What does this asshole do with these bots, run influence operations? For whom? What do we know about which influence operations are hired for which interests? Forget the government ones for a moment, what about commercial interests?
Toxic chemicals for instance, if you mention one it flags it and sends it to agents that cycle through fake accounts, backed up by bots to vote with them, to argue endlessly.
It’s like mentioning voldemort. Try it, talk trash about aspartame on reddit, or roundup, or atrazine, or god forbid nuclear energy, they’ve lots of real world dupes on the latter there, the decades long influence operations have borne fruit, but they have influence agents for all of those things, on keyword, the worst are on fluff pieces, propaganda pieces their PR firms or whatever make and they post it, those will be overrun, and the agents will mass flag you if you strongly argue against their bullshit.
What does this asshole do with these bots, run influence operations? For whom? What do we know about which influence operations are hired for which interests? Forget the government ones for a moment, what about commercial interests?
If it’s the same guy that was posted about a while ago, they do it for (blackhat) marketing. The bots mostly post comments in threads that look like a normal discussion, but where the goal is to move people away from one solution to another one. Imagine if somebody asks whether a piece of software is good, a bot then replies that they have not heard good things about it, and another bot chimes in and says “yeah I have been using <other software> instead”.
They’ll probably also make manual posts claiming how good something is, put it in their control panel and a single bot will post it, while the other bots chime in with upvotes and discussion.
Add a bit of logic to chime in on unrelated posts to make the account look more legit and you got yourself an army.
What does this asshole do with these bots, run influence operations? For whom? What do we know about which influence operations are hired for which interests? Forget the government ones for a moment, what about commercial interests?
Toxic chemicals for instance, if you mention one it flags it and sends it to agents that cycle through fake accounts, backed up by bots to vote with them, to argue endlessly.
It’s like mentioning voldemort. Try it, talk trash about aspartame on reddit, or roundup, or atrazine, or god forbid nuclear energy, they’ve lots of real world dupes on the latter there, the decades long influence operations have borne fruit, but they have influence agents for all of those things, on keyword, the worst are on fluff pieces, propaganda pieces their PR firms or whatever make and they post it, those will be overrun, and the agents will mass flag you if you strongly argue against their bullshit.
If it’s the same guy that was posted about a while ago, they do it for (blackhat) marketing. The bots mostly post comments in threads that look like a normal discussion, but where the goal is to move people away from one solution to another one. Imagine if somebody asks whether a piece of software is good, a bot then replies that they have not heard good things about it, and another bot chimes in and says “yeah I have been using <other software> instead”.
They’ll probably also make manual posts claiming how good something is, put it in their control panel and a single bot will post it, while the other bots chime in with upvotes and discussion.
Add a bit of logic to chime in on unrelated posts to make the account look more legit and you got yourself an army.