
Automated Crowdturfing Attacks and Defenses in Online Review Systems - bartkappenburg
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.08151
======
socceroos
This one is close to my heart. Having the internet become a place where the
'best positioned' can influence and direct opinion collapses the freedom of
discussion we've had on the internet back down to the old days of big news
corps and/or states controlling public opinion.

Recent history shows that this is occurring frequently on major social sites,
and I see this infiltration happening more and more on smaller sites and
communities.

It's an incredibly difficult problem to tackle. How do you create a hammer of
justice without it crushing the freedom of discussion itself?

~~~
losteric
Better public education.

Virtually every societal problem in America can be traced back to our sub-par
and falling public education.

It's a hard problem to fix - deep reforms take decades to reflect in society,
and the vast majority of voters will always be ones that went through older
(broken?) versions of the education system... but fixing it is the only path
forward. We can't regulate or police away bad ideas. This is a problem where
we need to manage _demand_ \- the answer to flat-earth theorists, Nazis, and
anti-democratic propaganda is to make sure the general public is equipped to
dismiss those concepts.

~~~
nerpderp83
This is by design. The Republican party knows that attacks on education
invariably end up creating more Republicans.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
This is the type comment they're talking about trying to detect. It adds
little/nothing of substance to the discussion and even if you were to provide
sources it pulls discussion toward a poo flinging match about whether the
political bias of any particular source is relevant.

~~~
nerpderp83
Comments about substance and quality of discussion are always the same in the
same ways.

One would need to have automatic classifiers and lines of discussion that can
travel across hyperplanes.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Yes. Logic and reasoning don't work well for evaluating statements about
complex subjects that eventually boil down to subjective assessments of things
and opinions about things.

Most societal problems are NP or contain NP sub-problems.

------
rawnlq
People in this thread are worried about using this for generic
commenting/discussion systems. But how would that work? The RNN would need to
understand the contents of the original comment to reply. It's not as simple
as paraphrasing the marketing spiel of the product to confirm or deny that it
works well (which is what I mostly use reviews for).

------
Animats
It's not so much about influencing as it is about disrupting. Putin's goal is
to make democracy stop working. First in the countries of the former Soviet
Union, especially Ukraine, and Georgia, then outward.

~~~
losteric
What's the difference between influencing and anarchic disruption? Disruption
increases noise, influencing manipulates the signals that gets through.

Putin is not the only actor here. The Clinton campaign publicly employed
crowdturfing, and I would be extremely surprised if conservative forces aren't
doing the same. Not to mention corporate policy astroturfing (eg climate
change).

America's foundation has been crumbling for decades... and I predict we're
going to keep sliding downwards for a couple decades at minimum.

Effective democracy requires an educated electorate that can publicly manage
law, economics, and culture. We're failing because the public is literally no
longer equipped with the skills to govern themselves anymore. Our public
education system is stuck in the 1900's, the world has gotten more complicated
while our standards fell to the lowest common denominator - turning K-12 into
a degree-mill crossed with a day-care for minors.

~~~
learc83
The electorate is much better educated today than it was 50 or 100 years ago.

It was common to drop out in 8th grade when my grandparents were kids. In
their parents time dropping out at 5th grade was common. Do you think farming
better prepares you to elect competent candidates than public education?

Average performance on IQ tests has steadily increased since we've measured
it.

There is no objective measurement that would lead to the conclusion that we
are less educated today.

~~~
sokoloff
> Do you think farming better prepares you to elect competent candidates than
> public education?

In some ways, yes. Running a farming business or working in a coal mine or
steel mill teaches you a lot about hard work, no-BS, and the farm business
teaches you math and economics. I believe that leaves the electorate less
susceptible to magical thinking, less lazy, and less inclined to expect the
government to fix their lives and less willing to have the government run
their lives.

(Most of the modern ag-business giveaways came about after the time period in
question.)

~~~
loceng
My mother's from France. Growing up her family's business was agriculture.
They didn't have smartphones, TVs. This meant they'd spend a lot of their time
talking with others, especially people older than you - and that's how you
learn critical thinking. I recently saw a video interview -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hUOUNZrbBg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hUOUNZrbBg)
\- with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Clinton commented he doesn't know how
people do it these days with all the distractions for consuming and not
engagement - and that he learned his thinking skills heavily through family
dinner every night.

~~~
learc83
People have said the exact thing about novels, comic books, television, and
telephones.

Socrates even complained about _writing_.

Scientific American published a screed against the negative effects of chess
in the 1850s.

The devices and distractions of every new generation are the harbingers of the
apocalypse for the previous one.

~~~
loceng
Well, that's interesting. All of those do present different levels of
engagement though. The phone - only voice and no facial or body queues. Novels
- obviously no audio and no opportunity to engage, and comic books - less use
of imagination required than a novel. Television being the most like real-
life, most stimulating as actually watching something in the real-world ...
designed to be more engaging visually and with sound than stimulating with
interesting thought (most of time - entertainment vs educational/learning).
Writing too, perhaps if people you learned the most from and listened to the
most from were very well-spoken - and perhaps Socrates understood the value of
the listeners/readers being present for engagement, whereby if someone doesn't
understand a point or wants to challenge it, they can instantly. It does seem
like all of these evolutions and innovations of humanity and language,
communication, are making the natural world a less healthy place.

