Russian Trolls Used Vaccine Debate to Sow Discord, Study Find

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/health/russian-trolls-vaccines.html

by matt4077 • 8 years ago

29 20 8 years ago

adrianN3• 8 years ago

Has it been conclusively shown that these are actually russian trolls or do people just repeat that factoid? I feel like a lot of things get attributed to the Russians with little more than "trust us" as proof.

DanBC2• 8 years ago

Yes, it is well established that this was Russian trolls. Some of the accounts were the same ones that interfered with the US election.

adrianN3• 8 years ago

I didn't follow the US election thing in much detail. Was there proof that those accounts where controlled by Russian trolls?

Zealotux• 8 years ago

Pro-vaccine tweets from the same accounts argued that vaccines saved lives. Some said they should be mandatory. Some were insulting, such as “You can’t fix stupidity. Let them die from measles, and I’m for #vaccination.”

The same account being both pro and anti vaccines would be a definite proof in that case, I have no doubt that propaganda has no problem being spread by actual people, however in that case we would need to read the full study to be sure.

gk1• 8 years ago

Parent was asking about the "Russian" part, not the "troll" part. As in, the trolls could be from somewhere else.

_rpd• 8 years ago

The paper[1] says that they use "accounts known to be bots or trolls and identified in 7 publicly available lists of Twitter user IDs" such as this list ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/now-available-more...

A lot of what gets reported as "Russian trolls" is based on the data from this site ...

https://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/

which monitors 600 twitter accounts that link content "relevant to Russian messaging themes." You can read more about their methodology here ...

https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/the-methodology-of-the-h...

[1] http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/i/today/z_creative/WeaponizedHea...

sAbakumoff• 8 years ago

IMHO if a society is susceptible to discord caused by debates around very, very unambiguous topic, then this society indeed deserves D. Trump in the office.

mmjaa3• 8 years ago

The irony is that Americans are quite happy to be manipulated through Dialectic Materialism, communisms favourite philosophy...

mandelbulb• 8 years ago

With colleagues at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Broniatowski looked at 899 vaccine-related tweets sent from mid-2014 to late 2017.

If there were either hundreds or at least several tens of thousands tweets like that, or if all of the tweets they've screened were highly popular, then I could take that study seriously. As it is, however, this appears to be a targeted evaluation failing to qualify the significance of those tweets' impact.

jaclaz• 8 years ago

I don't know, but if something like:

“Don’t get #vaccines. Illuminati are behind it.”

is actually given any credibility and can actually contribute to form or shift an opinion, there is then IMHO an underlying (bigger) problem with the gullibility of the people.

orev• 8 years ago

Yes, there is, and much of the issue comes from the way our brains work. We have an entire branch of science dedicated to it: psychology. Knowing about it doesn’t mean you can wave a magic wand and fix it though, so you need to attack the problem at every level you can.

decasteve• 8 years ago

I’d be inclined to flag this because the source is paywalled [0]. Is the analysis accurate? Hard to tell from the excerpt.

[0] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2018....

detaro• 8 years ago

source publication: http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/i/today/z_creative/WeaponizedHea...

via NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/russian-trolls-pushed...

Russian Trolls Used Vaccine Debate to Sow Discord, Study Find

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