Reddit Has Become a Battleground of Alleged Chinese Trolls

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.

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

Back in the day, we just called those people assholes.

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.”

If you're going by the original meaning of troll you're missing the fifth category: monstrous cave-dwelling creatures.

:)

I strongly disagree. Look at the flatearth communities.

Well, actually...

In the Internet sense of the word, the trolls in question live under bridges and spring out to surprise those who would cross with unpleasant demands and behaviour. Not cave-dwellers at all.

——

Hey, this is Hacker News, if we can't bikeshed the etymology of "troll," what use is this medium?

> In the Internet sense of the word

But that's not the original meaning :)

Shhh... people still think they are being serious.

edit: Think about it this way... There are dumb people on both sides of anything, it's tough to say "only their side needs to own their idiots" when lots of stupid and people run around talking absolute nonsense about climate change when it's hot out. That doesn't mean everyone that agrees with them is as dumb or even wrong at all.

If 10% of people believe it and the rest are acting - how could you tell?

> 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.

I think you’re both right. Being an ironic flat-earther is easier than being an ironic racist, especially since sarcasm doesn’t transmit very well over text, especially on contentious topics.

What the heck is with the resurgence of this? Where is it coming from? I remember stuff like this, flat earth sites and the time cube thing [0] in the earlier days of the internet, but can't understand where it's coming from now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

I like it, it's catchy!

You can't forget Poe's law, though

It depends on "how original," stories about trolls under bridges go back a long way, but if we go WAY back, we get the word applyimng to many different mythical creatures:

"The term is used to denote various beings, such as a jötunn or mountain-dweller, a witch, an abnormally strong or large or ugly person, an evil spirit, a ghost, a blámaðr, a magical boar, a heathen demi-god, a demon, a brunnmigi, or a berserker."

I think that over time, and thanks to various "fairy tales," we have settled on Trolls as he mountain/riock/cave-dwellers who are turned to stone if exposed to sunlight.

Sadly, the Internet Troll multiplies when given attention. Sunlight does not disinfect social media.

That's part of the premise of that one South Park episode / season about the 2016 elections[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skank_Hunt#Plot

The time cube was the product of a single, elderly, schizophrenic man. People in that demographic post to Facebook these days, I think.

Flat earth, I think, is caused by crazy people finding it easier to find each other with the Internet and social media, and putting together communities on the Internet.

The internet sense comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_(fishing) rather than the bridge dwellers.

“Trolling is a method of fishing where one or more fishing lines, baited with lures or bait fish, are drawn through the water.”

Well huh, I've been online since, um, 300bps dial up BBS's, and this is entirely new to me.

Apparently I've been living in a cave. :)

Let me gently disagree. The internet etymology is based on the fishing activity.

I recall this exact discussion happening at various times over the last few decades.

I agree that the verb comes from fishing, but with respect to fishing, nobody calls a person who trolls, a "troll." If the noun came strictly from the fishing use of the word, the people engaged in trolling would be "Trollers," not "Trolls."

I think both etymologies are in play, one for the verb, another for the noun. It could have been that it began with the verb, and somebody punned "Is someone who trolls, a troll?" and that stuck.

But what makes the noun work is very definitely the association with the mythological trolls who are unhelpful to humans.

conflating employees of propaganda machines with "watch the world burn" in bad faith circus-goers is an unfortunate abuse of language. i mourn for our loss of a good word that used to mean something.

whatever they are, they are much closer to shills than trolls.

do words with specific meanings usually become meaningless when they become global mainstream? the world picks up a communities word and doesnt bother to use it in the old context? reminds me of decimate maybe?

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.

I'm guessing it comes from people who have never been in an airplane, on a very tall mountain or in open prairies. Ya know...all those places you can actually see the Earth curve at the horizon...

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

Not a chance. I think that a lot of kids with socialization problems who grew up spending a lot of time on the internet took trolls seriously, and built very strange worldviews from that assumption of earnestness.

But actual trolls are still everywhere, and their trollishness can be measured by the inverse of the ratio of their typing to your typing. That ratio can nearly reach zero with the use of copypasta.

Only people who stop at the headline. If you go to the flatearth subreddit they're pretty clear about what they are doing. They don't quite say it explicitly, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to see the game they are playing.

Though I have charitably believed in the past they are mostly having fun with each other rather than trying to troll the rest of the world.

> 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.

Sure, a lot of them are trolls, probably almost all of them at first. But the problem with pretending to be an idiot is that actual idiots will rally around you and take heart.

Have you seen Beyond the Curve, the documentary about flat-earthers trying (and failing) to prove the earth is flat? You'd need pretty strong evidence to convince me that everyone in the film was in on it.

The biggest group of government sponsored trolls is those of US politics related. Go to any "mainstream" politics subreddit eg /r/politics and I guarantee you half the commenters are paid shills. The most "reddit addicted city" is Eglin Air Force base. https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddi...

It's a trend, like yo-yos or pokemon. People see other people doing it, it looks fun, so they join in. Facebook and youtube have made it easy for people to join in on the fun.

What you need to understand is that for a minority of people who take truth, facts, reason and science very seriously, flat earth is infuriating. But for a lot of people who are just looking to have some fun, it turns out to be a lot of fun. The protests from the first group that you shouldn't joke about things like that, that it's wrong to be wrong, etc just sweeten the deal for the people having fun. It's trolling in the classic sense.

For most of them. Of course when you have people pretending to be idiots inevitably a few real idiots will join in, thinking themselves in good company. But for the most part flat earther arguments are constructed with obvious comedic intent that very serious people seem blind to.

Or you can think of it this way: being wrong is a taboo, and some people enjoy challenging that taboo.

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

If you ever go to the flat earth events like conferences, you'll find as I have there's two group of people. The first is the real believers. The second group (which I am a member of sometimes) is there to sell stuff and really doesn't believe.

I wondered the same thing and then stumbled over “Behind the Curve” on Netflix. It was an eye-opener. You’ll learn where it came from and more importantly, how to handle people with these beliefs. It changed the way I will approach the topic for sure. The earth is round! Don’t misunderstand me, but the psychology that drives flatearthers is fascinating and we can help them find the right “path”.

It’s a great watch! Highly recommended :)

There is also the tendency of mentally unstable people not getting the joke and more or less taking over the meme. Then the profit-seekers and cult leader types emerge, and suddenly what was a joke is a movement. On a much smaller scale the same thing happens with satirist news outlets, and the process is:

Outlet makes a joke (for a real example “Joe Biden is refusing to leave the White House and has armed and barricaded himself.”)

Joke is spread devoid of context, still as a joke.

Trolls get a chuckle by posting it to some extremist group.

Extremist group doesn’t get the joke and adopts the narrative, fitting it into existing ideology.

Pizzagate and QAnon are great examples of this process. The other process is that schizophrenics dig up old ideas to fit their current delusions, such as “Orgone” and “Chemtrails.” Some of these ideas fit into the delusional ideation of non-mentally ill groups and it becomes a widespread conspiracy theory.

Note that this can all be very profitable, if you look at people like Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, and David Icke.

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

People do so very much love to dress up their failings and vices in lofty goals and in playing devil's advocate. I guess it helps their ego to feel like they aren't being reprehensible scumbags.

The "main" Flat Earth Society (tfes.org) isn't made up of people that believe that the earth is flat - they are trolls. I'm sure there are plenty of 'True Believers' out there, but they're just as fringe as any other conspiracy theory.

That makes me think of Hacking vs Cracking, and the confusion that laypeople have when a programmer refers to "hacking something together quickly"

This has nothing to do with the parent's point. Being the "gadfly" may have value, but it's also inherently aggressive. That's why they killed him, after all. You have to be prepared to defend the value of your particular aggressive provocation- maybe it leads to enlightened self-reflection, but maybe it leads to someone shooting up a mosque.

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

Serious question: is it possible to play devil's advocate without insincere motivations? For example, say someone holds a strong but simplistic belief on a complex topic, if asking a legitimate question in a straightforward and non-offensive manner upsets the person holding the belief, is it necessarily (and always) a form of aggression?

Agreed. I was just stating this to some friends. I used to read the chans and their noxious crap, thinking it was funny anti-authority "rebellious" trolling.

Now you have people announcing their mass shooting on them, and hundreds of posts applauding it while talking about the Jewish conspiracies.

I think that when you troll and joke enough, if it ever was a joke, you can get sucked into it. Especially teenagers and others who are looking for certainty, or apply "logic" to some narrow ideology that finally "gets it."

So yeah, there is some "old school" trolling where people just like to see others get riled up, but that is far less than the first three.

> 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.

Playing devil's advocate is not the same thing as posting inflammatory things for fun at all.

You play devil's advocate because you want to test your convictions by making a good faith effort to argue for the other side. You attempt to present the other side's argument in the best light, and really think about your reasons for actually concluding against that side.

Trolling is the opposite of a good faith effort; you are intentionally making an argument you know is absurd, in an attempt to get someone to engage as if it were a real argument. You have no intention of trying to understand the other side or think about why people might feel differently, you are simply trying to confuse and anger people.

You can argue that you think trolling is funny, but you can't argue that you posting inflammatory things is playing devil's advocate.

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.

Trolls are not persons, they are characters.

There were a lot of trolls in the old days of newsgroups, and none of them fit in any of your categories: they were neither in it for the money, and they certainly were not true believers. They were in it for the entertainment. The best way to fight them was to ignore them, hoping that the lack of reaction would bore them.

In 1997, imagine that you are arguing with the user Voldemort on comp.sys.mac, as he is claiming that the Mac is awful, that Mac users are idiots, and that surely Apple will be dead by year 2000. Maybe J.K. Rowling agrees with you that the iMac will save Apple. But that's completely irrelevant because you are not arguing with her: you are arguing with the evil character she created, that wishes death upon the Mac world. What you need for Voldemort to calm down is not to win the argument against him, but to convince the author of altering the behavior of her character. An entirely pointless endeavor...

EDIT: that said, I agree that the internet landscape has massively changed since the nineties.

...and he was ultimately executed for it.

That behavior is acceptable in an academic setting, but nobody blithely posting contrarian or inflammatory content on a fansite or Facebook is doing it because they're hoping to inspire Socratic discourse.

It started as a joke by trolls. It's debatable if it still is

Let me put it this way. You have a society and in your society you have an annoying Socrates. He provokes people, gets some people riled up, and gets some people to self-reflect. Some people are angry, most people are indifferent, and some people like him.

You have two choices: (1) execute Socrates, or (2) accept Socrates as part of the Miltonian "marketplace of ideas" and leave him be. I'd like to think we've started to see that (2) is a better choice than (1). Dismissing Socrates as "aggressive" (and implicitly "dangerous") is, from what I can tell, not the right move.

How can you distinguish between the 3rd and 4th categories? How do they behave differently?

> 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.

Do you think Socrates' objective was to get people angry? Do you think that's what he was trying to accomplish?

I've been thinking of this, especially in light with the tragedy in Christchurch today. I think this view is fundamentally mistaken in two important ways. The first is that as I said, when we pretend to be something we become it. When we argue for a position, even as a hypothetical or a joke, we start to empathize with it more. I think a lot of people start out joking about something and gradually begin to seriously believe it.

The second reason it is fundamentally mistaken is that it ignores the fact that there has always been a "trolling" aspect to far right discourse such as Nazism. Think of the racist carictures Nazi's or KKK members draw, they are meant to be taken "seriously not literally" as some have said of Trump. Reactionary politics goes hand in hand with intentionally trying to provoke a reaction, both of them have this shared idea of trying to gain power through provocation and the idea that the status quo is a sham. As Sartre said in Anti-Semite and the Jew:

"Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument has passed."

I don't mean to dodge your question, I just think it's very hard to answer. What I do think is that Socrates was trying to point out flaws in deeply-held beliefs. I don't think it's hard to argue that when pointing out flaws in deeply-held beliefs, the subject at hand will get angry -- or at the very least uncomfortable.

So, much like "no pain, no gain," anger and discourse often go hand in hand.

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.

I think Serdar Argic is possibly the earliest example of a kind of troll that is being discussed in this article, someone who drops in to new places when they are discussing something even tangential to their hobbyhorse and dropping in their screed.

Of course it is, but one has to have some sort of agreed frame with other discussants. Suppose we were discussing suicide cults and the question arose of why people join them; that's well worth discussing, and even debating if there are conflicting views, but discussions of how cults recruit people should be easily distinguishable from actual attempts at recruitment.

> 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.

This is my understanding, but it appears we're not correct. A cave dweller is a troglodyte, but a troll is not specifically a monster under a bridge. In fact, an old English term for walking is to troll [0]. It would appear that this is where the terms stroll and trolley come from.

[0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/troll

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/troll

> I just think it's very hard to answer. What I do think is that Socrates was trying to point out flaws in deeply-held beliefs.

I don't think it's hard to answer at all—in fact, you answered it right there. No, Socrates objective wasn't to get people angry. His objective was to point out flaws in deeply held beliefs.

> I don't think it's hard to argue that when pointing out flaws in deeply-held beliefs, the subject at hand will get angry -- or at the very least uncomfortable.

It definitely can, but there's still a difference between trying to inflict anger, and anger being an undesirable possible side effect.

> I don't think it's hard to answer at all—in fact, you answered it right there.

I guess I did shoot myself in the foot there :)

I was trying to reconcile this: suppose Socrates was a dick and actually did get pleasure out of annoying people -- and the pointing out of the flaws was actually the side-effect. Would his execution somehow have been justified?

I still don't think so.

> but discussions of how cults recruit people should be easily distinguishable from actual attempts at recruitment

Hmmmm....can you think of an example of a case where "asking a legitimate question in a straightforward and non-offensive manner" about suicide cults would not be easily distinguishable from an attempt at recruitment?

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.

Yes, I can think of many such examples because misunderstandings can and do occur. However, we are now far away from the behavior I labeled as a form of aggression, to wit 'posting specifically to inflame or upset people,' so I don't plan to proceed any further down this path of semantic possibilities.

My boss Ryan Postma told me back in 2004, and I quote

The real fun is yet to come. The people that believe the really crazy shit haven't got PC's yet.

So not a resurgence: just the emergence.

> we are now far away from the behavior I labeled as a form of aggression

So, it is necessarily (and always) a form of aggression then?

A troll is not specifically the monster under the bridge, no. The troll under the bridge is from one fairy tale about trolls, and I find that the closest use of troll to what Internet Trolls do.

But no, trolls in general do not live under bridges. Agreed.

You vastly underestimate the first group. And they are well paid for it as well, ( I assume because of the English Requirements ).

And since China has a huge population, even a small group percentage of people would be gigantic on Reddit.