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Reddit Has Become a Battleground of Alleged Chinese Trolls

(www.buzzfeednews.com)
142 points mzs | 1 comments | 15 Mar 19 15:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | 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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ineedasername ◴[15 Mar 19 16:50 UTC] No.19401504[source]▶
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

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1. darkpuma ◴[15 Mar 19 17:32 UTC] No.19402047[source]▶
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.