Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/censorship-shadowy-forces-controlling-online-conversations

by r721 • 12 years ago

255 148 12 years ago

digitalnewsasia.com

r7212• 12 years ago

Presentation slides (pdf, 55mb): http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2014kul/materials/D2T1...

PDFy mirror: https://pdf.yt/d/Rw7qpWWchX0cd05f

snarfy• 12 years ago

Reminds me of megaphone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool

legutierr2• 12 years ago

Are the sock puppets that frequent HN simply much harder to detect? It often surprises me that HN is not a target for these kinds of people; I like to think that I have a good sense of when this kind of thing is going on, but probably I'm less sophisticated than I think I am.

gburt• 12 years ago

It is widely claimed (in comment threads) that many tech. companies directly or indirectly operate this sort of targeting here. I'm not certain there's any evidence of this though.

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

There is plenty of evidence, including some very high level interventions to put a stop to some of the worst of it. No need to name names but it happened in the past it is happening in the present and it will most likely continue as long as HN has any sizeable (or perceived as influential) audience.

penprog3• 12 years ago

hn is without a doubt a target for these kinds of people. I'm honestly surprised that this thread hasn't been flag killed considering how it shows how blatantly idf are gaming this system.

edit: nothing against Israel and Jews in general, just that there was some pretty clear evidence specific to the IDF in the article

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

HN is definitely a target for these kind of people. It has gone so far as high level contacts between the bosses of these kind of people and the stewards to sort things out. That doesn't mean that it has stopped nor does it mean there won't be repetitions. Astroturfing, burying, and derailing all happen. The scariest aspect to me is not those that are paid to do this sort of thing, because I can see their motivation but their little helpers in the form of the gullible public. From the above you could probably conclude I'm a cynical old bastard these days and you wouldn't be to far off.

I suspect that any forum with more than a few thousand participants has elements that are trying to actively shape the conversation to serve their goals on it.

legutierr2• 12 years ago

The scariest aspect to me...are their little helpers in the form of the gullible public

Well, given my rather naive comment above, I have to assume that I fall into this category to some extent. What would you suggest people do differently?

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

That's a pretty scary concept when we have the rise of the unstoppable, unaccountable and highly secretive spy agencies. Things will probably get even worse when Strong AI exists.

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

When -> if.

And if strong AI comes in to play the world will change in ways that any kind of speculation as to whether 'things will get worse or better' is totally moot.

woah2• 12 years ago

Seems like it would be an important public service to game as much online discussion as possible, persistently. Right now, the vulnerability of these discussion media is not detrimental to those running them. Make gameability of discussion media something that is actually visible, and the vulnerabilities will be patched.

jevgeni• 12 years ago

Kind of hard to follow, what you are trying to say. Synergy.

woah2• 12 years ago

Persistent, ridiculous gaming of discussion media would be good for society, as it would force it to become gaming resistant.

fidotron• 12 years ago

Of course, this place isn't immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies.

One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn't need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.

ddingus12• 12 years ago

I use the word "dodge" and that is one of a number of things people do to avoid having to deal with information they find difficult to process.

A while back, I decided to compile a list of these behaviors seen on a smaller, guilty pleasure type of site I enjoy. Here are the major ones seen very frequently:

1. Subject change

2. False comparison

3. Claim of too many opponents

4. Silence

5. Claim to either be a member of, or opponents of discussion being members of club, with said membership somehow required to complete what is otherwise a non-rational conclusion.

6. Claim of overall subject and or implications of subject complexity being greater than scope of discussion; therefore, it’s all a waste of time. (You would not understand)

7. Transformation of rational point at hand to emotional one.

8. The bible.

9. Redefinition of common words.

10. Personal attack.

11. Obsfucation. (however you spell it)

12. Excess verbosity.

What I did was post this, put names on it, including my own, and then start citing it when the behavior is seen.

I expected people to moderate the behaviors and perhaps improve dialog. What actually happened was the behaviors intensified! They created new ones, and started using them in combination:

Subject change, excess verbosity, silence was very common. Blow up the dialog to prevent realizations or consensus, then go silent to let it all fade away. Then do it again, and again...

Now, something good did happen. Participants who get it, tended to add their own observations to the list, and a bond formed between them. This helped differentiate the dialog some, and high clarity material, rational material was easier to identify and that dialog did improve.

But the noise makers also improved, making better noise, more frequently, division went up, and the overall tone of the place was harder to enjoy.

This led me to another realization:

We very often want to frame things as debate when the truth is we are often doing advocacy.

Advocacy has three components: Reason, character, emotion. Advocacy is a super set of debate.

Effective advocates employ all three and here is the kicker:

They will trump an effective debater in a dialog.

Interesting isn't it?

ddingus12• 12 years ago

Notably, I also found out a few other dynamics:

Personification trumps vilification and ridicule.

Let's take something really ugly, like abortion. People will post up the ugly pictures and they will post up their favorite slogans, and they will denigrate opponents with brutalities like, "baby killer"

This kind of noise completely destroys rational advocacy / debate on the topic, which is why religion and politics are often discouraged in technical and other discussion venues.

Now, personify it. I took a story from Brazil where a 9 year old girl was raped by her father, her mother wanted to get an abortion for her, and the church, state, father and others wanted to deny the girl that.

Instead of the usual advocacy path, I asked people what they personally would say to the little girl who doesn't want to carry a pregnancy.

This required they simulate the scenario, and express their thoughts as actions, or virtual actions in this case, rather than just pull out their favorite "pokemon battle card" type sayings...

Amazingly, the dialog split into two camps!

The majority of participants answered honestly, and were quite disturbed at the experience. The majority said they would not tell the little girl no, regardless of their personal beliefs / preferences. It was the human thing to do.

For those ideologues who were being absolutist about it, they would not answer, because they would reveal cracks in their black and white vision of things, so they vilified instead! And it was intense.

The rest of the group turned on them, and they got shouted down. Secondly, that experience changed the group dynamics. Abortion noise is no longer tolerated like it was before. It's potency as a distraction is now much less in that venue. The personification really impacted people.

Edit: One absolutist actually said the right answer was to cut the girl open after she has carried the baby far enough along to be viable. The group response to this was harsh, and they were banned.

I personally took a lot of heat for that disturbing approach and had to apologize for the rough dialog. And I did, citing my interest in finding out what trumps what. This was well received, but the whole thing was expensive emotionally.

Honestly, this is one of the few times I've ever seen the noise machine beat back into submission like that.

Lesson there somewhere.

(Yes, this is an area of interest of mine, and I've been running little experiments for some time as the problem identified in this thread is growing rapidly and we have few answers. I find the use of data intriguing, and I plan to do some reading to better understand what other options we may have.)

Natsu2• 12 years ago

There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.

I'd be careful about this one. People don't always have the same news sources, so what constitutes "common knowledge" for one person might be alien to another.

Personally, I expect myself to be able to provide a citation for anything reasonably controversial or not widely known and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with asking someone to show their work.

After all, there's the opposite side of this coin: someone who isn't giving evidence because they cannot. I mean, if I claim to have a unicorn in my garage, I can't reasonably expect everyone to accept it on my say-so. I know that's not at all the scenario you have in mind, but I think you'd hate to have someone engaged in such behavior justifying it with your logic when that's not what you meant at all.

rakoo• 12 years ago

AFAIU flamewars increase the discussion on a topic, so this makes a story much more likely to stay on frontpage.

hluska• 12 years ago

The danger of flamewars is that they rapidly devolve to personal attacks. When threads devolve this far, it keeps intelligent people from joining the conversation and actually elevating it. 10,000 monkeys with 10,000 typewriters may create a best seller, but 10,000 raving lunatics with Internet connections destroy any chance of an intellectual conversation....:)

dubfan• 12 years ago

I recall that the site has some flamewar detection algorithm that will penalize a story if it detects a flamewar. I don't have a source for this at the moment, though.

grecy2• 12 years ago

but more visibly with the employees of certain companies.

I'm amazed how obvious this is on Reddit now, and always laugh when I bring it up and get down voted to oblivion :)

I'm no expert, but it's clear NetFlix has a few thousand users in /r/movies for example.

pekk4• 12 years ago

Netflix also has however many thousands of normal users there.

selmnoo• 12 years ago

The fascinating thing is, you can't stop the ads on HN from the big big players, because it's effectively accounted as being real news. Zuckerberg held the second public Q&A session the other day, that promised him some news. Then there was that article about a woman engineer at Facebook, the story appeals very appropriately to current events and the emotional zeitgeist of the tech industry, and there was that whole campaign by Sheryl Sandberg in the last few years (which she has dialed down now). So, astroturfing is an amateur's game, the big boys actually launch massive campaigns that give them a nice PR image, they do big actions that ensure coverage. All of this is done very carefully to ensure that the news is framed in a way they want to consumers. One of my favorite pg essays is about this, about the fact that a lot of journalists are lazy and fishing for a marketable story. Make the work easy for them, give them a marketable narrative (communicate it to them not by giving them money/bribing them -- no, that's an amateur's game, you give them the narrative in a socratic manner, you give them selected bits and pieces and trust they'll fill in the blanks). But money/bribing/soft extortion helps too. E.g., if you slam Apple, you don't get invited to their conferences and such. And everyone wants Apple stories... and if you can't report Apple stories, you lose viewers. So you just keep giving out nice Apple stories and you can remain confident you'll continue to get a nice stream of goodies from Apple. Etc. etc.

RobertKerans• 12 years ago

There's great chapter in Edward Bernays' Propaganda where he takes apart a stereotypical set of newspaper stories and categorises them according to the type of agenda they serve; surpirise surprise almost none are real news (if that's actually a thing? Depends how reductionist you want to go). Applies just as much now as then, and as much to HN as any other media outlet

Htsthbjig• 12 years ago

This was just the start:

http://vimeo.com/85948693

Now companies and big governments are analyzing network graphs in real time thanks to Facebook. They can test people's reaction on real time to anything.

I don't believe that Apple's success is just about Advertisement, I use their products a lot because they are very good products.

When I was a kid I did not have money so I bought all computer gear myself looking for the best deal, then I also used my own OS(gentoo with everything super optimized). I used to joke with my friends about how Apple was all about Advertisements and nothing about quality, and people was so stupid.

Then I grow up, I started working on my own and I suffered so much for my conscienceless. First I had to change to a stable Debian because gentoo was killing me, then I had to change to standardized hardware too as it was doing my life miserable.

One day I bought a mac as a luxury because I had made some money with my company. I started using it a lot, it was so simple and it did not made me spent as much time as Linux. I made some numbers and it made sense to buy more Apple gear. It worked great.

I made tons of money buying "expensive"() stuff.

What makes Apple great is that is is one of the only companies that get how real people work, read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

Now, I am not a fanatic of Apple, I would love other companies doing the same(like doing my computers on metal) but it is not easy. In my experience companies without engineers on place do not know how to create things. Those that have engineers on place do not understand humans well enough.

()expensive is losing a customer because you could not fix something on time. Expensive is paying an engineer to pay for something that should not be broken in the fist time.

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

Here's a fun article about facebook's postmodern propaganda:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html

Part 2: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/03/who_can_know_how_much...

Note: one may well disagree with some of the things he says. Try not to freak out.

tptacek7• 12 years ago

The "usual suspect" discussions about NSA are something like 10:1 against NSA. If there's an NSA sockpuppet army trying to influence HN, it's a good one, because there's no evidence of it.

Andrew_Quentin• 12 years ago

Except for your constant defence of them of course

mindslight2• 12 years ago

Good influence won't simply be support for/against, but deflecting each viewpoint into a framework that upholds the status quo (making it impotent) and causing infighting between people who would otherwise find common ground.

The NSA doesn't influence standards by sockpuppeting "no crypto". They concern troll to add endless complexity, making implementations buggier and rarer.

In the HN NSA threads, the easiest example is encouraging argument between people who are in violent agreement that the NSA must be curtailed, but differ in approach. But instead of coding or grassroots activism, they're goaded into engaging each other on a message board!

Listen critically to "conservative" talk radio for a good general example - every segment starts off talking about problems that have grassroots concern (and that the "other side" would even sympathize with, just with lower priority). After the warm up to get listeners on board, the narrative switches to pigeonholing that anger away from systematic issues, and towards individual politicians and the "other side" that supports them.

a3n• 12 years ago

We're probably not worth it, we're a small community, and the part of that community that are actually and truly influential is smaller still, and wouldn't be doing their influencing by preaching to the HN choir. I'm sure we're monitored, at least automatically, but I doubt we're worth directing.

It's a very small echo chamber.

sitkack5• 12 years ago

One can't also tell the difference between subterfuge trolling and plain up trolling. It would be nice to use machine learning in a multidimensional conversation scoring system so that tired hollow techniques at conversation manipulation would fade in to the background noise.

aaron695• 12 years ago

One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn't need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely.

Being very meta do you have any links? HN being open it shouldn't be hard to do an analysis. I guess you aren't claiming it is being done but it could be done, but I don't see this as a problem.

Like, if this was happening, a blog with evidence would rank pretty well for karma points, but it hasn't been done.

phkahler• 12 years ago

You left off just plain downvoting. I've seen some fairly benign comments on certain topics go down to -3 or -4 in a hurry with no counterpoint given. Stuff the collective here will often ignore or debate, but down it goes.

penprog3• 12 years ago

The first thing this article reminded me of was ghost in the shell season 2. In the show the Intelligence Agency of the government used this sort of info manipulation to increase animosity towards refugees to the point where the public was in support of basically slaughtering them.

In the show this agency also analyzed public opinion using info obtained from discussion forums to gauge the public's acceptance of government policy and they would use the information manipulation with sock puppets to change public opinion in their favor.

mrottenkolber2• 12 years ago

One of the best shows ever. The whole Stand Alone Complex concept is kind of unique to GitS, is it?

Edit: Oh and btw, ghost in the lisp: http://medias.ircam.fr/x03b42f

RPG talking about his work on the mass media manipulation machine of DARPA.

cjslep• 12 years ago

Yes and no[0]. For reference, the definition of a Stand Alone Complex from wikipedia [1]:

Stand Alone Complex (スタンド・アローン・コンプレックス Sutando Arōn Konpurekkusu) eventually came to represent a phenomenon where unrelated, yet very similar actions of individuals create a seemingly concerted effort.

The ideology of radical Islam from the viewpoint of neoconservatives in the USA in the 00 decade was of "shadowy underground terrorist cells all linked together and we should all be afraid of it", when in reality it was much more akin to the Stand Alone Complex: disparate radical groups all over the world used a common idea to act on their own but without communicating to one another. When viewed by the intelligence community, of course they weren't independent isolated events influenced by the same root idea; they were a centralized enemy. They projected thwir own centralized nature to the fragmented radical Islamic movement of the early 00's. Eventually, that radical Islamic movement grew into the identity provided them by the intelligence community as a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

[0]So yes in name, no in practice if you buy into the viewpoint above.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_Shel...

lizzard• 12 years ago

I've been talking about this for years; we have to at the least be aware that there is wide scale sockpuppetry and astroturfing for political as well as corporate ends. Better tools for disinformation detection may help. One person running many personas is much easier to detect than the more sophisticated model we have now.

raggaeturf• 12 years ago

If you doubt this, then just criticize Google on HN or Reddit...

Google has thousands of employees and sock puppets on all social media discussions. It's especially blatant on Reddit.

Google is a charity and everything they do is perfect and for the good of humanity. They've never been involved in massive spying and with monopolistic practices concerning their spammy ads and search engine preference for ebay, amazon, trip advisor and others.

pekk4• 12 years ago

Big companies cultivate the mindshare of product fans and employees who then feel naturally inclined to argue for their favorite companies, that's not always meaningfully different from astroturfing, but this doesn't necessarily mean that what you are reading is coming from some Conversation Control Department. Sometimes lots of people on the Internet just disagree with your opinion.

lingben• 12 years ago

same thing for facebook, criticise the effectiveness of their ads and watch what happens

sologoub2• 12 years ago

Negative comment, 2 karma and this is an only comment you made... You look like a sock puppet to me :)

penprog3• 12 years ago

maybe you are the sockpuppet?

RemoteWorker• 12 years ago

tptaceck, someone's talking about you.

pekk4• 12 years ago

Whenever someone says something you disagree with, just accuse them of being a sockpuppet of a shadowy conspiracy.

Then you can censor their view very effectively.

arca_vorago5• 12 years ago

This is more insidious than I think even most HN readers realize. In the intelligence community, the big black sheep people don't really talk about is psychological operations, or psyops, units. They are the same breed that used research from MK ULTRA style programs to learn how to deprogram humans (some claims on how to reprogram them), and part of that is a scientific analysis of mass social community discourse. Previously, domestic propaganda was illegal, though it was often engaged in anyway now that the law against domestic propaganda has been rescinded that means the remnants of older programs like Operation Mockingbird, where the CIA inserted people into news outlets across the board for intel gathering and disinfo pushing, have now evolved to a level where they are actively manipulating public discourse on all kinds of subjects.

A very good example of this is the post JFK assassination issue. It's pretty clear to any intellectually honest person that there are some very large issues that were never addressed regarding the assassination, because the CIA purposeful put into action an operation to discredit any alternative theory's as "conspiracy theory" and anyone who talked in that manner was labeled as a crackpot "conspiracy theorist" and then a large campaign to undermine any logical discussion of "conspiracy theory", essentially by putting it, as Chomsky would say, "outside the accepted range of debate".

Wonder why the fourth estate, aka journalism is in such a sad state of affairs? It's because the state has reached (quietly) so far into it that even the handful of real journalist are having a hard time.

They have keep up technologically to keep sources safe, which proves almost impossible these days. They have to deal with pushback from the editors bosses of a glarily political nature, they have to deal with being cut off from sources if they happen to piss off the wrong people with a too-strong story.

This is another reason the surveillance society is so insidious. I have said it before and I will say it again, surveillance, censorship, subtle covert influence of public discourse, are not about security.

It's about control.

A lot of people argue about 1984 vs Brave New World. What I say is that it's a Brave New World, unless you attempt to resist, then it's 1984. This is the state we live in, the real question is "Are the people going to let this happen?"

I'm no longer so reliant on the "long arc of justice", and am getting pretty pessimistic.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

The difficult thing is figuring out how much of it is insidious and dangerous and how much of it is The Men Who Stare at Goats.

arca_vorago5• 12 years ago

The problem is that we like to imagine the hippy version of the Men Who Stare at Goats, but that's not the reality of the kind of people who kill for a living. More aptly, The Men Who Stare at Goats ... and try to kill them.

Doesn't make them any less dangerous or insidious, perhaps even more so! Hanlon's razor may be a strawman that should be put in the dustbin of rational conversation, but nevertheless do not doubt the malice hidden within incompetence.

drcomputer2• 12 years ago

This is the state we live in, the real question is "Are the people going to let this happen?"

I am terrified of mental manipulation. My only inclination and direction is to train my mind to be an independent blank slate. There's also an odd web that forms, the direction of information flows, word choice, word frequency, like it ping pongs in between groups of people. The form of abstract ideas, the direction of thought. These things can be studied.

arca_vorago5• 12 years ago

The form of abstract ideas, the direction of thought. These things can be studied.

Indeed you are on to something there. I have long called for a return to our Enlightenment roots for just that reason. It encourages an independent and able mindset, which is precisely why education has been deliberately manipulated in to preventing any such thing.

Education of the populace is not in the interest of the international or domestic oligarchs. Remember this.

ElComradio• 12 years ago

Journalism is in bad shape because, thanks to big data/metrics, companies figured out clickbait makes more money than hard news or investigative journalism.

patronagezero• 12 years ago

My new online-conversation digestion involves reading the posts from the bottom up these days. I've found this yields interesting results, with what I consider the most interesting posts being towards the bottom, and the 'always-agreeable' generic karma-magnet posts at the top.

Umn555• 12 years ago

“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.” ― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2: Perspectives of World History

“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.” ― Oswald Spengler

Umn555• 12 years ago

"Wonder why the fourth estate, aka journalism is in such a sad state of affairs? It's because the state has reached (quietly) so far into it that even the handful of real journalist are having a hard time."

I'm sorry to tell you but it's the very nature of capitalism to consume everything in it's path. Corporations are authoritarian institutions. The idea that there ever existed some balanced press or balanced capitalism is a consistent fantasy among the vast majority of people including intelligent ones like yourself. The more history you know, the more those people around you look uneducated.

The "balance" in capitalist societies is a myth that needs to be broken.

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/OpposingCopyrightExte...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#me...

Look at that chart, that means the powers that be have been crushing the public for 200+ years, every time getting there way and the "moderates" and "balancers" like yourself are totally clueless.

Also the bailout:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVjz1OyBJCc

Overthrowing governments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg_-NjjnvP4

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/...

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." [p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23] "The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

The 9 trillion dollar bank bailout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVjz1OyBJCc

Libor scandal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal

Rule of law is impossible under capitalism, since the kings of business (he who has the gold makes the rules) get to do whatever they want and the public gets fucked.

http://williamblum.org/

Regulating capitalism has totally failed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551

arca_vorago5• 12 years ago

First of all, I would like to point out that when you say capitalism, it is a much more nuanced term than you seem to be inferring. Which kind of capitalism? Crony capitalism? What about Workers capitalism? A much different thing than the generic stereotypical capitalism you seem to be talking about. Why yes, of course, unbridled capitalism tends to swallow up more and more, sometimes exponentially and in a way that threatens the Constitution... which is exactly why, though the balance does not exist (and nor did it ever in the past, as you say, fully exist), but I see no logical reason to give up on the idea that we the people, under the power of just law, with a properly elected and sufficiently representative legislative of the people, could implement a balance heretofore unseen, prosperous for the American economy and it's people.

You seem to argue against points I never made. Yes, they have been "crushing the public", for quite some time. though, first of all, you need to define what you mean when you accuse someone of being some label. What exactly do you mean by "moderates" and "balancers". Do you mean to say there should be no balance with the accumulation of capital and the private hands that prosper because of it, with the number affected of such and the degree to which they hold uneven power over the surrounding less fortunate populace? Would you toss away all private profit and push a purely socialistic system? For that is what you seem to be advocating here.

As an aside, it is of note that there have been ebbs in flows in this power dynamic, and I would argue that the American System and FDR were the closest thing we have come to so far as a proper, pragmatically implemented and physically verifiable program that does not only exist in theory as you seem to argue such prosperity and balance does.

I am a USMC combat veteran of the Iraq war, of a long line of military men. I am very aware of Smedley Butler and admire him as one of the best Marines to have ever lived, and his writings are considered essential reading. I'm sure you are also aware of the Business Plot he helped thwart?

Perhaps I think I may have misunderstood you earlier. We both agree that unbridled capitalism is bad, due to it's destructive nature, yes? Ok then, it must be brought under a degree of control then. (The degree of which would be debatable.) How does one do that? Through the use of the state. It's the 3 branches of government that need to be involved in the righting of these wrongs, but the problem is that we have allowed the same entities behind the supposedly failed Business Plot to just go dark and perform the coup more silently and in particular through the very business of capitalism and finance itself! When these items are properly governed for the good of the people they can be used as a force for good, and in unknown shadowy hands they can be used for bad.

I see no proposals of your own, though I eagerly await them. Mine would be based upon the Constitution. I'm not sure I fully comprehend your stance due to your ambiguity, but just be aware that anything unconstitutional should a priori be discarded.

P.S. Just because something is broken doesn't mean it should be tossed in the trash. Many things can stand repair, and I think our Constitutional Democratic Republic is one of them.

lol1234562• 12 years ago

A social group implies at least 2 persons.

Even if two people are in a room, and they start having a conversation what you find is that they will try to

* Censor / Re-Imagine themselves to present their POV in a better way

* Censor / Manipulate the other person to force their POV unto them.

The online is a complete extension of the offline, so its perfectly normal for all this to happen, even all the time !

intended• 12 years ago

All the discussion here pointing out possible shill armies aside - is there some way to actually stop it.

How do we move conversations - Forward.

sitkack5• 12 years ago

We voice our thoughts and opinions verbally, with our neighbors, coworkers and friends. Convincing people online in discussion forums is not the best use of our rhetorical time, I would argue that most discussion forums are actually honey pots, whether intended or not.

notacoward2• 12 years ago

This is why I'm not particularly thrilled about programs passing the Turing test. As soon as we have programs that can write credibly human-sounding comments on sites like this, many conversations will be controlled by whoever can afford the largest sockpuppet farm. Also, for every post on the actual threads of interest, there will be dozens of comments on every thread designed to increase karma. Automated karma whoring might even be more injurious than the direct intervention, because it will increase the groupthink tendencies already present.

Some might say we're already half way there. I disagree. Yes, Google or Apple employees might swamp an occasional thread here and there, either openly or covertly, but what I'm talking about would be a whole order of magnitude worse and constant.

r0s2• 12 years ago

It seems like any kind of mass-comment system would be easy to detect. Simply limiting the post rate and comparing to other posts would work just like current anti-span filters now.

Oblouk• 12 years ago

This is if all the comments came from the same IP and if the puppeteer was stupid enough to post all the comments at once.

Additionally if the AI can beat the turing test then comparing the posts would not be practical. Passing the turing test signifies that it is not possible to distinguish the comments from human comments by looking at the comments alone.

lukifer2• 12 years ago

I read a fairly compelling Doctorow short (possibly I, Rowboat?) which posited that that origin of AIs was spam filtration. By creating an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between spambots and anti-spambots, a selective pressure was accidentally created from which intelligent language-using agents emerged.

notacoward2• 12 years ago

Limiting what post rate? If it's coming from a farm it could have the same distribution as real people. If you read the article, you'll see that it's not about spam. It's about astroturf, and not even the kind where you just get a people to repeat your talking points. There are more subtle ways of diverting attention toward a legitimate message you find favorable, or away from a message you'd rather have people forget. That's all much harder for an automated system to detect, and the karma-whoring part harder still.

Look at some of the other comments on this very thread. Not the top vote-getters, but the ones that must have gotten two or three upvotes apiece. Several of those could easily have been generated by an AI designed to rephrase an already-popular view, perhaps with a pop culture reference or two thrown in to make it seem more authentic. Voila, instant karma, which can then be used in the ways the original presentation suggested to influence who reads what.

It only seems easy until you spend five minutes thinking about it.

harperlee• 12 years ago

Somehow you reminded me this XKCD: http://xkcd.com/810/

demarq• 12 years ago

genius!

InfiniteRand• 12 years ago

I'm not sure how alarmed I am by this. I certainly have seen this in action on Wikipedia at least, if not on the scale described, but I have little doubt it occurs and I can think of a couple events whose online conversations show evidence of this sort of manipulation.

To some degree I admit, when I see the overwhelming online conversation swaying in one direction, it does influence. On the other hand, partially because I know online conversation manipulation is out there, I become less prone to read comments. I used to always read comments to Economist articles for example, now I rarely do.

Ultimately, if there is online conversation manipulation but people barely pay attention to it, it will be overwhelmed by all the other random sources of influence in our lives. Whether, traffic, etc. all play some influence on our opinions, if the impact of the online conversation manipulation is less than that, I am not alarmed.

There are two other aspects of this worth thinking about:

1. What is the problem we have with online conversation manipulation? Is it the sock-puppets alone? If you replace sock-puppets with volunteers, is that different enough? If you take volunteers who otherwise wouldn't participate in that online conversation, is that different enough? What are the aspects of this that are different from a legitimate campaign to change the opinions of others about a position you think is profoundly wrong.

2. One sad aspect of this is that it dilutes the impact of anonymous or semi-anonymous voices on the web. This was a short-cut to influence for ordinary web users. On the other hand, this is in a way natural, whenever the impact of a medium becomes popularly recognized, more people will try to utilize that medium, and its impact will be diluted. In the same way, just having a website used to be a short-cut to influence, but now has little effect.

stemc43• 12 years ago

US gov. actually admitted that it has a trolling network - it used to be called "viral peace". They claim it operates on "terrorist websites". And of course they give no definition of "terrorist websites" - But I think it's safe to assume reddit, twitter, facebook are terrorist websites.

schoen• 12 years ago

They also have some openly governmental accounts called "Think Again Turn Away", like

https://twitter.com/ThinkAgain_DOS https://www.facebook.com/ThinkAgainTurnAway

They used to directly engage in debate with people more, while now they seem to have switched to a more posting-only style.

wyck• 12 years ago

This has been going on in one form of another throughout history. But if you want to sway opinion on the internet, it's not that easy. There are a lot of voices and noise in the mix, compared to how it was a mere 20 years ago.

This is certainly important, but in the context of history, how people consume information is on a much better track, in my opinion things are actually getting better if you look at the big picture.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

2013's "Most Reddit Addicted City" was Eglin Air Force Base.

http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddi...

superuser2• 12 years ago

Air Force Bases are also full of technologically inclined 18 to 25 year old men, i.e the Reddit demographic.

Animats• 12 years ago

I've made this point before about search engine ranking. Most of the popularity signals used by search engines can be, and are, faked. I have two papers on this:

"Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" (2012), or how Google's use of social signals backfired, badly. http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf

How Google's use of social signals backfired, badly.

"'Places' spam - the new front in the spam wars", or how Google's use of "local" information backfired. "http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/placesspam10.pdf" (2010)

Google's merge of data from Google Maps into the main search engine results created a whole new branch of local SEO spam.

The fundamental problem is that the creation of fake online identities is cheap and easy. This can be partially fixed by taking a tough line on identity, but that's hard for services which are either big or have only a casual connection with their users. Facebook ran into the gay agenda enforcing a real names policy.

The mobile guys can at least make people buy a phone to fake an identity. (A phone number is not enough; you can rent fake phone numbers. See "http://www.attlines.com) An app that phones home with too much user information, though, is hard to fake cheaply. Yelp can tell if your phone has been to the place you're rating.

jordigh2• 12 years ago

the gay agenda

I'm not sure if you know about this, but this is typically a term of derision and a strawman by anti-gay and homophobic groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_agenda

seanp2k2• 12 years ago

+1; there are also lots of other marginalized groups of people who stand to lose something if aliases cannot be used.

Edit: for example: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/faceboo...

patcon• 12 years ago

Call me crazy, but it /has/ crossed my mind that #gamergate might have been a large-scale test of the ability to create widespread conflict and some degree of community crisis from thin air through sock-puppetry...

EDIT: I honestly don't totally understand what gamergate is, but am in awe of the resurging energy of the whole thing, and hence the observation

Udik• 12 years ago

Hmmm. The only verified case of sophisticated, organized sockpuppetry in the wild mentioned by the article seem to be related to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and anti-semitism, and in every case they seem to be orchestrated to favour Israel. But all the comments here seem concentrated on the NSA, AIs, and even abortion. Now downvote me :)

krapp• 12 years ago

Then clearly either you, or the article, or both are just another reeking layer in the American government's propaganda onion. Edward Snowden clearly proved, scientifically, that the NSA/CIA/Military Industrial Complex controls everything and everyone I don't personally agree with, especially on the internet.

Now go tell your controllers your mission has failed, Udik. If that even is your real name.

Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

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