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Reddit Has Become a Battleground of Alleged Chinese Trolls

(www.buzzfeednews.com)
142 points mzs | 4 comments | 15 Mar 19 15:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.668s | source
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neaden ◴[15 Mar 19 16:27 UTC] No.19401182[source]▶
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.
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tomatotomato37 ◴[15 Mar 19 16:30 UTC] No.19401231[source]▶
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
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neaden ◴[15 Mar 19 16:34 UTC] No.19401278[source]▶
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.”
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lohszvu ◴[15 Mar 19 16:41 UTC] No.19401383[source]▶
I strongly disagree. Look at the flatearth communities.
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1. SlowRobotAhead ◴[15 Mar 19 16:46 UTC] No.19401462[source]▶
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?

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2. rootusrootus ◴[15 Mar 19 17:25 UTC] No.19401955[source]▶
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.

3. PhasmaFelis ◴[15 Mar 19 17:28 UTC] No.19401988[source]▶
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.

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4. Pharmakon ◴[15 Mar 19 17:50 UTC] No.19402254[source]▶
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.