns to
us rather than posting them here)—can you imagine what that must feel like?
But since the issue is the integrity of the community and its moderation I
feel like I'd better say something.

~~~
largehotcoffee
Thank you for the well thought out response, in that case I am happy to
concede I was wrong. Let my post serve as an example of what you were pointing
out.

~~~
dang
That's an incredibly generous response. Thank you!

------
stcredzero
Reddit has been rife with brigading and manipulation for years. At this point,
it's been this way for longer than it was an idyllic place to discover cool
nerdy stuff. This is precisely why there are so many very active and hyper-
strict moderators now. Not all, of course. It depends on how much "heat" the
community contains and how much the subject matter attracts. They have to act
like police in bad neighborhoods, because that's just the reality of the
place.

Throughout the 20th century, the Eastern Bloc had to deal with western media
eroding the narratives of their society. Now, it seems that the tables have
turned through social media. But instead of creating images, stories, and
music of the wealth and richness of life brought by self determination, it's
far more effective to simply sow chaos and jam our society's means of
information exchange.

EDIT: We are in years numbered such that they appear widely in science
fiction. In objective terms, we are doing better than we ever have in all of
history. In 2019, we need to embrace the normal. We should be suspicious of
the lurid and the outrageous. We should be skeptical of the accusation and the
conspiracy theory. In 2019, these are all the viral pathway to easy money and
influence. We need to start looking at these things like we now look at the
products of medicine shows. Not all of these things are necessarily bad.
However, we always need to be mindful of the incentives.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc)

~~~
52-6F-62
There are still some good ones, but they tend to be smaller and rarely
political. For instance, r/homelab is still pleasant. (Though it might inspire
negative effects on your credit cards)

~~~
stcredzero
Conservative readers might be surprised at this, but I find /r/stevenuniverse
to be quite tolerant and accepting. I've even called out sexual-orientation
based identity politics there and had some substantive discussions. Other
times, I've been downvoted to oblivion, though. There is some activist
brigading there, but the general culture of the place seems to reflect the
culture of the show. (Politically left, but if you are a good person who
accepts others, we will accept you. You won't be judged by how you were made,
rather by the quality of your relationships.)

~~~
Pharmakon
Isn’t Steven Universe some American cartoon? Why would the sub for it be
relevant to discussions of any kind of politics? What am I missing?

Note that I haven’t seen the cartoon, but from adverts it seemed pretty banal
rather than political.

~~~
stcredzero
_Why would the sub for it be relevant to discussions of any kind of politics?
What am I missing?_

The show has been pointed at by conservatives as an example of gender/identity
politics. However, the ethos of the show is that we really should accept
people no matter how they were born, and judge them on the quality of their
relationships. What's more, this isn't transmitted by saying it, rather by
showing it. IMO, more careful observation shows that it's actually the
opposite of identitarian media, despite surface appearances.

Occasionally, some identitarian rah-rah comes up there, and I feel the need to
point out that we're all in this together, and isn't that what the characters
show us?

 _from adverts it seemed pretty banal rather than political._

It transcends the political, like all good, honest art should.

~~~
Pharmakon
Huh... well I live and learn, thanks for the detailed answer.

~~~
stcredzero
There's one episode that on the surface, or to a child, would be a completely
banal story of a kid helping his dad clean out the garage. There's of course,
an emotional subtext of people thinking about the past, and past
relationships, and people they've lost. Then, there's another subtext,
invisible to a child, where there's the story of a widower who has an affair
with the friend of his dead wife.

It's one of those cartoons that's one thing on the surface, but has other
things for the adults.

------
duado
The flip side is that every non approved opinion is now a “troll.” I responded
to someone on Twitter saying that I didn’t think the Mueller investigation
would amount to much and I got called a Russian troll. It’s a way of
pretending that opinions you don’t like don’t actually exist.

------
mtw
If you ever meet someone from mainland China, such as university students,
they take criticism of China very seriously. For example, mentioning Taiwan as
an independent country is an offence and will shock most Chinese mainlanders.
But this is similar to foreigners criticizing the 2nd amendment or similar
parts of American culture. It will create the same passionate response in most
Americans.

The more Chinese students learn about websites such as reddit, the more you
will find these responses. You can't just expect them to just sit idle. The
fact that English is not their native language will however make others
qualify them as trolls/bots

~~~
grigjd3
I work with a lot of people from mainland China and I have not once gotten the
impression of any generic sensitivity to criticism of China.

~~~
tivert
> I work with a lot of people from mainland China and I have not once gotten
> the impression of any generic sensitivity to criticism of China.

Those kind of reactions often, but not always, get muted the longer the person
is exposed to more diverse perspectives outside of the mainland.

There's also a cultural trait in China where you strongly defend your in-group
against criticisms from an out-group, even if those criticisms are valid. I
have a Chinese friend who considers his mom to be kind of lazy (and tells her
so), but if someone from outside the family made the same criticism, he'd
strongly defend her as a hard worker. The same thing is true of criticisms
made by non-Chinese of China.

------
ProAm
I wish people still lived by the idiom "Don't believe everything you read".
It's like social media stopped all forms of critical thinking in society.

~~~
ativzzz
> I wish people still lived by the idiom "Don't believe everything you read"

When did they ever?

> It's like social media stopped all forms of critical thinking in society.

Human society as a whole is irrational and does not engage in critical
thinking. Small groups of highly focused individuals, or individuals
themselves sometimes can, but it takes too much effort most of the time.

~~~
seppin
We trust our friends and family, our tribe. Something shared on Facebook by an
uncle is more trusted than a maliciously researched article on the New York
Times.

~~~
ativzzz
Trust implies a lack of critical thinking. When we trust something we don't
think about it deeply, we just accept it.

------
AWildC182
The timing of this is interesting as just about a ~month ago there was a mini
protest because Reddit accepted significant investment from the Chinese
company Tencent and users began pushing Tienanmen Square Massacre images to
the front page.

------
zachguo
The number of gov-backed trolls is overestimated. Majority of those are simply
real people using VPNs. It may sound hard to believe, but think twice about
the huge size of population and high rate of Internet penetration.

Chinese population is largely nationalistic and conservative, and some hawkish
groups are very active online. There is a joke that Great Firewall is not for
controlling Chinese people but protecting Westerners from Chinese netizens.

------
aphextron
All upvote/downvote based social media is inherently toxic to public discourse
and extremely manipulable. Something major was lost in the transistion from
BBS and forums to this insanity we have now. It used to be that long form
discussion and nuanced viewpoints were the norm. If someone had an opinion you
disagreed with, you could either refute it or ignore it, not _make it
dissapear_. Now everything thoughtful or balanced in any way is buried under a
mountain of “gotcha” quips, and moral certitude, bot or not.

~~~
notacoward
It's not just upvotes and downvotes. Twitter doesn't track karma, so people
just compete on number of followers or retweets or other measures of "reach"
instead. Upvotes are only one way to trigger that dopamine hit.

------
ilamont
That's the way the Chinese Communist Party rolls. If it can't control
individuals, it controls the platforms, either directly or through proxies. It
started with mass media ([https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-
model-comp...](https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-
complexity-and-thoroughness)), social media, the Internet
([https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-
china](https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china)), and
telecommunications in the PRC, expanded to "overseas Chinese" communities in
Southeast Asia, Australia, and North America
([https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-0327201811...](https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-03272018113611.html)),
global tech companies ([https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-
foreign-...](https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-
companies-restrictions/index.html)), and now global social media communities
([https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-
china/#PGexF...](https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-
china/#PGexFR6YsiqJ) and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882)).

This forum may well be next.

------
yumraj
Genuinely curios, since I believe Reddit is banned in China, so can't Reddit
counter this by simply blocking traffic from China?

Or, perhaps Reddit doesn't think this is a problem, or at least not a problem
they want to tackle given their recent funding from Tencent.

~~~
ggggtez
That's not really how the internet works, because of VPNs.

------
jorblumesea
I feel like this is one of those ideas that sounds good to Chinese, in China,
but will inevitably produce backlash and the opposite reaction in the West.

~~~
tivert
> I feel like this is one of those ideas that sounds good to Chinese, in
> China, but will inevitably produce backlash and the opposite reaction in the
> West.

IIRC, in both China and Russia, state-actor trolling was perfected
_domestically_ control the local population before they started to export it.

------
throw2016
This idea of a world with chinese and russian trolls with no mention of other
state actors seems to be missing a rather big part of the picture.

------
cmroanirgo
Here I am in my nice and warm bed made by HN, where n00bs are marked green,
and unless you're active you can't down vote. This, coupled with consistent
moderation, HN means that we don't see this noise. It seems such a simple
solution to vitriolic trolling. (Thanks guys!)

It'd be interesting though, to see the metrics of signups and their origin to
see if they even bother here...

------
anigbrowl
Is anyone aware of tools/research on instrumentation of such activity on
social media? I don't mean text mining or semantic analysis of trolly content
but the patterns of activity and interaction. At present I use directed graphs
with k-means type clustering/community detection algorithms but that can lead
to difficulty seeing the forest for the trees.

Imagine, for example, that Hacker News members were grouped in different teams
- red, greeen, yellow, and blue - and that the teams competed to dominate
discussion threads and grow their own discussions as semantic 'territory'.
Imagine further that you had to represent this without any text, using only
the time, post size, and threading structure, but with prior knowledge or
manual curation of team membership. I'm particularly interested in how a
thread could be represented spatially, but _not_ as a time series (ie viewing
progress over time would require animation). It's easy to visualize the ebb
and flow of territorial conflict on a geographic map, with armies crossing
borders and territories expanding or shrinking over time, but how to do that
for emergent 'territory' like the expanding and branching threads of a busy
discussion topic? I sometimes imagine it like a growing plant or tree with
different colored leaves to represent competing affiliations, but there are
surely better approaches.

tl;dr how can you visualize evolving discussion threads without using text?

------
logicallee
I think this is an interesting subject, but I would remind everyone of Hacker
News' excellent discussion policies on this subject:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
wnevets
Post anything even remotely critical of the chinese government and your reddit
post will be downvoted and spammed with whataboutism and FUD.

I posted a comment about the forced labor camps of Muslims in china and the
same username replied two different times arguing two different things. In one
reply the Muslims in these camps were terrorist and had to be arrested for the
protection of the chinese civilians and in the other reply saying they're not
labor camps they're trade schools to help them get jobs.

------
ppeetteerr
Somewhat silly question: can we build a firewall around china from the
outside?

~~~
ozzyman700
yes, geo ip ranges can accomplish close to this

~~~
nkkollaw
I can spoof my address in 1 second. Are you saying that Chinese hackers and
trolls cannot do the same?

~~~
ozzyman700
"close to this"

------
deft
According to this article and comments here I should be getting paid simply
for disagreeing with the pro-USA nonsense everywhere. Where do I apply?

------
fartcannon
We need authorship attribution plugins for Firefox/Chrome. Identify propaganda
and submarine advertisements/shilling.

------
darkhorn
You should have a look at
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/) it reminds me
of a communist times I was living years ago.

~~~
ativzzz
Fascinating. Almost every comment is either outrage or blaming Western media
perception of China.

Are these real? Professional trolls? Probably a bit of both? Can we even tell
them apart?

I guess we just to be skeptical of everything you read online, but damn is it
exhausting. Easier to just cut off these data streams and just live life
ignorant. "ignorance is bliss"

------
duxup
I saw here a pretty good pattern of anytime a story about Uyghurs was posted
there was a post or two about: "I just traveled through there and it's nothing
like the article says, it's quite peaceful."

There were even some hilariously worded posts about how: "At least unlike the
US I don't have to wear my backpack on the front for fear of thieves." That
almost seemed like the height of communist era type poster propaganda...

That kinda came in went pretty quickly.

------
saargrin
its funny for buzzfeed to complain about trolls or really anything on the
internet,them being a perfect example of internet cancer

------
908087
Shills/trolls pretty much have the freedom to do whatever they want on Reddit.
Vote manipulation and simulated conversations between groups trying to steer
the discussion seem to be fully sanctioned by the mods and admins.

If you look at the comment history of the accounts involved, there's often a
pattern of accounts that used to only discuss US sports teams before going
dormant for a year or more and coming back with a strong interest in defending
some corporate or government entity 24/7.

------
largehotcoffee
derp

~~~
dang
I responded to your other post about that:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358).

Please stop this now. It breaks several of the site guidelines.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
jimrhods23
Chinese/political Trolls have been on Reddit forever. I noticed it in full
force when Obama was running for president.

But, it only seems to matter now because Trump. I still wonder if Hillary
would have won the presidency, if all of this foreign meddling with our
elections would have been swept under the carpet.

~~~
nkkollaw
Foreign meddling happens every single time. It's normal in any election.

This time, since Trump won he won not because of people voting for him, but
because of Russian trolls.

It's just that the other side doesn't want to admit defeat.

------
tiredyam
This may be a silly, but I have been kicking around this idea of creating a
politics based lobste.rs of sorts; the users would need to go through a
vetting process to be able to contribute. Possibly even crazier; users would
need to go through some further vetting process to discuss a particular topic.
Maybe this is already solve-able via Reddit, but i would prefer it to be off
reddit. Any thoughts? There seems to be no place for very well informed and
educated individuals to discuss politics that is publicly accessible imo and
something like this could address that.

------
nkkollaw
Can we really trust BuzzFeed with any kind of reporting?

This might or might not be true, but the fact that reality mirrors what
BuzzFeed says is purely coincidental.

~~~
freehunter
You mean can we trust the Pulitzer Prize winning staff of Buzzfeed News or can
we trust the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist organization Buzzfeed News?

Because I don't know if you know this, but many members of the staff of
Buzzfeed News have won Pulitzer Prizes and the organization was a finalist in
both 2017 and 2018. The accuracy of their reporting is no more suspect than
any other well-respected media organization.

~~~
nkkollaw
Yes. That actually makes me wonder about the Pulitzer Prize, if what you're
saying is true.

From
[https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/buzzfeed/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/buzzfeed/):
"overall, we rate Buzzfeed Left-Center Biased due to story selection that
tends to favor the left and Mixed for factual reporting based on poor sourcing
and a few failed fact checks.".

They're also selling their own brand of kitchenware if you're not aware of it
(see [https://www.buzzfeed.com/samanthawieder/tasty-kitchenware-
wa...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/samanthawieder/tasty-kitchenware-walmart)),
which is a perfect indication that not even them believe their journalism will
get them anywhere.

They're a biased, failing enterprise that spins news to cause outrage and get
a few clicks.

Someone at BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize..? That doesn't mean that BuzzFeed's
journalists don't generally spend the whole day writing listicles or biased
articles to try to avoid bankruptcy.

The author--Jane Lytvynenko--has bright red hair and might identify herself
with news reporter, but has no track record and not even a LinkedIn profile.
Her tweets read like "Hello happy Thursday here's a selection of memes from a
pro-Bernier channel plz enjoy". I mean, "plz"? Give me a break.

~~~
24gttghh
>The author--Jane Lytvynenko-- _has bright red hair_ and might identify
herself with news reporter,

Is this some kind of ad-hominem attack? I don't see how it is necessary.

~~~
nkkollaw
It's not, I'm just saying that journalists usually look decent to inspire
trust, while she has bright red hair and uses "plz" instead of "please" in her
tweets.

~~~
24gttghh
And I reiterate that you are using ad-hominem and no-true-scotsman attacks to
discredit someone instead of using their words or actions. Btw her hair looks
a pretty normal shade of red/brown in all but one google image search
result...

------
pessimizer
This article is purely innuendo and quotes from reddit posts that insist that
there is an army of Chinese trolls specifically arguing against things that
they are personally opinionated about. This article contains no actual
information or evidence about what people in China may or may not be actually
doing.

I don't mean to imply that there are any fewer than 50 people being paid by
the Chinese government to post on English-language websites full time, but
Reddit is a cesspool of paid posters.

It's just a particularly US/Western neo-cold war paranoia that it's somehow
mostly or even largely the Chinese and Russian governments. The evidence
usually cited is that somebody is agreeing with the Chinese or Russian
government, and since no one could possibly agree with the Russian or Chinese
government Q.E.D.. For Russia, it doesn't even matter whether the poster
agrees with the Russian government, because what the Russian government wants
to do is foment strife and confusion in order to weaken the West, therefore
both sides must be Russian.

I also don't mean to imply that there any fewer than 50 people being paid by
the Russian government to post on English-language websites full time.

I'd just put those into perspective by trying to imagine the number of people
employed by the governments of English-speaking countries to post on English-
language websites full time; then add the number of full-time posting shills
from private companies, including that person about 3 cubes down from you.

China's published propaganda is improving, though; they're starting to get
that Anglo-American reasonable liberal tone down. That sometimes make me think
that a lot of posters who are pounced on for being Chinese shills are just
Chinese people expressing Chinese opinions, but without the trained skill of
wrapping them in some circular argument about practicality and respect.

